Finding Truths: Hidden Secrets of the Human Condition That Will Transform Your Life and The World

By Scott Forbes

To take a closer look at the state of the human condition, one must realize that we have been trained to perceive a reality that is not only false, but primarily benefits the elite over everyone else. In Finding Truths, author Scott Forbes not only exposes this false reality but illustrates how we can access a reality based on our own truths, and that serves our real life purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543910698

Scott Forbes

Scott Forbes, Professor of Biology at the University of Winnipeg, is a behavioral ecologist whose chief research interest is the evolutionary ecology of families. He has published articles in a wide variety of journals, including Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Ecology, Nature, American Naturalist, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

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ILLUSIONS OF SOCIETY

Let’s begin with the most important of truths—you, and only you, create your own reality. Other people do not make you who you are, make you think a certain way, or make you do anything. So, if you occasionally blame someone else for your issues and problems, then please stop and think. What you choose to do and experience every day is really your unique version of reality—one that only you have created. No one else has this same version of reality, just like no one else has your exact voice, fingerprints, DNA, or life experiences. We are all unique individuals.

Perceptions and Reality

As individuals, we spend an entire lifetime gathering the skills and assembling experiences in the hope that this modality of training helps us to make decisions, act, and deal sensibly with the world of everyday life. Our reality is almost entirely influenced by the distinctive cultural and societal norms into which we are born. Because of this, the majority of human beings on the planet are not taught, or even prepared, to consider a reality outside of those parameters. They live life within the lines drawn by their parents, educators, religious leaders, politicians, and the other systems of society—because they are conditioned to do so. But, in reality there are no lines or boundaries. Even today, quantum physics leads us to reconsider conclusions about many aspects of science long ago considered settled, but today are obsolete, disproven, or questionable at best. Yet, the irony is that our true nature—that is, our condition at birth, before all these external influences took root—knows far more and is endowed with the capacity to anticipate and create an infinite variety of realities. We only need to remember how to do so.

Remembering how to create a reality that is based on truths, and not illusions, false ideas, or beliefs, is challenging, given the influences our society exerts upon us. Every person’s sense of reality begins with perceiving, which is essentially the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information. We do so in order to understand the environment around us, whether this is a stimulus from another person, a sound, a physical object, or anything our senses might detect. Perceiving involves a physical or chemical stimulation in the body that creates an immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation of the experience, which then becomes a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something—hence, a perception.

As we go through life, we are constantly picking up numerous experiences from the outside world that stimulate our senses. Our eyes see images. Our ears hear words and music. Our nose smells. Our tongue tastes. Our skin feels textures. Everything we experience comes from our condition of awareness that is then defined. No two people will ever look at the same experience identically; their range of perceptions are not exactly alike. How many times has someone—an example might be a parent—recalled an event and either you do not remember it the same way or at the time you recorded in your mind a different circumstance or outcome? How many times have you had a discussion with a person on a topic and the two of you have very different points of views? No two people will ever remember or believe something in exactly the same way. This is because no two people are alike. Each one of us is unique in our own way. Hence, our perceptions, our beliefs, and the way we see things will also be different. It is our ranges of perceptions that influence what become distinct thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, and, in reality, what makes us all unique.

Life is all about perception—positive versus negative. Whichever you choose will affect and more than likely reflect your outcomes.

—Sanya Teclai

Why this is the case is because the perceptions we develop are constantly getting stored in our mind and become the inputs that help us process what choices to make and what actions to take in life. We do most of this perceiving at the subconscious level, where we have stored our beliefs, attitudes in life, dispositions, values, and motivations. It’s then that our conscious mind that is the everyday awareness, allows us to use these signals and think, say, and act accordingly. It may seem that some perceptions are stored on the surface of our mind, because they come into play frequently. In other cases, they surface, making us think that they are deeply hidden in our subconscious. Regardless, they are available to influence us, until they might be eliminated or changed or no longer relevant. One can believe that she is not talented, or she can change that thought to believe that she has unique talents that are valuable to herself and others. One can believe that he has an unhappy life, or he can believe otherwise. One can perceive a spouse to be unsupportive or difficult or simply realize that differences exist in all of us, and seek a common understanding.

By changing your mind, you can change your reality.

