I think this really enriched my notion of a trapped prior — an idea that someone can be fully locked into a perspective on the world that they cannot see outside of, for various biochemical and psychological reasons, but that certain particular biochemical or psychological experiences could move them out of. I think it’s something of a challenge to any life-philosophy based on argument and empiricism as sources of truth, that the thinker can be so trapped in certain perspectives as to falsely reinterpret evidence within their present framework.
I think this also helped me see the ways in which trapped priors are a very human problem. The story of Alex re-enacting social roles from childhood and being able to live life very differently and have access to parts of his mind he’d shut off immediately after (“[I] understood what people meant when they told me that I was constantly “up in my head””) and leading him down a path of wanting to understand religion, was a helpful pointer, especially given the fact that the experience was not in the context of nor related to the doctrines of any organized religions.
(I am not close to curating the follow-up post, which I didn’t really understand and on first few reads seemed to say some false things.)
I’d go farther than zhukeepa goes, and declare that activating “unrealized afters” (higher perspectives and modes beyond mere conventional ways of existing) is potentially MUCH more transformative and powerful than releasing any childhood issues of the sort he describes. As in, ok got all the crap cleaned out of me-now what? There’s a limit to what that kind of therapy can do, IOW, as compared to the potentially limitless realms beyond the ego. In those cases, it is society itself which tries to keep them unrealized, not the ego so much. Since the perennial philosophy goes into quite of bit of detail about that, I’ll leave it there for his next entry on said subject.
Curated.
I think this really enriched my notion of a trapped prior — an idea that someone can be fully locked into a perspective on the world that they cannot see outside of, for various biochemical and psychological reasons, but that certain particular biochemical or psychological experiences could move them out of. I think it’s something of a challenge to any life-philosophy based on argument and empiricism as sources of truth, that the thinker can be so trapped in certain perspectives as to falsely reinterpret evidence within their present framework.
I think this also helped me see the ways in which trapped priors are a very human problem. The story of Alex re-enacting social roles from childhood and being able to live life very differently and have access to parts of his mind he’d shut off immediately after (“[I] understood what people meant when they told me that I was constantly “up in my head””) and leading him down a path of wanting to understand religion, was a helpful pointer, especially given the fact that the experience was not in the context of nor related to the doctrines of any organized religions.
(I am not close to curating the follow-up post, which I didn’t really understand and on first few reads seemed to say some false things.)
I’d go farther than zhukeepa goes, and declare that activating “unrealized afters” (higher perspectives and modes beyond mere conventional ways of existing) is potentially MUCH more transformative and powerful than releasing any childhood issues of the sort he describes. As in, ok got all the crap cleaned out of me-now what? There’s a limit to what that kind of therapy can do, IOW, as compared to the potentially limitless realms beyond the ego. In those cases, it is society itself which tries to keep them unrealized, not the ego so much. Since the perennial philosophy goes into quite of bit of detail about that, I’ll leave it there for his next entry on said subject.