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On Being Human: An Owner's Manual
by David V. White

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Eighteen years old, and I am walking down the street in Rome, beside the Coliseum where gladiators fought, and Christians like me were fed to the lions. "The Romans are mostly Christian now," I muse to myself, but a different variety from the one I have known. "Is their brand as good as mine?" - for I was told more than once while growing up that their brand of Christianity was not Christian at all! So I wonder, just who gets to decide these things?

And what about sex? The kids I meet in Sweden don't see things the way I was taught. The rules drilled into me as "God's will" seem irrelevant to them. Are they all going to hell? That seems a bit strange. They seem to be good people, well-intentioned, friendly, considerate.

At eighteen it is mind-boggling, soul-wrenching - and great fun - to discover that people in other corners of the world see things very differently from the way of my tribe. Things I have been told are "givens" for being human are not "given" at all, but vary dramatically from place to place. Things that are supposedly core values concerning the most basic things: religion, sex, who started a war (and why), how hard one should work, even which political system is best.1

My imagination is racing: if the differences are this great between America and Europe - cultures with a common heritage - what about countries that sprang from completely different roots? (Yes, I was a bit naïve. But the issue was not just naivety. I knew there were great differences between cultures, but I did not understand that there were dramatic differences concerning core values. I knew that food and dress were different, but not the most basic issues of right and wrong, good and bad, how one should live, and even what we are perceiving in front of our eyes.)

Questioning “Reality” – Continuing to explore the power and importance of worldviews in our lives

It has been reported that monks in Tibet, sitting in deep meditation in cold caves, can dry wet blankets wrapped around their bodies; that in Indonesia, spiritual seekers in deep trance can walk on red-hot coals without injury; that yogis in India can go without air for thirty minutes – some even longer; and numerous accounts from all over the world report that prayer has healed the sick. Do you believe all these things have happened? If not, why not? If so, why?

Unless you have gone to Tibet or India or Indonesia to study these phenomena, or have studied the effects of prayer on illness, you cannot know whether these things have occurred – or whether they are occurring now. Therefore, if you disbelieve them, why are you choosing to do that? In disbelieving, you are not being scientific, nor rational. To be scientific about them, you would go out and study these phenomena with an open mind. After much study, you might form a tentative hypothesis about the truth or falsity of a particular report, but this hypothesis would always remain open to new data. This would be the scientific approach. Being scientific, you would not make a blanket act of faith that these reports were true or untrue.

To be rational about such reports, you would withhold judgment until and unless you needed to make a specific decision in your own life that related to one of them. As a rational being, why would you need to make an abstract decision about whether they were true or not? If you needed to make a specific decision about a specific course of action in your life, you would take into account everything you knew at that moment in time – and then make the best decision you could, based on what you understood at that moment. Being rational, you would act or not act in a specific way in a specific circumstance based on your best rational judgment – but you would not need to “believe” one way or the other in a generalized way about the ultimate truth or falsity of these phenomena.

And if you have not investigated one or more of these phenomenon for yourself, and yet believe that they have occurred, why would you choose to do that? Why do we have such a tendency to make broad generalizations of belief or disbelief about things we cannot know?

The answer starts with the fact that all children come into the world within specific culture systems, systems that provide invaluable guidance about how one can successfully navigate the process of daily living: what to eat, how to protect oneself, how to get along with others, and much, much more. This set of answers we are given is our consensual reality. Without these answer systems, each child would have to personally create a whole civilization – an impossible task. Yet the process of being enculturated into a consensual reality always includes a strong component of “this is the right way to do things” and “this is wrong.”

As we go out into life, based on the “consensual reality” we were given, most of us think we know what “reality” is. Yet what we really know is not “reality,” but only that particular consensual reality in which we were raised. It can therefore be quite a shock to discover that other cultures do not agree with our beliefs – that they see and believe quite different things from what we were taught. Encountering these radically different beliefs of “the other” for the first time, most of us have a tendency to dismiss or denigrate, to disbelieve the things that do not fit within our conditioned reality.

Another tendency, especially in the modern West, is to conclude that we have “developed our own point of view.” But if I look carefully at my own experience, I begin to see how much my worldview derives from the people I grew up with, and the people with whom I now spend my time. This seems to be a deep trait in the fabric of being human: we have a great need to be supported in our consensual views by the people in our group.

(Throughout history some of us, through choice or necessity, have left our birth cultures, and found other “realities” to be a part of. But we do not do this in isolation – we either join another consensual reality, or we create a new consensual belief community with a few like-minded souls. Then, for those in the new community, the accepted consensual reality becomes just as fixed as the one that was left behind.)