The mind uses perceptions to create the form of reality that we experience each and every day. It’s our human mind that takes all the inputs and makes its best guess at what our life and the world around us is like. This is our personal reality, constructed by our mind—a story or a thought that we may run though over and over again. But, it’s not the totality of the physical reality that is out there stimulating our senses. Quantum physicists say that our senses may only be able to detect a very small fraction of the physical reality around us—as little as four percent. It’s our version of reality that may be the true illusion. This is because our perceptions are constantly being influenced by the illusions that have taken hold in our inner mind—some of which are true, and some of which are not.

Parents and Family

There is no such thing as a perfect parent. So just try to be a real one.

—Sue Atkins

The fact is that, at birth, we have no perceptions. We are a blank canvas. We are a living being, with a mind that is fully open to all possibilities. We have yet to be influenced by our parents or family members or any other members of society. Just observe infants. Their needs revolve almost entirely around nutrition for survival and comfort. A child wakes each day and naturally is curious, playful, and feels the joy of being alive. A child is not driven to make money, have a big house, get a college education, have a good job, or drive a fancy car. Such a reality is developed over time—through the truths and illusions that take hold in the mind.

Thankfully, the blank canvas at birth does not stay that way forever. An important aspect about being human is the ability to learn and advance—in the broadest of spiritual, emotional, and physical realities. Our parents and family are the first to influence us. They are our guides and teachers, in the early stage of our life, beginning that task intently and trailing off as we age and mature. What our parents do and say to us every day begins to form our perceptions. They do so based on their own perceptions of right and wrong or good and bad—some of which are true, and others of which are based on their own misperceptions and illusions. Some of us might say that our parents were our greatest teachers or that our parents really messed me up. Yet, these are perspectives, and might or might not be the truth.

As we go through childhood, our parents tell us how to behave. My parents drilled into me proper table and other manners, as an example. Parents tell their children when they are doing something wrong and praise them when they do something right. They tell their children what to wear and what not to wear. They inform our senses of colors, tastes, textures, and smells. They define words for us. They tell us whom we can trust. Throughout life, our mind is constantly taking in new and some revised information, merging it with past experiences and existing perceptions, adjusting them, determining choices, deciding how to proceed, and then taking action. Our parents and family play a significant role in shaping our early perceptions, which, in turn, create a version of reality that is unique only to us.

A simple story may help to explain this. A young woman is preparing a pot roast while her friend looks on. She cuts off both ends of the roast, prepares it, and puts it in a pan.

Why do you cut off the ends? her friend asks.

I don’t know, she replies. My mother always did it that way and I learned how to cook from her. Her friend’s question makes her curious about her pot roast preparation. During her next visit home, she asks her mother why she prepares it the way she does.

The mother says, That’s how my mother did it, and I learned it from her. Her daughter’s inquiry makes the mother think more about the pot roast preparation. When she next visits her mother, she asks, Mom, how do you cook a pot roast?

The mother answers, Well, you prepare it with spices, cut off both ends, and put it in the pot.

The mother asks, But why do you cut off the ends?

Her mother’s eyes sparkle as she remembers. Well, the roasts were always bigger than the pot we had back then. I had to cut off the ends to fit it into the pot that I owned.

How often do we think or say something or take a particular action and we don’t even think to ask why we do it a certain way? As with the pot roast story, some of the perceptions we learned long ago come out of circumstances that may no longer be relevant and really belong to another place and time. Every parent schools their child in one thing specifically such that it becomes the child’s focus when they grow up to be parents themselves. With our children, I focused at dinner on table manners the same way my parents did, until my wife told me to stop. I was focused on table manners so much that I did not realize that my behavior was shutting down communications between our two children and my wife and me. I was demonstrating that, because of a perception set as a child regarding the importance of appropriate table manners, I was inclined to keep doing the same thing, over and over again. What I should have done is stop and ask whether what I was doing was fine or whether a change in perception and behavior was needed. Review, then change, always follows awareness and questioning. In the pot roast story, the young woman’s friend was paying attention to her friend’s preparation of the pot roast. She was aware, then questioned, and finally the truth was revealed. Our perceptions all start with an awareness through the senses. It’s what we do with that stimulation that matters.

