Avoiding knowledge, facts, and hundreds of years of science, is one way to live. If you do choose to live that way you certainly have everything you need to avoid anxiety of the real, and most importantly, what you feel/believe won’t have to compete with those annoying facts.
“If I don’t have knowledge of it, then it must not be real.”
“Only the things that I know are real and valid.”
“If I don’t know what you know, then I don’t need to respect you or your opinions”.
“If I don’t have any knowledge of it, I don’t have to give it any respect.”
There is something very profound going on here when people in positions of authority make decisions that are not based on knowledge, assuming their opinions and perceptions are superior to others, including the experts. When challenged they reject, become defensive—not listening to the counter argument—and/or vilify others.
This attitude of ignorance penetrates into the very fabric of so many powerful people who’s agenda is avoidance of what they don’t know or understand, in order to weave policies that are self-serving—insisting their views are the truth without any evidence to back them up.
If I am denied the open view of the universe, access to rational knowledge, reality is no longer based on scientific methods, only feelings and emotions that are arbitrary choices that do not serve the whole.
Choosing can also include neurotic aberrations—habitually producing psychotic and reactive defensiveness of a world view that produces distorted judgments and perceptions.
How many human beings close themselves off to a classic ‘construct of reality’ by denying themselves knowledge?
If I am obsessed about ‘my’ reality, am I rejecting rational knowing in order to sustain my egotism? Do I need to do this to sustain my identity?
Is egotism the distortion and/or the denial of knowing?”
Is this the ‘measure’ of consciousness—the removal of one’s ego in objective perception?
How open are we to rational knowing—especially being rational about ourselves and how we obstruct our thinking with feelings in order to protect our self image, sense of value and worth?
The character of human self-identification is far more closed than open. There are reasons for this closure, one of which is a lack of self-regard among one’s peers.
Another is a hereditary composition of the character of one’s neural matrix that shapes personality. This varies greatly from person-to-person. One’s strengths or weaknesses depend on the emotional constitution, mental development, and the contextual experience in one’s development such as wealth, poverty, sex, culture, current conditions and conflict, geographic area and circumstance of nature.
The strength of will to stay protected in today’s world of global reach—its multi-dimension and range of differences—is challenging to all who are confronted with a flood of both rational and irrational information in an open-media-format where the flow of knowledge floods the senses and imagination.
Individual, family, and cultural exposure beyond the barriers of custom and tradition bring new perspectives that penetrate tradition and belief that once held ‘reality’ in its frame. This creates enlightenment for some and reactive defensiveness for others. For those who fail to keep informed, it brings uncertainty to everything, especially for those who keep knowledge away from themselves in order to protect their certainty in belief.
The inertia of individuality and identity from the past has been able to hold the frame of reality in place by religious beliefs and customs, but as knowledge unfolds, life seen in the universal whole can generate fear in many who would close the window of knowing while at the same time the new ones are born again into a new world of knowing.
Some are aware of this opening. This is especially so of those wanting to know the mechanisms of self-identification. Many in established cultures are uncomfortable with this.
For one, the window slams shut in belief. For the other it flings open to new visions of an expanded and more accessible universe, a free self, and life.
Most struggle with both. Many hesitate to drink the water of knowing and thereby miss the opportunity of a conscious relationship with their real self. (Which is not always comfortable)
”Is the choice one of fantasy or reality—or is it both?”
I do not know. The outcome is not promising in the very near future, but I still choose to know, to be open and to meet the demands of consciousness in the present.