Perception and what we believe.

"If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.
strongly held beliefs continue to influence judgment, despite correction attempts—even with a supposedly conscious awareness of what is happening."

The above quote is pretty boiled down.  If you want to know where it came from, copy and paste to your favorite search engine and it will tell you.

Lao Tzu knew something of this, or didn't know something of this---its complicated.

Stories about full cups and half-full cups and empty cups are often used to describe our thinking.  We use such analogies to explain positive attitude, negative attitude, gratefulness, and even openness to demon possession.  The thing to remember, sometimes an empty cup is not just good, it's a goal.

My favorite analogy with a cup has to do with giving someone more when their cup is full.  It's related to beliefs.  And compares beliefs to preconceived notions.  A little like prejudice but more consuming.

Take, for instance, a child raised in a fundamentalist religion.  Their world view is created by those beliefs.  The can't see scientific theories about the origin of the universe or about where people came from or even astronomy, without having their world view thrown into cognitive dissonance. 

Cognitive dissonance makes us uncomfortable.  It makes us question things we have never questioned.  It's like a mental earthquake. 

Some people are good at compartmentalizing--they put religious stuff and science stuff and their own moral compass/lack of moral compass into places that don't interact.  It allows them to believe the religion of their childhood while practicing business tactics that are hard on poor people and taking classes on astronomy at the university for their required science class.

"This is business, it isn't personal"

Compartmentalizing gets rid of cognitive dissonance.  It allows us to maintain conflicting beliefs for the long haul as long as we don't get all crazy and try to avoid hypocrisy or worse, try to examine our own beliefs with an honest and open mind.

Most people that lose the ability to maintain the beliefs of their childhood will either relegate the belief to one of harmless childhood magick--like Santa or the Easter Bunny, or they will become angry.  If you talk to a lot of atheists you will find they were raised in a religion, and their current "there is no god" belief has at its center, the belief that the religion of their parents was wrong, therefore--"there is no god"  A lot of teenagers that play with Satanism do the same thing.  They have not actually changed their beliefs, they have only changed how they feel about those beliefs.  It's a lot like a reaction formation.

The cup was full, it's still full, but they no longer like the taste of the beverage.

Emptying the cup is tough.  It requires tearing down the silos maintaining those compartments.  It requires not just the clear eyed examination of the beliefs that shape an individuals world, but the ability to identify what is colored by a belief versus what is just objective fact.

I'm not sure objective fact exists.  The one thing no scientist can eliminate from any study is the observer.

We all have beliefs.  We know our religion is belief.  We know that our faith is belief--no matter what we have faith in.  We know that anything we can't detect with our senses is dependent on a certain amount of belief. 

But what about our faith that our senses are telling us how things really are.  Colorblind individuals don't see the same as most people.  Creatures that use echo location, individuals that see sounds, animals that can differentiate thousands of smells---do we really believe (see how I threw that word in there all innocent) that we all share a common factoid-filled world? 

For those individuals that compartmentalize, for those individuals that allow themselves to only see what their beliefs--religious, moral, cultural, language-based, family-based--it doesn't matter, what they believe is all they can perceive.  They create their own reality.

So for those of us that are brave enough to examine our own inner worlds,  improving the current world we live in falls to us.

Be brave.