The World of Agreement

The world we know is a function of collective agreements built up over time. Our world is an interpretation or story which is undergoing continual modification, although the foundations of this story are rarely questioned. The undefined sense-data presented by the senses in themselves tell us nothing, although the body can immediately distinguish the difference between pleasure and pain. At a very early age we begin to build up a picture of our environment and of ourselves, and this picture is largely imposed upon us by others in our immediate surroundings, particularly our parents or guardians. The urge to survive, to experience pleasure and avoid pain is the driving force from within which pushes us to understand how to survive and flourish. The body's fight or flight mechanism which is primitive and instinctual protects us from immediate danger, thus whenever even very young children feel threatened they automatically run the other way. When we become bigger and stronger, we may choose to fight if we feel the odds are in our favour or if the flight option is not available. Our parents, of course, have learned how to survive and their primary concern is to pass this knowledge on to us. This is their first responsibility and we can observe that all parents of all species do exactly the same thing with their offspring.

Our basic assumptions about life and about ourselves are formulated before we develop the faculty of discriminative thinking, which is around the time of adolescence. Collectively, our basic assumptions function as an underlying structure which shapes how we perceive our world. This largely unconscious filter shapes our identity and gives us our sense of self, of who we are. It is the unexamined paradigm by which we define ourselves and also assess the validity and acceptability of all new knowledge and experience. It gives us our moral sense. Any future information that challenges this underlying structure automatically threatens our self-indentity, triggering a hostile response from our side. The examples of race, culture or religion demonstrates this. If one of my basic, inherited assumptions is that caucasians are intellectually and morally superior to the other races, then my daughter bringing home a coloured boyfriend will automatically trigger a negative response, preceding any rational thought I may give the situation. In fact, this automatic response will also serve to block any truly objective thinking on the matter. Why? Because, this situation threatens my basic assumptions and, by extension, threatens me and my identity. Children are not born prejudiced, they are taught prejudice, and usually not in any formal way. They simply pick it up from their environment. What they do, unconsciously, is to agree to the prejudiced ideas they are exposed to. They accept the myth that some races, religions, etc., are superior to others, and this myth becomes one of the basic assumptions through which they view the world. It becomes part of the paradigm. It is something they have agreed with, albeit largely unconsciously. And, until they do a serious self-enquiry as to the nature and validity of their prejudice, they will be stuck with it.

The previous example is obvious, but there are deeper, more insidious assumptions which make up part of the underlying structure by which I define myself and my world. This time it is negative judgments directed not at others but at my self. If a parent or guardian had an abysmal sense of self-worth and an angry, judgmental outlook on life, then as a child I could easily become the target. I could find myself repeatedly attacked with emotionally-charged comments such as, 'You're a good-for-nothing', 'You're too stupid to succeed', 'You're a disappointment', 'You don't have what it takes to make', 'Nobody will want you', etc. In such an environment, especially if I do not have positive support from other adults, I will end up with a basic assumption that who I am is simply not good enough or adequate or loved and wanted. This unconscious, unexamined self-assessment will sabotage my happiness in every area of my life: success, career, money, love, friendship and so forth. I will find myself de-motivated and struggling in all of my projects and aspirations. Lacking confidence, I will accept defeat easily. I will quit rather than persevere in the face of setbacks. I will not complete things. I will not believe in my own choices. And all of this will be because of an agreement I have made with myself about myself. If I want to transform this, I will have no option but to do a self-enquiry concerning my true feelings and beliefs about myself and make a new agreement with myself about myself.

The negative agreements we make about ourselves are so insidious that we will resent those who actually support us in being successful: the teacher, friend, colleague or lover who says, 'You're good enough to succeed, I believe in you!' Why? Because my negative self-assessment -- the agreement I made about myself -- is integral to the paradigm which gives me my identity. Any information to the contrary will threaten this paradigm and I will likely end up attacking those people who support me the most. I will actually feel more comfortable spending time with people who perceive me as a loser.

It is important to recognize that our low self-esteem is a result of agreements we made about ourselves. This way, we will be able to assume personal responsibility as the ultimate creator of our self-image rather than abdicate responsibility by playing the loser's card called 'I'm a victim': 'My father is to blame for my low self-esteem, it's his fault!' The loser's card keeps us trapped in a vicious cycle of resentment and revenge, which is another way of saying hell.

Agreement also governs large groups of people. Just as there are individual paradigms, there are cultural paradigms. Just as individuals clash, cultures clash. A good example of this was Spain's conquest of Mexico in the 16th century. When Spanish conquistadors and priests encountered the Indian peoples of Central America in the 16th century, it wasn't simply a clash of material and political interests, it was a collision of vastly differing paradigms. The Spanish believed they understood the natives, which they did not, and the natives struggled to come to terms with the mentality of the Spanish, which they failed to do. The result was horrific, as history testifies. This clash of paradigms led to the destruction of an entire indigenous civilization and made a mockery of any Spanish pretense to civility and religious enlightenment. The indigenous peoples and the Spanish each had a set of agreements about the world, only these two worlds of agreement were totally alien to one another. The result, of course was butchery and cultural genocide. Once the Spanish had completed their military conquest, their next task was to destroy indigenous culture. To this end, their major weapons became Catholic indoctrination, imposed re-education, reducing the natives to virtual slave-status and outright suppression of indigenous values and world-view. Christianity was first imposed by force, and once the demoralization of the Indians was well advanced they began their own mass conversion to Christianity. It was not the conversion of a powerful people, it was the conversion of a defeated, confused, demoralized people. This mass conversion was triggered by the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531. She became known as Our Lady of Guadalupe. With this, the Spanish conquest of Mexico was effectively accomplished.