For this reason, most of us do not give much credence to the views of people with whom we disagree, or to those who see the world quite differently from our “tribe.” On the contrary, we look for people who agree with us, and we tend to listen to them and spend our time in their company. We look for and hang out with those who reinforce our worldview, those who confirm for us what we already believe.

This observation is not meant to challenge the value of enculturated worldviews, for they are quite necessary. As mentioned before, when we are growing up, we have to have patterns within which to function – answers to questions about how to act, how to live, what is important. We need to know the rules we are to function within – even if we eventually decide to break free. We would not be able to live without this enculturation; in fact, one of the definitions of insanity is to be oblivious to the rules of the society in which one lives.

Who Will You Believe?

There are many different cultures in the world – very, very different from each other. Does any one have an objective claim on “reality?” Is it really wisdom for any one group to claim that only they were given “the truest truth?” We might with some objectivity observe that some cultures are better at accomplishing certain goals than others, that each has strengths and weaknesses. Our tendencies, however, are much stronger than that. It seems to be human nature – part of our conditioning, perhaps – for most of us to conclude that “our” consensual reality is the most advanced, the most accurate, the most true.

It is fascinating, then, to consider the basis upon which we tend to reach this conclusion: our culture enculturates us to believe that this is so. What other basis is there? Who has a standpoint from which to “judge” which system of beliefs is closest to reality, since each of us can only look through our enculturated eyes. It would be like asking a life-long soccer player to decide whether soccer was better than basketball.

To explore how malleable our perception of the world really is, an experiment was done involving kittens that were placed in two quite different environments (before their eyes had opened). One environment had horizontal lines and shapes, with no vertical lines in it; the other had mostly vertical shapes and lines, with minimal horizontal images present. After being raised in these separate environments, the kittens were then put into the “normal” world. Remarkably, it was found that conditioning determined perception to an extraordinary degree: the “horizontal world” cats could not see vertical shapes in the “normal” world – they would literally bump into them. And the cats from the “vertical world” did not perceive horizontal shapes and lines, and could not function effectively in relation to them.i

In the world of hypnosis, there are many experiments that bear on the question of what is really real versus what is enculturated. In one, subjects under hypnotic suggestion were told that when they opened their eyes, they would see two boxes on the table in front of them. And they did. The only complication is that the people conducting the experiment had placed THREE boxes on the table. The people conducting the experiment continued to see the three boxes, while those under hypnotic suggestion saw only two.ii

The radical implication is that in many ways, our early conditioning parallels this experiment – we were conditioned to see the world the way the people around us saw it, our minds molded and shaped to see this encultured reality. So we see “two boxes” out there in the world because everybody around us conditioned us to see two boxes. And if our perception is shaped in this way, how do we get outside this conditioning far enough to see what is “really real”?

Another fascinating experiment: Subjects were given the hypnotic suggestion that they would start singing a song if they heard a specific trigger word during their normal day. The people conducting the experiment followed them, and discovered that most of the subjects followed the hypnotic suggestion – when they heard the trigger word, they would break into song, interrupting the conversation to sing their assigned tune. Up to this point, this experiment is a fairly common example of the power of hypnosis.

Now comes the really interesting part: when asked why they had started singing the song, the subjects gave a rational (to them) explanation for their behavior. Yet the rational explanation they gave had nothing to do with the most likely reason they had burst into song (which was the hypnosis). What seems to have happened is that, when asked for an explanation of their behavior, their thinking minds came up with the most reasonable-sounding explanation they could think of at the moment. Not being conscious of the hypnotic suggestion they were under, they didn’t know about this reason, so their minds created the most rational explanation they could come up with. And, most crucially, the subjects seemed to believe that this was the reason for their behavior. It made sense to them. Of course it did – their own minds had created this “rational” explanation. It just wasn’t the most likely reason.iii

How much, then, do each of us operate in this way every day, giving the people we talk to – and ourselves – the best rational explanations we can think of to explain our actions (and to explain the enculturated world we “see”), while other motives and reasons lie hidden from us in our enculturated beliefs, fears, ambitions, and expectations.

So what is really out there?

You look out at the world and see a tree, and you think that the tree you are seeing is really what is out there. But is it? Charles Darwin reported in his diaries that when the Beagle sailed into a harbor in Patagonia, the natives on the shore COULD NOT SEE THE SHIP. Their past experiences did not include sailing ships, so their minds could not take in this new phenomenon. Fortunately, the local Shaman was less culturally bound, and could “see” things outside of his enculturation. Thus with his help, over several days, the rest of the natives were gradually enculturated to “see’ the Beagle.

