Mitchell Diamond
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

Exactly. What is overlooked by most people are the downsides or drawbacks of our overactive minds. The human brain evolved in such a way that it generated a lot of unnecessary noise in order to extract an occasional nugget. Those infrequent nuggets accumulated to make an enormous impact on human success, but in the meantime a great deal of useless cognition passed as rational thinking, but wasn’t.

What we perceive as insight and logic are mostly heuristics and biases that arise as the consequence of conditioning and predisposition. And yet people are completely unaware of this. Consciousness is primarily an organ of self-delusion. And despite our ignorance of our own internal processes — or perhaps because of it, humans evolved a propensity for spirituality: the personal experience and underpinning of religion. As you point out, meditation is one of the many rituals humans have developed for the purpose of temporarily quieting and inhibiting our hyperactive consciousness. Rhythmic activities like music and dance were also among the original rituals in incipient primal religions, but they all had the same purpose: to alter our state of consciousness. This is a critical aspect of the human condition.

Mitchell Diamond

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