Some people believe with their eyes. Some people believe with their thoughts. For those who see their truths, only experience is real, and they are easily mislead through a puppetry or performance, for they trust their discernment too much. Chained to unconscious habits. For those who think their truths, experience is a stage for ideas, yet thoughts can be as scripted as any theater. Fettered to ideologies, only in this case consciousness of the bonds does little good.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what motivates people, perhaps because I don't "get it." Precisely what I do not get is the gestalt when an individual or a group shifts from the dominance of unconscious habits to conscious ideologies. No one, and of course including myself, is immune from this. Perhaps what surprises me most of all is the multitude that thinks that they are nothing other than the story that they tell themselves, i.e., that the self-given narrative of their lives is truly who they are despite their deeds seen from another perspective. But it makes sense, as divesting oneself of a treasured narrative identity is fundamentally traumatic, something which we are psychologically primed not to do. Yet the alternative is either sensual or cognitive slavery.
I spent years and my dissertation musing upon affective "slavery," as it is prior to sense and cognition, and forms the basis for noetic thought.
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