A more prosaic example: if a fly were sitting on your nose, looking in the same direction as you are looking, will it see the same thing? A fly’s perceptual system is quite different from our own, so the best assumption would be that the fly would see an entirely different picture from what you and I see. But if so, which of us is seeing what is really “out there”? The answer is – neither. Each is seeing what our perceptual system creates – as opposed to some true picture of whatever is “out there.”

The Magician in the Brain – turning neural stimulants into thoughts

So when we see a tree, what are we really “seeing?” An image in our mind. Where did that image come from? From the conditioning process that went on in our early lives, in which an image was formed in our mind that we now associate with the word “tree.” As we grew up, someone pointed to a picture and said, “tree,” or someone pointed to an object and said “tree.” And gradually an image formed in our mind that we began to associate with certain visual stimuli. But what if the people around us when we were growing up had – through the eons – focused on the forest rather than individual trees, and, therefore, had directed our focus to the forest, not the trees. What would we be seeing now? (I can’t resist: We would not be able to see the tree for the forest.)

What are these visual stimuli? They could just be imaginings in your mind, random firings of neurons. Or they could be like dreams that arise without any immediate stimulation from outside the brain. (How could you prove that they are anything more than that?) But let us assume for a moment that at least some of our sensory impressions are not imaginary. If that is the case, the best current understanding is that light rays strike something, and are reflected off that “something” into our eyes. At that point, neural impulses are created in the eye that travel along our optic nerve to the brain.

These impulses then stimulate the brain in some mysterious way that causes us to think “tree.” But how does this happen – that neural impulses somehow become “tree?” We do not know. It is a mystery.iv (And of course the same applies to tactile, and auditory, and all other sensory inputs.) Stimuli arrive in our brains, and brain changes occur that can be studied. That is, the material side of the brain can be studied. We can detect heat and motion and neuron firings. But none of this gives us any clue as to how these stimuli make the leap to conscious experience. We simply do not know how this happens. This is the “big question” in consciousness research. As British philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer A.S. Eddington put it, these two things (a neural impulse and a conscious thought) resemble each other about as much as a telephone number resembles a subscriber. Eddington went on to say:

Some influence . . . plays on the extremity of a nerve, starting a series of physical and chemical changes which are propagated along the nerve of a brain-cell; there a mystery happens, and an image or sensation arises in the mind which cannot purport to resemble the stimulus which excited it.v

What does all this mean? What you think of as a tree out there is, in actuality, a set of stimuli on your neural pathways, which in a magical leap somehow becomes a “thought” in you mind. The impulses themselves look nothing like the thoughts they generate. Neuroscience cannot distinguish a neural impulse that becomes “tree” from one that shows up as “frog” in the mind. That neural impulses having no measurable or detectible relationship to “tree” show up in the mind as “tree” is a truly great mystery, and calls into question any rigid and fixed view of “reality.”

The Judge in the Mind – selecting what to let in

There is another mystery: How do we select which bits of information will get to the mind? At any given moment, there are thousands of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations available. We do not consciously make the millions of decisions necessary during each day as to which will get in. How then is the decision made, concerning which ones will be taken in? The Greeks believed that the “eye” went out and found the image it wanted to see. Whether this is the case is debatable, but what is clear is that through some unconscious and mysterious process, we consciously register only a very small part of the sensory data available to us.

For instance, remember a time you were deep in thought – absorbed in a book or a math problem – and someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, “Why didn’t you answer when I spoke to you?” And you realize that you were so absorbed in the task at hand that you didn’t hear them when they had spoken to you a moment before. Yet the sound waves created when that person spoke the first time hit your ears in the same way they did the second time. So how did it happen that sound waves of equal volume to the ones eventually heard did not make it to your consciousness when they hit your ears a few moments before? How was the decision made not to let those initial sound waves into your consciousness?

Or consider the oft-reported phenomenon of a mother hearing the soft cry of her child several rooms away, in spite of the loud din of a party. No one else hears this faint cry of the child, yet the mother does. How did those sound waves make it to her consciousness, and to no one else’s in the room?

The way our perceptual system works is that nerve fibers run from our sense organs toward the brain, carrying information that will eventually be used to form our perceptions. However, neuroscientists have discovered that for every nerve bundle that carries information to the brain from our sense organs, there are sometimes as many as 10 nerve bundles carrying messages from the brain toward the sense organs! What are they for? Somehow, the brain seems to be sending constant signals to the perceptual system as to what to let in. But this is happening at the unconscious level. Thus at the unconscious level the brain is determining what we will “see.” But if you are not conscious of this process, just who is in charge here?