In a perfect world, parents are the purveyors of truths and dispellers of illusions and lies, capable of carefully guiding a child’s development of morals, values, beliefs, and knowledge—hopefully, all based on truths. Yet, the state of parenthood today is not one of perfection, with 55 percent of Hispanic, 72 percent of African American, and 30 percent of white children born out of wedlock. In Southeast Washington, D.C., one in ten children are living with two parents and 84 percent are living only with their mother/father. In the United States, more than 20 million children—greater than one in three—live in a home without the physical presence of a father. Nearly 5 million children live without a mother. Millions more children have fathers or mothers who are physically present, but emotionally absent. This state of parenthood is merely an indication of the cascading and often unavoidable effect of degrading cultural and societal conditions on far too many generations of parents and families.

Even under the best of parental circumstances, regardless of whether this is a man and a woman or any other combination, parents are generally working more hours than their ancestors, commuting longer distances, and not spending as much time with their children as their parents did with them. With the goods and services needed for survival becoming more and more expensive, one or both parents must often have more than one job, leaving less time to be spent with their children. If a family unit has only one parent present, then all of the responsibility rests on that one parent—including making an income, paying the bills, and raising the children.

As a result, school used to start at the kindergarten level, but now many parents turn to pre-school and daycare for their children, so that they can earn enough money for survival or live the lifestyle they perceive is needed. Many parents knowingly or unknowingly hand over the development of their children’s perceptions—whether based on truths or illusions—to others, including babysitters, daycare operators, and teachers. In some situations, this might be a good thing, but the reality of a perfect society, with parents 100 percent in charge of their children’s perceptions, is very elusive, if at all possible. Whether parents or their surrogates in education or daycare are the primary people teaching the children, the truth is that children are being conditioned to believe one way or the other about life. Awareness of this fact is very important, and it is a foundation of understanding that will allow us to sift through what our children are taught to believe and to change those perceptions that are not based on truths. It’s a constant task for a parent to conduct this type of awareness review, as the systems of society are very persuasive.

Education

We cannot solve the problems in our education system with the same people we used when we created them.

—Albert Einstein

Beyond our parents and family, it’s the society to which we are exposed that begins to add more layers of perceptions—truths and illusions both. In our Western society, a child is expected to attend some form of schooling, take standardized tests along the way, have their progress compared to others, and learn skills that are supposed to enable them to be employed and support themselves as adults. In the United States alone, a child will spend 13,000 hours in an educational setting by the age of sixteen, and many more hours will follow if they finish high school, attend college, and then attend graduate school.

As a child moves through this ten- to fifteen- or even twenty-year process, she develops more and more perceptions, which are strongly influenced by her experiences while being educated. A child might take a test and get a low score and believe she is not as smart as others in the class. A child might grow up thinking he needs a college education to get a good job, because that’s what his parents and educators have told him he must do to be successful in life. A child might be exposed to schoolmates’ or teachers’ views and adopt them, sometimes as a way to fit in or because they are expressed to be the truth. How one looks at an experience might be the furthest from the truth, but if she perceives it as a truth then it is likely to become her reality.

In his article The Purpose of Education: Social Uplift or Social Control? Andrew Gavin Marshall documents how the modern-day school system evolved from a tool for nation-building to a mechanism of social control. Early educational systems, such as Plato’s Academy and the universities of the Middle Ages, were designed to foster independent thinking. Fast-forward to the 1800s and much of this philosophy of education did remain, as the largely agrarian population was encouraged to question and to think independently. This process became an uneasy ally to the super wealthy who arose from the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They mainly desired factory workers that would be obedient to authority, satisfied doing mechanical repetition of tasks, and capable of rote memorization of facts.

These wealthy individuals and families, such as the Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies, Fords, and Vanderbilts, amassed fortunes never before dreamt by most citizens—fortunes that they would put to the task of molding society in their image and putting in place the systems to do so. These individuals took control of the levers of American state and federal power and groomed a class of academics and intellectuals that would be amenable to their interests—influenced and controlled by these wealthy elite. Most influential in the early 1900s was the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which was chartered by an act of Congress in 1906. Control of education was achieved by taking it out of the hands of the independently church-run schools and placing responsibility with state-run public schools, which could be controlled by elected and appointed officials, many of whom would be indebted to and under the control of these super wealthy people working to maintain and enlarge their personal realm of power.

Over the last one hundred years, there has been little change in the way children are taught, even though a substantial amount of research has been done on how children learn. When teaching is done well, children learn, and when it’s done poorly, children are at best bored. Today, it’s