Why should I not be skeptical about who I am? After all, my name was given to me---it was not something I chose.
Similarly, while growing up I was told whether I was good or bad; whether I was a boy or a girl.
Then later on in school it got even more sinister: I learned whether I was ugly or pretty; skinny or fat; American or Russian...; white, brown, or black...; Christian or Muslim...--and so on (and of course, the original judgement of good or bad was reinforced throughout this time period through reward and punishment).
I think you get the idea--the idea being that we as a human race are highly socialized. In fact, I will go even further and declare that what we call, "socialization" and "education" are actually conditioning factors. And further, that this conditioning is actually a "dumbing down" factor because of the emphasis on threat and punishment; and because of the emphasis on having children conform to what is known instead of encouraging them to think for themselves (again, through threat and punishment).
The consequences of all this are that we live in a society where we can kid ourselves about our extraordinary technological achievements while still remaining in decay. We can kid ourselves about being intelligent and unique among living creatures, when the fact of the matter is that we as a human race have almost totally lost our ability to think for ouselves. And what we call "intelligence" is actually the repetition of the patterns that we have learned through books and other social media. And that this explains, for example, why we are not able to solve problems at a deep fundamental level---that is, we are able to build bridges and send astronauts to the moon--all of which require problem solving skills, and yet we are not able to solve our basic problems of human existence.
The interesting thing is that this socialization-conditioning process has been going on for thousands of years, and it is being passed on from generation to generation---the Mexican people are conditioning their children, as are Americans and Chinese; Christian and Muslim---the whole world is caught up in this inheritance pattern of repetition which our human race proudly calls, "tradition".
And yet we have individuals and organizations all over the world who think we can solve our problems through the same old traditional means of, "more education", "more funding", "greater awareness of the issues", "social manipulation", and so on.
Now, my question is, how can minds that are conditioned (confused)---where the conditioning is the source of the problem to begin with; how can such minds solve our problems in any deep meaningful way?. Of couse, the answer is that they CANNOT, and in fact what we are doing in all areas of human endeavour (politics, science, medicine, psychology, education...) is treating symptoms---treating symptoms because we do not know what the real, root source of the problem is---that root source being WE OURSELVES!
I am sorry, but unless we can change psychologically and spiritually at a deep fundamental level, we will continue living in conflict not only within ourselves, but also outwardly within the world at large.
Now you know why I created this blog, Skeptical About Everything. We need to begin questioning our deepest fundamental beliefs, and then perhaps through this questioning we can reach a deep fundamental understanding of ourselves which in turn may lead to a deconditioning process.
More to come!
