What is the way of humans?
It seems that every experience, every encounter that humans have, every sound and every scene, all of it, is boiled down in humans’ minds to be categorized in some kind of hierarchical way, to be stratified as an archaeologist inspects rock formations, to rank everything in orders of potential danger, or other criteria.
Ranking everything. Everything is ranked in terms of probable danger, or possible sustenance; gauged in a range between hostile and friendly; Everything is assessed and compared to everything else, all based on some external criteria, some measurement, some index. Nothing exists in humans’ minds alone and of itself.
And the result of such behavior is humans do not and cannot accept things as they independently are. We become incapable of the acceptance of reality as things as they are because we have so clearly defined and metered all in one or more rankings, or on various scales. Things become measured in relation to some other things. This is nicer than that, that is bigger than this, this is more than that, or this is less than that, this will provide me more than that, that will be better or worse than this.
These rankings, these measurings occur almost implicitly. Humans do not see that they do this, that they do this without thinking, automatically, without planning, without perceiving that there could be any possible negative consequence from this immovable habit. That there is no perception that this practice is itself a severe oversight in human behavior.
This tendency to see things all in relation and comparison to everything else provides a cover for our blindness to things as they simply are. We do not allow ourselves to understand something individually and autonomously. We even seek links and invent relationships between different objects even when these relationships do not exist.
What Am I?
So we thus see the two results of this human habit. First, the judgment habit at ready, we can disperse all of our encounters and experiences into one or more sets of groupings. This is so successfully used and abused by advertising, whether for products, ideas, or mass movements.
The second result is that this judgment process gets turned upon the individual him/herself. In the blink of an eye we turn that immediate judging functionality upon ourselves. No surprise that we find ourselves so lacking.
There’s More?
But Wait, you say, Isn’t Everything Connected? Does not everything exist in relation to everything else? And perhaps only in relation to everything else? As in: No man is an island, and so on …?
Yes, it is true. Everything is connected, everything is related to everything else. Everything exists by virtue of everything else. But by the use of our psychological comparison machine, by the mental weighing and measuring and rankings, we lose perception of any one whole thing. And one thing not only exists in relation to everything else, it also exists whole in itself. In its self, it is one complete thing. In relation to everything else, it is connected and joined to all other things.
There’s More Again?
But Wait, you say, If everything is connected, then also at the same time how can everything be individually separate and unique onto itself?
I reply. Everything is connected. And at the same time, everything is independent and unique unto itself. Our tendency to connect has the unfortunate result of focusing too heavily on the connected nature of things, and avoiding the independence of each thing.
It is like the famous experiments to determine whether light is a wave or a particle. Initially, the determination was that light is a wave, but further study shows light is both a wave and a particle. We would be remiss if we only accepted light as one of these two phenomena. It is both. Similarly, for a fuller understanding of our world, we can perceive that things are both connected to everything else, and at the same time are independent entities.
What is your way? You can let me know here.
The illustration entitled “Ethnographic Map of the Indian Tribes of the United States, A.D. 1600, 1849-1855” was created by mapmaker Seth Eastman based on the work of geographer and diplomat Albert Gallatin, in 1826. Courtesy Minneapolis Museum of Art.
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