Kia ora Caitlin (from a cuzzie from the other side of the ditch). Thank you for this wise, compassionate commentary, I think I needed very much to have this explained to me. My best friend since I was 15 (I'm 47) won't talk to me anymore, because of this exact issue/process. Loving your work by the way.
It's curious that people will cling so hard to what are, after all, just ideas, theories, observations which might be illusions. We have to struggle with and for the truth, and as William Blake said, "Opposition is true friendship."
"Opposition is true friendship" only for those whom we might name after a communistic Russian religious sect, the Dukhobors (Spirit Wrestlers). A lot of people hate that sort of thing, just as a lot of people hate contact sports or physical work.
But as for clinging to ideas, the way the brain works on many levels is to generate hypotheses about what it takes in, and then check them against perceptions, intuition, reason, experience, social constructs, and so on. When this process fails, the person with the brain often becomes very distressed, because constructing a world view is a lot of work in the first place, often going back to infacy, and is often accompanied by important emotional commitments. If that works has to be revised in important ways, it's a lot of work, and one's survival may be at stack. You'll observe few people who can change their minds in important ways.
Kia ora Caitlin (from a cuzzie from the other side of the ditch). Thank you for this wise, compassionate commentary, I think I needed very much to have this explained to me. My best friend since I was 15 (I'm 47) won't talk to me anymore, because of this exact issue/process. Loving your work by the way.
It's curious that people will cling so hard to what are, after all, just ideas, theories, observations which might be illusions. We have to struggle with and for the truth, and as William Blake said, "Opposition is true friendship."
"Opposition is true friendship" only for those whom we might name after a communistic Russian religious sect, the Dukhobors (Spirit Wrestlers). A lot of people hate that sort of thing, just as a lot of people hate contact sports or physical work.
But as for clinging to ideas, the way the brain works on many levels is to generate hypotheses about what it takes in, and then check them against perceptions, intuition, reason, experience, social constructs, and so on. When this process fails, the person with the brain often becomes very distressed, because constructing a world view is a lot of work in the first place, often going back to infacy, and is often accompanied by important emotional commitments. If that works has to be revised in important ways, it's a lot of work, and one's survival may be at stack. You'll observe few people who can change their minds in important ways.