Learning to Be Confirmation Unbiased

During the presidential election season, all over social media, people post "evidence" that comes from sources with one political leaning or specific intention. While none are truly unbiased, there are ways to sort through the muck. One great way to manage is to find information that challenges our views. To do that in a fair manner, one should give as much passion and time to seeking out unpleasant information that is opposed to our beliefs and stances as one gives to finding information that supports current beliefs.

If you already lean toward specific ideologies and beliefs, and then only seek circles of information that consistently confirm and never challenge that framework, there's a term for it, "confirmation bias", and chances are, your ideologies and beliefs are shaky, at best. At worst, those beliefs can kill people, when those with such bias are allowed to effect legislation and rules for the rest of us, or when average people decide to allow their biases to affect others' right to life and freedom.

Challenge your comfort zone and welcome others of and in the world to take you out of your personal status quo. Through allowing others to challenge our beliefs, our beliefs are either fortified, adjusted, or they are changed altogether.

It's how we learn and grow. Changing your mind or not being able to make up your mind is not weakness, it is strength. It fortifies and grows the mind to be flexible in thinking. And sometimes, issues are so complex, once we allow more information in, there can be no cut and dry solution or stance, because reductionism marginalizes and trivializes.

Anyone who truly understands an issue can argue for or against that issue with equal fervor and breadth, because they can explain all sides.

It gives us greater ability to be able to protect ourselves against tyranny and injustice when strategizing in a geopolitical sense, in business, or in our personal lives. And when need be, it also adds a sense of humility and compassion to our stances, so we are able to deeply understand the view of our supposed enemy.

So, challenge your mind's comfort and step outside the norm. Take a different path home and see what you find.

The Only One for Me Is You

The more I read about Syria and think of the past couple decades of middle eastern world affairs, the more it becomes clear that the objective is disruption of the entire Islamic world- religion? Oil? I don't know the "whys", though many people have their own ideas.

I do know that we all suffer in the consistent demoralization of humanity, sitting by, as those who blanket us in security are the monsters in the night who terrorize the hopes for peace. When I say "we", I mean all people of this planet.  Remiss of nationalism or any other "-isms", my choice is not to take sides, nor do I place blame with entities that I or mass culture deem responsible.  I understand that at the core of everything, each person is taught that Survival of the Fittest reigns over the land. I know that we are taught, from the moment the umbilical cord is cut and the oxygen from mother to child is ended, that we must breathe on our own, or perish.

It literally gives me pain to think of others' suffering- it doesn't matter how or in what fashion the pain occurs, just that it exists.  It's a real pain that I feel in my heart when I think of everything from the macro, planetary aspect, to the micro, of a dying child. It's a lot to shoulder that I, individually, am responsible for everything that exists whether positive or negative. What a heavy burden.

Fortunately, the burden is shared. Collectively, we are the same one at heart.  So, sing, dance, chant, pray, meditate, fund-raise, build, create, be that one consciousness that decides Peace. There is enough for all of us if we just change the way we think.

The long-standing beliefs of aloneness and separateness are at the core of humanity's progress and its demise. One mustn't toss out progress in place of collective oneness.  A recent study published in Nature Communications, coupled with common sense, determines that teamwork and cooperation are what propel society into survival.

This very moment of the Now is a chance to transform the energy of perpetual fear and suffering into one of perpetual motion of compassion and peace.

You are enough.

This is enough.

Enough.