Air Out And Synergize!
Many conventions keep you inside your bubble and subculture. The rule about never talking about politics and religion and just swearing about and avoiding those topics also keeps you inside your bubble, echo chamber and subculture. The disapproval of creativity and of creative expression also keeps people inside their own bubbles.
Support groups, creativity clubs, workshops in temples, churches and congregations, activist communities and libraries are spaces where you can connect with people who share your values but not your subculture, or who don’t share your values but can take you out of your bubble.
It is not a crime, or self-sabotage, to remain in your bubble, but it isn’t what makes us human. Plus, sometimes we have to see the harm that our beliefs cause — to others or to ourselves — , and we won’t see it until we are confronted with different and better concepts than our own.
We expect education to pull people out of misery, wrong thinking, prejudice and destructive habits. But education does not only happen in classrooms, in confined spaces or in the interior world of the mind. Education includes receptivity to perceptions, interpretations, horizons and rituals that you would not have had access to at other times and that perhaps you would not have sought out. Often, we can not fathom that we are in a bubble and that the deficit of wisdom and the absence of the wise in our circle is proof that we have been living in a bubble or in a subculture that would benefit from more fresh air and untested stimulation.
The more you understand, the easier it is to accept that the diverse solutions people come up with are viable aspects of their evolutionary process, and that you too can do things in more constructive and skillful ways than you used to, that you are not stuck with conclusions or beliefs that you haven’t challenged for a while and that wouldn’t survive scrutiny.
7 May 2023
