Review lesson

December 4, 2009 at 1:12 am | Posted in Social Medicine | Leave a comment
Tags: authority, Bias

It is often difficult for us to see ourselves. Your author himself has great difficulty being self-aware and responsive, versus self-referential and reactive. Many spiritual traditions (including Chinese Medicine) speak of how difficult it is to achieve clarity and maturity – and yet, without these qualities, our lives are very difficult to live, being full of confusion, misunderstandings and constriction.

(Un)Fortunately(?), the growth that is necessary to achieve clarity or maturity is painful and requires hard work.

Blood, Sweat, Tears.

The result is often more uncertainty (but strangely, less confusion…’splain dat one, honey). Our ability to be comfortable with uncertainty, in fact, is an indicator of our maturity, of our ability to face up to the reality of life: so many things are not certain. The few things we can be certain about we take for granted; the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, again; gravity will not suddenly disengage; stock markets will crash; and so will microsoft windows.

Our inability to face reality compels us, on the other hand, to distort who we are…sometimes with pride or over-confidence, sometimes with hyper-responsibility – but all functioning to do one thing only, no matter how heroic the purpose might be made to seem on the surface: distract.

To distract us from what? Our own selves and the people and experiences that matter most to us, the people and experiences that we haven’t had the capacity to yet resolve and understand.

While I believe that most (your author was not courageous enough to say all) of my gentle readers can identify (perhaps only very secretly) with the words I have written so far, I believe that we may be unable to link this distortion, this mental unwellness, to certain aspects of our life and world which are perhaps too usual, or accepted, or ingrained.

Scott Peck takes a stab at describing one of these distortions within a post published here in this blog some time ago:

Scientific Authority