Perception — Self & Others

I offer you a quote from the book, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, by Andrew Norman.

Scientists have done a lot in recent years to expose a root cause of our dysfunctional politics. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarizes the research in his best-selling book The Righteous Mind. His Conclusion? Our brains have a kind of tribal architecture. As he puts it, we’re “groupish” creatures: beneath the level of conscious awareness, our thinking is bent by the need for tribal solidarity. Passionate loyalty to an in-group “us” makes it hard to think in a fair minded way. When an out-group “them” is made to seem threatening, our thinking becomes especially bent. Demagogues and propagandists exploit these vulnerabilities: they stoke judgment-warping fears and manipulate their own loyalists.

A quote from the book Money, Sex, War, Karma by David Loy.

Wars start because politicians lie to the press, and then believe what they read in the paper.

As you recall from our practices of sustainable compassion, we work in the extending mode to share our experience of care and compassion with our friends (the “in” group), difficult ones (the “out” group), and strangers (all the “others”). Seeing others as different from ourselves (in whatever way we do that), reinforces our sense of ego as separate from others and our sense of belonging to a certain tribe.

The only way we can all live in peace (i.e. stop suffering) is to see that fundamentally all beings are the same in their true nature; and treat them as such.