The first thing to say is that a model is just a model which may or may not help understanding and allow predictivity. It is NOT the truth. People often in laziness forget this.

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To demonstrate at a simple level layers of understanding I will first refer to myself.

When I was young I was always losing lots of marks in my school work because of my untidy handwriting and shit drawing / diagrams. The text may have been illegible but the content was sound. In religious education I rarely got above half marks because my drawing of various bearded biblical figures was poor and I was marked down. I was often near bottom of the class. I was told I had very scruffy poor handwriting. I was thick.

A little later when maths went beyond arithmetic and into geometry and topology I became interested and started to do better. Once science needed thought instead of parrot brain I started to do better and stopped seeing myself as thick. I remained convinced I was shit at diagrams and chose not to do biology because I had been marked down for shit art and sketches. This ruled out medicine as a degree choice.

A while back I got married and the wife said that I stacked the cutlery draw gammy or left handed. It soon became apparent that for the things I taught myself I adopted a left handed method.

It seems then that because I was forced to be right handed I lacked self-confidence and did not believe in myself. That changed the direction of my life {by extrapolation}.

A simple thing changed my whole narrative of school and life. A layer of my understanding about myself was shown wrong and thence discarded. I now notice lefties everywhere. I still do quite a bit right-handed but can do fine motor control stuff left handed too.

My understanding of self was damaged by a choice someone else made and with which I was forced to comply by societal conditioning.

A simple layer of understanding and compliance to a model affected my outlook and world view.  A layer once removed invalidated an entire narrative.

Had I been raised left-handed who knows?

We indoctrinate our children.

How we construct our “world” begins at home.  In many cases we inflict our notions of God onto our children and they must obey, to an extent. That social-conditioning sets in and concretizes into prejudices very quickly. I recently saw a picture of an orthodox Jew and five tiny children face pressed up against the wailing wall. Therein goes the continuance of strife in the Middle East I thought. From a young age they were being trained and indoctrinated into a centuries old interpersonal chasm of ill feeling and blood. There is only one way and that is the way it has been for centuries. They have a layer of understanding, so solid, so fixed, being laid upon them. What chance have they of seeing through or past that layer? Not much. The lens built from infancy does not allow a wide ranging and accurate picture. It is coloured from early on.

Such indoctrination happens across all cultures in a culture specific manner and to varying degrees. It presents an opacity of view from the get-go.

We all have filters, layers, through which we view the world. We all have colouration and aberrations.

We ourselves are indoctrinated.

It is a logical follow on that if we can indoctrinate our children then we ourselves might be indoctrinated despite what we may believe to the contrary. We may not accept that we are indoctrinated and mistake our layers for truth and accuracy rather than the prejudice they are. We are sure under the veil of our social-conditioning that we are right. We can be evangelical about spreading our own indoctrination.  We want everyone else to share our illusory layer through which we assemble the world, or rather our notion of it.

We may pass on the indoctrination of our parents onto our children, the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. Your reality has been to an extent passed on to you.

Until we can accept, at least as a working hypothesis, that we are indoctrinated and therefore prejudiced, there is not a lot we can do to evolve. If we deny our indoctrination we cannot get past it. It is a form of cult-like conditioning to which nearly all of humanity is subject.

Beyond social-conditioning there are other perceptions.

Other ways of assembling the world are possible.

If you think that the hamster-wheel greasy-pole reality is the be all and end all. That is a world you create for yourself in your “mind”. That is your current version of reality. It may not occur that there are a whole set of other “worlds” out there. It stands to reason that if you can create that world you might be able to create others. You will never know unless you try.

Getting rid of social-conditioning is difficult though not impossible.

In order to do this you need to fully accept that social-conditioning limits you profoundly and work at unpicking this element by element. An example is fear of missing out, FOMO. If you do miss out on a social event of piece of gossip the entire universe does not implode. Which is hard to believe given how FOMO driven some are.

The first layer of understanding is that you are a socially conditioned being with near Pavlovian defensive reactions to anything which even slightly questions your version of how things are and the status quo.

In order to achieve liberation you need to move well beyond the socially conditioned bullshit which you have in your head. Very little of which has any reality.

Your entire narrative of life is based in social conditioning.

This is not easy to accept for most…pretty much all you talk about is based heavily in this social conditioning. Through your words you make your “world” and reinforce it by repetitive mantra magic. You do this every single day of your life.

Unless you stop you will tell the same story all the way to the crematorium…you will begin your next life in a broadly similar manner….

To be continued…