THE PERCEPTION OF CULTURES

The reality defied expectations. Or should I say defeated. One can only be (for lack of other words) perplexed by the illusions and propaganda we grow up in around here, in this mighty western world. And eastern. Yes, putting aside cultural differences caused by geographical and meteorological conditions, human beings are all the same everywhere. Same in our basic nature and sometimes more than that. Cultural diversity has its origin in great many aspects, however not in different kinds of humans, or different species (how some xenophobes like to call other people…). If darkness means absence of light, then ignorance means absence of information? If only that was true. In that case, we would be pretty much saved by the internet, right? Oh, that reminds me - they say “1 cat has 9 tails. Want proof? No cat has 8 tails. 1 cat has 1 tail more than no cat, ergo…” Or perhaps I just want to point out the connection between the internet and information. And cats, of course. So, perhaps information alone might just not be enough to defeat ignorance. We need something more. We need the brain capacity to see connections, causes, effects, the true nature of ten thousand things and the ability to emulate the whole picture of the world around us. That is called wisdom. But how can we understand it all? There is so much information on so many levels, how can we even pretend to see it? We often do and it is called preconception, bias, prejudice… These are never present in wisdom. The truly wise ones do not pretend they know all. They are aware of the limits of their knowledge, hence they are not so pre-occupied with those three and that perhaps gives them more space to process the knowledge they already have. But who knows, right? It certainly isn’t my case, unfortunately I have my fair share of those three. The thing is, our whole world is made up (at least by atoms, right?). And no, I haven’t chosen the red pill. Human eye doesn’t work the way you may think it does. Look up the details and perhaps you will be astonished how small is its field of focus. The rest of the picture is completely made up by our brain. Again, look it up, but I’ve heard of an experiment, measuring how people perceive colors. Turns out that since every eye is unique, every one of us sees different shades of colors in slightly different ways, yet there is obviously no way of comparison, so we have no idea. The reason for writing all this is that we sentient beings can exist only thanks to this ability of making mental images and filling the gaps with subjectively calculated pieces. It is in our nature and we do it all the time, way more often than we realize and not always are we able to differentiate. Just by the way, that is the main ingredient of fear, anger, hate, selfishness, arrogance, depression, and so on, and so on. The mere awareness of the fact will not automatically make you immune. But lets leave this for another rainy day.

慧淨

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