Funnels and How To Survive Them
Which brings us to what goes wrong…
In a word, funnels. Our education system teaches us the two-valued universe. And there is the problem. We tend to live by those two extremes. Look at the US political system. One is either a Democrat or a Republican. One identifies as that and so anyone who isn’t (say) a Republican like oneself, is automatically a Democrat. So one now has a funnel - a filter whereby people are labelled and the ‘rain’ of information about them is funnelled into a specific area.
After a while one comes to realise that not all Republicans are exactly like oneself, so one widens the ‘catchment area’ for the funnel of ‘them’ - more and more people get assigned over into the ‘them’ funnel and all information about them goes through the funnel.
With our system, most people are better defined by their funnels than by their knowledge. Everything gets labelled and assigned. Funnels [i]are[/i] labels.
But what happens under the funnel, down where the landscape is receiving these bits of data? Imagine a beach in the rain. After the rain has passed, the beach will look pretty much the same. Now set up an array of funnels, some large some small, so that almost all the beach is sheltered by the funnels. Let it rain. What happens to the beach now after the rain? You will find it has been cut into channels, deep ravines where the largest funnels were and small gullies where the small ones were. Certainly the beach doesn’t look untouched any more.
As the funnels of the mind get larger, and as the channels underneath get deeper, more and more information gets funneled into them. We become biased, prejudiced and unthinking in our acts because we have these pre-dug channels to guide how we react.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:10 am
[...] Spirituality Guide » Blog Archive » Funnels and How To Survive Them [...]
April 18th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
VRy interesting to read it
