psychology – Page 143

What Does It Really Mean to Be Honest?

To honestly assess information, we need to fully inform ourselves.

We have all heard ‘honesty is the best policy’ and, ‘you shouldn’t lie’, but what is honesty at the deepest level, and why is it so important?

Honesty, at the deepest level, is a form of integrity.

Integrity asks you to be spiritually courageous, and involves using your wisdom and discernment even in the face of great pain. Being honest is not always easy. Sometimes being honest means moving away from the comfort of beliefs that we hold great stock in, beliefs which we have been taught over a lifetime, beliefs which inform our daily lives, actions, decisions, and relationships to a profound degree.

The truth is, none of the comfort or emotional well-being derived from any belief is indicative of its truthfulness. There is simply no connection between what provides comfort and what is true.

Why is any of this important?

Believing things which are untrue can be very harmful, even though we may derive enormous personal comfort from the familiarity and promises of these beliefs.

If someone comes to your door and explains that they believe something without providing charitable counter-arguments, alternatives, or competing explanations, then this is a very strong indication that that person is not acting in their integrity, their honesty.

An evangelist will stand at your doorstep and faithfully show you everything that they believe, including why it makes sense to them, and the path they have taken to arrive at those conclusions. If they present you with any material that entertains a competing explanation, such as another very different religious system, it will always be used to show that other explanations are false.

This is a very, very important point, because this is how we discover whether someone is acting in their integrity or whether they are deluding themselves or others.

For example, a Jehovah’s Witness will not charitably discuss the merits of Catholicism or Islam, regardless of how many believers there are in these faiths worldwide. Other belief systems will only be referenced in passing in order to show that they are mistaken relative to the interpretation of the evangelists’ own religious commitments.

A missionary does not go into the jungle to deepen his understanding of tribal spirituality, at least, not intentionally. He goes in order to persuade others of his culture’s views which he assumes to be superior prior to any philosophical comparison.

Now, again imagine you are an Evangelical Christian and a Muslim comes to your door behaving in precisely the same way as you might. They offer you only an explanation of how Islam is exclusively true and holds spiritual superiority over other faiths. They will not hold competing faiths, including your own, in a favourable light, nor will they provide any charitable explanation of how these work, or the benefits they provide people with globally.

In short, they are not acting out of integrity.

Let’s go back to why honesty and integrity are important.

If you are not genuinely honest about your beliefs and why you believe them, then the relationship of those beliefs to reality will be muddy at best. If we do not allow our beliefs to conform to the best available reasoning and evidence, then our worldview is at risk of stagnating for lack of congruence with reality.

Just think what this would matter to divinity – I am not speaking of religion, but of divinity itself that people on earth should not act upon their integrity. This divinity may not take offense at having been wilfully misunderstood, but it would surely not condone people believing falsehoods without question and not honestly considering different answers, particularly if those false beliefs were harmful to others.

A Baptist who comes to your doorstep to preach about the bible has nothing glowing to say about the Koran, the Talmud, The Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita, irrespective of how valuable these may have been to millions of other lives over thousands of years.

The reason for this is clear – once people believe they have found answers that suit them, they tend to stop considering the legitimacy of other explanations, and feel justified in confidently discounting the validity of those worldviews without feeling the need for further analysis. This is not a Christian problem or Jewish problem or a Muslim problem or an atheist problem – this is a human problem.

When a politician comes to you, whether on television or in person, he isn’t telling you why his competition are wonderful and can help you in your life. He comes to you because he wants your support, he wants your vote. Your belief in his policy is a kind of transaction to him. In fact, it usually does not even matter to him that his policy should make you or your children’s lives any better. All that matters to him is that you vote for him. It is the same with religion.

There are other important reasons that people once deciding upon a belief system do not carefully and charitably explore alternative explanations, and this is because of something called cognitive dissonance.

If you already believe something, particularly if you have believed it for a long time and/or these beliefs inform much of what your personal life is built around, then there will be very strong resistance to changing or even questioning those beliefs, even if those beliefs have been harmful or false.

If an animal in a zoo has been kept in captivity for its entire life, even though it may have been kept enclosed in cramped, uncomfortable conditions, then the world outside will seem terrifying, even the wild where it belongs. Its natural freedom will terrify it to the point where for the sake of its imagined comfort, it will choose to remain caged out of fear and the comfort of an abject yet familiar environment.

We even limit our own children in order to indoctrinate them into our own views. This can be done in many ways, by limiting the friendships they have, monitoring the books they read, the movies they watch, or even schooling them ourselves, bypassing the perceived problem of our children receiving and understanding alternative ideas and explanations.