The clash of paradigms between the Spaniards and natives of Mexico changed the agreements which indigenous people had about themselves. These new agreements were overwhelmingly negative. Consequently, the self-esteem of native people took a serious beating. They came to understand themselves as inferior, weak, defeated and condemned to poverty and servitude. Those natives who have broken this terrible self-image and regained their personal power are those who have assumed responsibility for their negative agreements about themselves and changed them. To accomplish this is not easy. It is an enormous task to rebuild a demolished self-esteem and a true act of power.

The world of agreement is also more than simply psychological and cultural. Scientific understanding is also a matter of agreement. A rodent knows that if it walks off of a cliff it will fall. We could say that it knows this but does not understand it. The difference between rodents and humans is that we not only know about gravity, but we have an explanation for it, which the rodent does not. We call our explanation scientific because many people over a long period of time have come up which theories to explain the phenomenon of things falling and then tested their theories both empirically and logically. Many theories were disgarded when they did not stand up to scrutiny. The current theory of gravity has, up to this point, stood up to scrutiny. Therefore we say that our understanding of gravity is scientifically based. For practical, immediate purposes it really doesn't give us any edge over a rodent, except insofar as we can create technologies that allow us to do things that a rodent cannot, such as send a spacecraft to the moon. Does this mean that our understanding of gravity is complete? Not at all. Our current understanding is sufficient to get a man on the moon, but this in no way proves that we understand gravity in its entirety. In fact, what we know about gravity may be just the tip of the iceberg. And, no matter how far we advance in science, we will never be able to prove that our understanding of any phenomenon is final. Why? Because our understanding is strictly circumscribed by the limits to thought imposed by the intellect. As extraordinary as the intellect is, it is a limited power confronting that which is limitless.

Our collective agreements about the universe and its contents are all rooted in the original sense-data which are presented in consciousness. These sense-data refer to something, but it must be clearly understood that they are not the thing to which they refer. The exact nature what they refer to is unclear and our knowledge of what they indicate is at best an interpretation backed up by continued investigation and scientific findings. Since sense-data are neither the thing they refer to nor the consciousness within which they are presented, there is serious doubt as to exactly what sense-data are. Are they real or are they unreal? Some schools of philosophy argue they are unreal, others argue they are real, and still others contend that they are both real and unreal or, conversely, neither real nor unreal. Whatever the truth is, there is no doubt that sense-data - whether real or unreal -- are vitally important, because without them there can be no life as we know it. Without them waking up in the morning would be impossible since there would be nothing to wake up to.

At another level, our collective agreements about the universe are themselves interpretations of sense-data presented in consciousness. Said differently, my understanding of collective agreements is an interpretation of sense-data presented in consciousness, i.e., my consciousness. Words I have read, conversations I have heard, images I have seen in pictures, etc. -- all presented as sense-data -- create the impression that there are collective agreements about the external world and its contents. But this belief about collective agreements is my agreement that it is so. It seems such an obvious fact that I assume it to be true. But is it? Since my knowledge of collective agreements is rooted in sense-data that are themselves perhaps real or unreal or both real and unreal, I am left with an existential doubt about the reality or nature of collective agreements. And these agreements are not limited to mundane things such as bus schedules and elections, they also include collective judgments about the Divine and what the Divine decrees or about science and what science decrees. All perceptions of multiplicity and all manifestations of polarity (hot-cold, up-down, etc) are held within a single unit called awareness or the Self. Everything experienced turns upon this unit. In the absence of awareness, such as in deep sleep, there are no sense data and no objects. When wakefulness returns, so does multiplicity. But awareness can continue without multiplicity (as in transcendence during deep meditation) whereas multiplicity cannot continue without awareness (as in a coma or while under anaesthesia). So just as a certain tentativeness is appropriate in dealing with our perceptions and beliefs pertaining to the external world, so a certain tentativeness is justified in how we relate to our convictions about collective agreements.

During the 1930's a demagogue created a collective agreement in Germany that the Jews were the cause Germany's troubles. Millions of otherwise intelligent Germans believed that this insane idea was true and the result was genocide. Recently, in Rwanda, the same type of collective agreement was created, only this time it was the Hutu people who believed that the Tutsis were the source of their suffering. Again, the result was genocide. For human beings true objectivity is existentially impossible. Whatever we think or see is automatically coloured by our moods, biases and mental/emotional processes. For this reason, tentativeness is our best safeguard against excess and madness. Of course, dogmatic men of action hate to read material such as this, since dogmatists like to believe that they are fully justified in committing whatever atrocities or stupidities their dogmas condone. The dogmatic mentality has no interest in the truth and will sacrifice anyone for power, material gain or simply for the need to assert that its ideology (religious, political, etc) is the right one, the only one and the one to which all other minds must kneel.