Adonis Diaries

Hypnotized reasoning (December 27, 2008)

This article has nothing to do with hypnosis or its techniques or about subject (people) susceptible for being successfully hypnotized. 

The need to be creative in formulating titles to draw attention is a commendable attitude since the other objective for writing is to disseminate our individual reflection on matters that we think are important to be discussed.

My original title was “logic versus faith” which could be catchy enough since people associate faith as the counterpart for reasoning which is not correct in my view.

I had to rethink my title because this “versus” smack of philosophy (read boring essay) but it should not be boring as you have already realized.

Having “faith” is used by adolescents to shirk the effort of using their brain when faced with despair and the complex world of comprehending new realities. It is as if they have been hypnotized and their brain was locked on a restricted manner of comprehending the environment, human conditions and world view.  Thus, adolescents have always been susceptible to extreme positions and have been used as logs to burn in the incinerator of martyrdom.

The quality of “Faith” is positively related to the diversity and width of our reasoning efforts through reading, reflecting, discussing, and writing.  Faith is the consequence of a lifetime effort to knowing ourselves as we try to know our environment and the human conditions. 

In my mind, the opposite of faith is logic and not reasoning, even though many would like us to believe that logic is the foundation for sane reasoning, as if a technique is to define a concept and not one of the many means to comprehend.

Logic to me represents the whole set of the elements that lead us to accept an existing paradigm or way of thinking as the only true reality of the environment and human conditions. 

Example of paradigms, think of Galileo (it is the earth that rotates around the sun) or Einstein (time, duration, and locations are relative to the universal system you live in) or Heisenberg (you cannot measure simultaneously the location and the speed of a particle) or the many spiritual messages of the various religions, or how to raise children, how to educate children, how our subconscious affect our behavior, the Big Bang on the creation of the Universe, the creation and development of man, and on and on.

Every paradigm shift to viewing the environment and human conditions, in physical sciences or human sciences, is the bold attempt of comprehending by focusing on a different angle outside the predominant “faith”. It is fundamentally a call for another kind of “faith” and for apostles and disciples to disseminate the new faith. 

It does not mean that the new paradigm is the definite “truth”, it should not or we are back to being hypnotized, but that faith undergoes a qualitative jump each time human spirit reaches a level of critical threshold for development, seek and want more knowledge; quality faith is enriched when we decide to critic the existing status quo because the thrive for expanding our knowledge is backed by a healthy spirit for taking risks and exposing our limitations.

When we say “truth is the result of individual reflection” and not what society boxes us in, we are fundamentally calling to critic any ideology that wants us to delegate our mind and spirit to a set of constraints. 

We do exist because we are a reflecting species; everything changes when we decide to invest time and effort to understanding ourselves and our conditions. 

Even when we sit to contemplate and reflect we are making decision to change the environment and human conditions.

You have a higher chance for receiving “grace” when you take frequent breaks to seriously reflect.  The basic of all human rights is to be permitted to reflect, encouraged to reflect, and offered the facilities to reflect.