Christians frown upon Muslims for doing this, and vice versa. If anyone was truly operating in their integrity, in respect for truth they would never limit their children in this way. Now, of course we all love our children, and of course we all do for them what we think is best.

However, if we truly believed what we say we do, then we would allow our children the freedom of education that would naturally lead them to seek the truth, and if what we believe to be true was indeed true, then they would reach the same conclusions as we have.

The fact that people force their own beliefs upon their children is a form of dishonesty. It is symptomatic of a lack of faith in one’s own beliefs and assumptions.

Many religious parents, although somewhat uncomfortable with the inherent dishonesty of indoctrination, reason in the following way: “Yes, I am limiting their beliefs and freedom because I love them and I do not want them to be affected by evil, whatever the cost, because in my doing so I spare them from sin and damnation”.

However, this is precisely the same reasoning that keeps other authoritarian religious traditions which you disagree with in business. If you are a Fundamentalist Christian, you disagree with Fundamentalist Muslim children not receiving a free education.

Yet their parents reason in the same way that you do, only they consider that beliefs in departure from Islam lead to damnation, while you believe the same regarding Christianity.

In honesty, you cannot have it both ways – either you agree that all religions should indoctrinate their children, or you believe that children should be allowed freedom to seek the truth.

Questioning beliefs and assumptions costs energy. If we re-evaluate what we believe and why, then the resulting change can be very difficult, which is sadly why people, particularly those with strong beliefs, have a strong resistance to this.

It is more important to most people to remain comfortable, in familiar territory, and amongst people who believe the same things than it is even to pursue the ultimate truth of reality, who they really are and why they are really here.

They are afraid that if they question their beliefs, then they will betray their family, friends, church, tradition, culture, God.

All that is actually happening is that that person is no longer putting comfort and familiarity first, and is now stepping into the courage and integrity to hold all of their beliefs subject to a rigorous questioning. People do this out of a deep respect for themselves, for others, for truth, and for divinity. Unfortunately, many see it as easier to die for their convictions than to live questioning them.

To the extent that people do not do this, they choose to remain asleep. This is why we have traditions spanning thousands of years, and yet no peace to show for it. Violence, both physical and ideological, is rife, as is suffering, neurosis and fear of death, insanity and damnation, all despite the proclamation of great faith and righteousness. It is not loyalty that keeps you in chains, but fear.

To value and practice honest questioning and integrity is to value spiritual awareness, to be awake to the truth in whatever form it may take.

The time to remain asleep is over for those who choose to awaken and hold to question every assumption that separates us from our brothers and sisters.

Simon P. Murphy is a Nelson-based writer. He is the author of the short story collection His Master’s Wretched Organ and the forthcoming Lexicanum Luciferium (both by VJM Publishing). His fiction is heavily influenced by Gnosticism and Alchemy, placing a central focus upon the theme of our navigation of an occulted reality through the use of archetypal symbolism.

The West’s Weirdest Political Alliances

It is said that “politics makes for strange bedfellows”. Well, so does the sister industry to politics, prostitution. The major difference between politicians and prostitutes, as this essay will illuminate, is that there are things that prostitutes are too ashamed to do for money.

The Sanders-Clinton alliance was weird, but not especially weird by the standards that we have now degenerated to. It’s not especially surprising that a defeated social democratic candidate would endorse the more left-wing of the remaining two.

One truly weird one that has been going strong for over a century is the Marxist feminist – Christian fundamentalist anti-porn and prostitution alliance.

These two forces both have an immense hatred of natural sexual liberty. The Marxists want to destroy all natural sexual impulses and pervert them into worship of the state, whereas the Christians want to lay guilt trips on people for these same impulses and call them sinful.

For these reasons the two have combined against women.

This was never going to be a particularly strong alliance, though, for the reason that the Marxists want to promote all manner of sexual degeneracy in place of natural sexual relations, whereas the Christians want to suppress and repress everything, natural or otherwise.

Another unusual alliance is that of the various control freaks who oppose cannabis law reform.

This has seen the Police (who do not want to lose the power they have to control people or the funding given to them to do so) and the alcohol companies (whose product causes over half of the damage that the Police have to clean up) to get into bed with each other.

Here it is really the Police that have been cucked by business interests. Because alcohol and pharmaceutical companies see cannabis as a competing product, they have bribed the people that the Police answer to to make it illegal – and the men and women of the Police force pay the price.

The fact that this has resulted in making life immensely more difficult for the Police themselves, who have to face the carnage wrought by booze on a daily basis, appears to be completely lost on them – they continue to vocally oppose cannabis law reform.

