Monday, March 22, 2010

The condition of condition

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in." Granted, we are conditioned beings. The question is, how much objectivity is it possible garner to see what the conditioning is? Science is supposed to do that. Yet how conditioned is science itself?

To observe requires an observer, a means of observation, and an object. Any one of these three can be heavily conditioned. As human observers our consciousnesses are wildly different and in varying states of receptivity. Any means of observation will inherently leave out as much as it magnifies: for instance, a telescope or microscope. The unaided sense organ has its narrow range of reception. And the object of perception is inherently conditioned as the result of the interaction of the observing consciousness and the observing lens. Especially on the quantum level, even down to the chronology of events, reality is heavily determined by the action of these factors. And this makes turning to the world of our minds particularly interesting when it comes to considering the effects of conditioning, because much theory and experimentation points to the fact that thought is a quantum phenomenon.

Because the act of observation is fundamental to assessing the situation before we even formulate a hypothesis, and as we have seen, the act of observation is rife in all its elements with conditioning, scientific observation can dangerously heighten the conditioning through which we see the universe. Rather than filtering out subjective differences it can reinforce incorrect assumptions based on consensual, "common sense" conditioning, which tends always to remain unchallenged.

So the mindfield of life is where the observational process is paramount in conditioning the result, and it is that Everest which we must first assault in achieving the first base of deconditioning.

1 comment:

Roz Chatt said...

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”
Yogi Berra