Upside down

"... a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Winston Churchill.

Churchill was speaking on a 1939 radio broadcast referring to Russian intent; little did he know that he easily could have been describing the game we all play that keeps us in the dark about who we really are and hides any truth that may exist.

Said a bit differently, it could go something like this: Being insane, thinking we are sane. However could we find a truth or an answer to anything if we are living in an illusion? Insanity is living in a world of illusion and believing it is real, and if we are insane then any saneness would appear to be insanity. As an example, we all have moments of insanity where we hold a thought we believe to be true accusing the truth holder of lying. The thought we hold in our mind is held by virtue of its value to us and no matter the evidence towards its falsity, we hold it as true. Is this not a moment of insanity? How long are our moments? And how long have we held a belief that we value even to the point where we have come to know it is a lie?

Those that we observe to be insane amongst us come to believe in the reality of their thoughts, and as such, their thoughts become their reality. This is the power of our mind. The question then becomes, "What degrees of insanity are there?" To think our spouse is having an affair and then to concoct scenarios in our mind that proves our thoughts are real is called jealousy. Is this not a degree of insanity? And where does this movie come into existence? In our minds of course.

Quite a bit of this insanity is occurring within our current internet political articles, and the comments section following the articles. I was just reading a story this morning and one of the readers was  ranting on about the government forcing something upon him on one hand, yet espousing the government to force something upon us that he holds dear. So the reader really didn't have anything against government intervention in our lives, rather what the contents of the intervention. But his comments would clearly leave one to believe he was against government intervention. Is he lying to himself? Is this a degree of insanity where he has come to believe in something under the guise of something else? How much of our lives are of this level of delusion?

Our delusions are born from our values, for what we hold as values dictates our beliefs and our actions. Little do we know how deep into our behavioral instincts beliefs and values rule. Our tribal instincts are clear examples of this. Whatever our tribe we have great difficulty accepting another tribes values. Why is this? It is because we seek security and our tribal instincts bind us together seeking security. This we value to the point we ignore any values an outside tribe possesses, ignore our faulty values, even to the point of our demise, which is what we were trying to prevent in the first place. Is this not a picture of our warring nature? And is this not a classic definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. We delude ourselves into thinking our beliefs and our values are superior to those of our enemies (they're enemies mainly because they hold different values) and have been fighting for centuries under the illusions that we are seeking peace. Peace is our illusion, conflict is our value.

More on this later....