Even weirder are the shifting anti-nationalist forces that have opposed Brexit, Trump and which now oppose Marine Le Pen.

This alliance has seen trendy liberals who consider themselves leftists coming out on the side of the political establishment (including the conservative parties), the international bankers, the corporate media and the unelected European Commission against the working class that the left supposedly exists to help.

This column has previously raised the possibility that these people may, in fact, be crypto-conservatives, and it’s certain that some are.

Most of them, though, are genuinely stupid enough to believe that they are acting in favour of the underdog and the unfortunate when they come out in support of the same globalist forces who have spent the past 30 years attacking the standard of living of the working classes.

The pro-Islam league of homosexuals, however, tops them all.

It appears that, because Muslims are generally considered outsiders in Western society, other groups who are also generally considered outsiders have decided to see Islam as a kindred spirit under the motto of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Unfortunately for the homosexuals, the Muslims they love and the Christians they hate are both Abrahamists, and as they are both male supremacist religions they share a common hatred of homosexuality.

Indeed, homosexual conduct is punishable by death in all of Afghanistan, Brunei, Gaza Strip, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

But thanks to a mutual hatred of The Man, homosexuals are frequently willing to passionately defend a religious tradition that would like to see them thrown from rooftops.

That has to be the West’s weirdest political alliance.

Sobriety Bias Syndrome

Sobriety Bias Syndrome is the tendency for people to erroneously assume that, if there are two competing perceptions of reality, the one that was arrived at while sober (or the most sober) must necessarily be the correct one. This line of thinking has retarded our cultures and had a grossly retrograde effect on our spiritual awareness.

The logic behind this is usually given thus: psychoactive drugs disturb the normal thinking processes of the brain, and these normal processes have evolved to make us optimally adapted to the environment around us, therefore without the influence of psychoactive drugs we will remain in the undisturbed and pure state best suited for accurately perceiving the material world.

This state is known as sobriety, and the term has become a synonym for clear-headed and rational thinking.

It is a very strange belief if one examines it, because it’s not clear what sobriety actually is. Our everyday experience of reality is formed by the interactions of several dozen neurotransmitters in our brains – and that’s even if we don’t smoke, snort, swallow, insufflate or shelve anything.

Even in a state that most people would consider to be fully sober, the conscious experience is strongly influenced by these neurotransmitters. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, adrenaline, and dozens of others exist, and our mood at any time is mostly a function of the complex interactions between these.

So a sudden spike or trough in any of them can cause a profoundly different mood or attitude – an experience as strong as any “drug” trip.

Not even by meditating can one arrive at a state in which one is not influenced by these neurotransmitters. Meditation might help to inhibit the release of some of these natural drugs (especially noradrenaline), but in doing so it will merely facilitate the release of others (especially serotonin).

In other words, meditation advocates can legitimately be accused of being mere 5-hydroxytryptamine junkies.

Because one is always under the influence of these neurotransmitters, no-one has any way of knowing what sobriety even really is. The usual assumption is that the average, everyday or most common experience must be the natural one and therefore the state in which one does the most rational thinking.

But no person, even if they have definitely not taken any external drugs into their body, has any way of knowing whether their natural neurotransmitter levels are correct.

Many, many people have near-permanently elevated levels of noradrenaline and adrenaline as a consequence of all the stresses of living in a city, which is an extremely unnatural environment and which does not give people in it much opportunity to relax and to find homeostasis of anxiety levels.

It’s very plausible that these elevated levels of what are essentially endogenous war drugs have pushed us into a collective stupor in which we no longer can make decisions with an intelligent long-term perspective.

It’s easy to believe that we are so full of adrenaline that we can only make decisions with immediate rewards in mind, because this would explain the obesity, violence, callousness and stupidity that characterises our societies.

So we’re already not making sober decisions, and so changing the drug laws to reflect that exogenous drugs are not categorically worse for a person than endogenous ones will not necessary lead to the breakdown of social order.

In fact it could be argued that some exogenous drugs – and cannabis is the obvious example – actually serve to reduce the levels of some harmful or stupefying neurotransmitters and therefore cause the smoker to become more rational (this is why Rastafarians call their smoke-ups reasoning sessions).

Sure, we don’t need surgeons taking a hit on the crack pipe before they operate, but a change in attitudes to exogenous drugs need not lead to change in attitudes to professional workplace conduct.

The truth is that people arrive at all kinds of enhanced insights that can be, and have been, used to improve the quality of human life as a consequence of a drug-induced altered state of consciousness.

After all, how else would they do it? Novel solutions demand novel thinking. Novel thinking is certainly not achieved by repetitively going over the same neural pathways for years and years on end.

