Uncommon Sense
Chapter 5: The Question is how
Probably the single most significant obstacle to a more in-depth perception of that which is common to your experience is asking the right questions. Common sense is that everything is “caused” by something. The philosophical concept is called causation. Causality is implicit in the logical structure of the English language because that is the model of the universe that our ancestors had. Implicitly we think if x is an event, then y is the cause. It logically follows, then to understand x, we need to find the y, and therefore we formulate our inquiry around asking the question “ why”. Unless you are into philosophy or have nothing to do with your time, you don’t, in the common course of your experience, break things down this rationally.
Nevertheless, the structure is there when you think of an experience you naturally ask why did this happen to me? Or, who is responsible because a source of agency is the author of the cause; therefore, it is a logical question. Asking the question of why intuitively appears to be the way to get to the truth.
Interestingly enough, we now know much more about our world than our ancestors did. Yet we think like them and believe what they believed and even operate on the same presuppositions they did. In other words, we adopted a simple perception of what is common to our experience that was forged in the 6th century. We use a 6th century model of the human experience to live in the 21st century. For many of us, this obvious fallacy is even a sense of pride. It stands to reason that an uncommon sense requires that we get a more modern grasp of the foundations of our perception, and that means changing the questions we ask.
To improve our perception, we must strengthen our ability to discern. Discern means to distinguish; perceive the difference between(two or more things). The deeper we can comprehend mentally what is not immediately clear or obvious, the more uncommon our sense of our experience is. When you boil it down, it’s really about how quickly you can make sense of what you perceive.
Unfortunately, discernment is not a skill that anyone sits you down and teaches you how to do. Life is about choices, and the meaning of a choice is often not immediately apparent; therefore, it is essential to be capable of discerning. Discerning is something you have to learn how to do. It is a skill that takes practice, patience, and perseverance. To learn how to do it takes an unflinching self-honesty, an open mind, and a willingness to try something new. The process is simple, you find out what to do, then practice until you get it right and then practice some more until you can’t get it wrong. Simple doesn’t mean easy.
Unfortunately, discerning is something we learn to farm out, outsource and subcontract. In addition to glorifying ignorance (The condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed), our consumerist culture promotes and installs the junk value of indolence (habitual mental laziness). These cultural values are a part of the mental virus that we inherit from our environment. It is reinforced by our social group. As much as you way you want to believe that you are an individual,you are in-fact a reflection of your social group. As it was elegantly put by a 10 year old “you say I am special and different, and everyone believes they are different, but if everyone is different, doesn’t that mean we are all the same? Ignorance (I don’t want to know) and Indolence (I don’t want to make the effort) are core values that we inherit from our all wise and powerful friends. Consequently, what is more common that not is that, most people would rather die than think. Most people would rather endure and suffer than to make a change. Others are holding out for anything less obvious than the simple truth. We are willing to believe anything literally rather than take responsibility for our own thoughts and actions. The more fantastic the explantion the better. We relegate discerning to a function for our emotions and surrender thinking to our ego. We come to depend on an authority not just to make choices for us but to actually discern for us, to tell us what something means. We buy our opinion from our social group. We rely so heavily on the preconceptions of others that even the concept of discerning is foreign to us. René Descartes propostion that the fundamental element of western phillosophy is “I think therefore I am” would be more accurately expressed as “I feel therefore I am”.
In the todays world the necessary skill to be able to discern what something means for oneself and to understand their implications for what it means for one’s lives, is all but a forgotten skill. By never actually taking the time to determine for ourselves what a thing is, by blindly accepting the consensus, we often find ourselves in a world we do not understand. We make a habit of taking the position that it is too much trouble to think something through. If you listen carefully, you will even hear people saying that they feel that it just takes too much effort to think about something. They would instead use their feelings to guide them. Trust your emotions because the only alternative is to think, and that is too much work. Let’s be honest here. Most people don’t even know what thinking actually is. It’s like when the parent yells at the misbehaving child to go stand in the corner and think about what they have done. What does that mean exactly? Go stand in the corner and make pictures in their mind? Go recall the memory over and over? What does it mean to think? How does one learn to discern?
Reasoning is a skill. You have to know how it is done and learn how to do it, then you have to practice. Just because you can access memory that doesn’t mean you can reason. This is why we experience thinking as a chore. Thinking may give you a headache because you are trying to lift 100 Kilos without a crane without a tool and so you are straining a muscle. The reason most people would rather die than think. This is because we are not as a general principle taught how to think. We are much like that misbehaving child; we go stand in the corner, but we don’t know what to actually do because we don’t know how to think. Thinking is not something you feel. Thinking is something you do. Thinking is a formal process that you apply to memory.
Without knowing that process, we become victims of our own ignorance and indolence. Without knowing how to think we cannot discern. This is a reality that is often too harsh to accept. Especially about ourselves. Denial is the next significant obstacle to our understanding. We find that we don’t want to accept that we do not know how to think because to do so would endanger our sense of self. We think that it means if we have to learn to reason that we must somehow be stupid. We confuse ignorance with stupidity. The definition of stupidity is being slow to learn. Ignorance means not knowing. The only way to be quick to learn is to be ready to realize you do not know. To be smart is to realize what you need to know and then seek to come to know it.
The foundation of an uncommon sense is asking the right questions so you can discern from the results a more in-depth perception. To do this means you have to make a habit of asking the question of how instead of asking why. It also means you need to change how you think about thinking. You want to develop the skill of reasoning.
Right action equals right results because only action gets results. Right thinking produces right action. You cannot theorize your way into right thinking. Only action gets results. You have to take action and, in this case take the kind of action that changes your thinking. You can gather all the information you want from books, seminars, YouTube videos, etc. but without being able to discern, to sort through it, and put it to use, then it is really only trivia. Information is not knowledge. You have to do more than just agree. You have to ”do” something with the information. Therefore, the only information that can help you discern are the answers to the question of what to do and how. To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. Otherwise, you will be swimming in a sea of trivia around the who, what, when, why, and where. The question you need answers to, what you need to focus on, while you on this journey, is not the question of why. What you want to come to understand is that the question of how.
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