Some thinkers, like Terence McKenna, even credit the use of psychoactive drugs for much of the initial impulse to civilise our species and for the first stirrings of spirituality in the human creature. It’s also an open secret that much of the creative technological thinking that made reading this website possible was sparked by LSD.

The Sobriety Bias Syndrome, a kind of Puritanical abuse of the bandwagon fallacy, makes all of these insights harder to achieve by binding people’s thinking to the most mundane, banal, plebian simplicities that can be devised.

The sobriety bias is usually promulgated by a decidedly mediocre sort of person, best characterised as being incredibly boring, and sufficiently so to have long since driven all interesting people out of their social circles.

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Humans and Cats

The relationship between cats and humans goes back into antiquity

Why do people love cats so crazily much? Is it the cuteness, the companionship, the intelligence, the charm? It could be any of those things, but this article will investigate a cold, scientific proposal: that we love cats because we have evolved to.

It is believed that the cat was domesticated by humans about 6,000 years ago in Egypt. This was far from a fluke.

When semi-nomadic humans decided to invent agriculture and settle down in the Nile Delta, they found themselves faced with a set of survival challenges that simply did not exist in the nomadic world.

The most obvious was the gigantic pile of grain that they had every autumn as a consequence of the harvest. The granaries that held this harvest also held a year’s food supply for the civilisation that controlled it. This meant that securing the granaries was a matter of life and death.

So people built stone walls, metal swords, guard towers etc. and these were very effective at keeping other people away.

The biggest danger to the granaries was not other humans, though – it was rodents. Storing a gigantic pile of food in the middle of a large settlement of people naturally attracted mice and rats from all around.

This meant that effectively keeping mice and rats away from the granaries also became a matter of life and death.

Enter the cat.

The perfect solution to what was at the time an existential problem was found in the form of the Northern African wildcat, from which our domestic cats are descended.

The cats naturally preyed on mice and rats anyway, so it was only a matter of time until someone had the clever idea of taking some kittens into their home in the hope of domesticating them in the same ways that dogs and horses had already been “civilised”.

As anyone who has raised a kitten knows, it would have only been a matter of weeks before the kitten started chasing pieces of string and leaves, and then insects, and then the dreaded rodents.

From this moment onwards, all people capable of agriculture came to take cats into their homes for protection of their food from rodents, as cats did not eat grain themselves. And so, having cats had by this time become a crucial factor that determined one’s ability to live.

This alone was probably enough for people like the ancient Egyptians to start worshipping cats, and this would explain the curious repetition of cat-related imagery in Egyptian motifs.

The sacred animal status achieved by the domestic cat is probably a result of the survival advantages to humans offered by cats through pest-control

Indeed, the gratitude of humans for their feline protection from rodents was initially so great that the Egyptians founded a holy city of the cat cult in a place called Bubastis. The status of the cat was so high in this culture that if a family’s cat died they could have it buried for free in the great necropolis there.

Since these times, the human population has exploded, at least in part to the initial benefits afforded by the survival advantage of not having rodents eat all of our grain.

The human and the cat might therefore have become inextricably linked. It may now be that, without cats, we couldn’t keep the rodent population low enough for us to maintain our immense population at the number it has swollen to.

It has been argued that medieval religious superstitions linking cats to witchcraft were responsible for anti-cat persecutions that led to an increase in the rodent population that led to the Black Death. So anything that harms cats, harms us.

The meow of the cat is an interesting behaviour that provides more evidence of common evolution between cats and humans, because cats do not meow to each other and they do not meow to other animals. The meow appears to be a form of communication that only exists between cat and human.

It’s possible that cats learned to meow because they evolved to. Perhaps cats that were more vocal were more favoured by humans, and so were fed more often and therefore were more capable of reproducing.

It might also be that the capacity to vocalise emotions in the form of meowing is indicative of intelligence, and that this was selected for in cats in the same way it was in humans – through increased efficiency of behaviour.

Probably the most striking piece of evidence for the common evolution of cats and humans, however, is the incredible fondness that people have for them.

This might also be an evolved behaviour. It’s easy to believe that people who were naturally fond of cats would more easily attract them as companions, and therefore benefit more from the anti-rodent efforts than a person who chased them away.

It is also easy to believe that, given the holy status of cats in some cultures, that anyone who harmed them was dealt to by other humans, and so did not pass cat-unfriendly genes into the next generation.

Unlike the horse, who was partially replaced by the automobile, and unlike the dog, who was partially replaced by remote electronic security, there will probably always be a need for cats for the sake of companionship and pest control.

It may even be that, like in the film Aliens, we take cats with us to the stars.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).