The Wizard of Oz in the Mind – organizing meaningful patterns

Once data does make it to our consciousness, the next mysterious step is for that data to be organized into meaningful patterns (meaningful to us, that is). Immanuel Kant called the raw data available out there in the world a “rhapsody of sensation.” And he went on to argue that this plethora of sensations did not give us the world we experience. In order to make sense of the sensations, we have to have concepts. These concepts organize the sense data into meaningful patterns – into thoughts, ideas, and images. But our concepts are not “out there” in the world. They are inside of us – in our minds. What is more, they are not the same in each person. (However, as I have been trying to make clear, to a great extent these concepts begin in the enculturation of our childhood, and these enculturated constructs are the building blocks for our individual worldviews.)

To put this succinctly, reality is not automatically given to the untrained eye. We are trained from birth to see what we will see. And our minds are organized to make what we see fit in with what we “expect” to see. A dramatic example: several studies were conducted at Innsbruck University in which subjects were asked to wear special glasses that had the dramatic effect of, literally, turning the world upside down – anyone wearing the glasses saw an inverted world.vi That is to say, everything they saw was inverted, bottom to top. The volunteers were asked to wear these glasses every waking moment. At first, as you might expect, this was very disorienting, and caused lots of problems in the most basic things, such as walking. But then an amazing thing happened. After wearing the glasses for a few days – The World Was No Longer Upside Down!

How could this be? The glasses still had the same property of inverting the world. The only explanation seems to be that consciousness wanted to see the world the way it had been trained to see it, so it adjusted the images coming in to fit what was expected – it organized the world the way it had been conditioned to see it. But if our minds do this without our knowing it, how do we know what is really out there? And if we can do this with physical reality, how much more are we likely to be doing this with subjective things, such as feelings, values, and beliefs?

Evaluating the Extraordinary

In this context, let’s say you want to determine once and for all whether Tibetans in deep meditation can really dry wet blankets in cold caves with their body heat. To find a definitive answer, you would have to go to Tibet and investigate the reports. You would interview people who had seen it, or done it, and you would begin to draw some tentative conclusions. But whatever evidence you collected, you could not be absolutely sure about the results, for no matter how many positive reports you collected, it could still be a legend – a legend everyone in the culture believed, because they constantly reinforced this belief with each other.

As a next step, you could find someone who says they are able to dry wet blankets with body heat. You then set up a scientific experiment, using the strictest analytical standards, to see if they can do so. When the test is completed, there are two possible outcomes:

1. The experiment fails. But what does this prove? Only that this one person did not succeed in this one instance – nothing more. This is the sticky issue that is often overlooked in attempts to disprove extraordinary phenomena. If a test fails, no broader conclusion can be drawn beyond the fact that this one experiment failed.

An analogy might be when scientists were trying to demonstrate that an atom could be split. Many attempts were carried out, and each failed. But this did not prove anything about whether an atom could be divided. It only demonstrated that each attempt up to that point had not worked. So scientists kept trying, and after many years and many attempts, the parts of an atom were finally separated.

Here is the crucial point. If you are trying to scientifically prove that something is possible, you only have to have one clear demonstration to show that it is possible. But if you are trying to prove that something cannot happen, you have to refute every single reported instance of its occurrence, and then you have to prove that it can never, ever happen in the future (and proof is NOT simply a theory that such an occurrence is impossible).

Thus to know for sure that something your consensual reality considers “impossible” is truly impossible, you would have to evaluate every single claim of its occurrence. You would have to verify the truth or falsity of each one. Even if this were possible, there would still remain the problem that the evaluation was conducted from within your own belief system. And since you perceive from within that framework, how could you be sure that you had taken off your cultural “glasses” long enough to see the real truth? If you started with the belief that it was impossible, you might have “inverted the world,” in order to make your conclusion fit what you already believed. You might simply be like the natives that could not see Darwin’s ship.

Thus the fact that one can disprove individual claims of extraordinary occurrences – and there are many claims that can be disproved beyond a reasonable doubt – does not lead to any sweeping claims that a thing is impossible. As William James so elegantly argued, if you want to prove that all crows are black, it is not enough to show that many crows are black. What you must do is show that there is not one white crow anywhere – for if one white crow shows up, anywhere, anytime – your belief that there are only black crows is proven false.

2. The experiment succeeds. There is also a significant problem on the positive side of “proof.” Even if you see what looks like proof of a phenomenon, how can you be sure it was not a trick by a magician, or created by your own wish to believe, or arose from a state of hypnosis (in which you are the one seeing only two objects on a table on which everyone else around sees three)? This is why broad acceptance that an atom could be split did not come from one successful experiment – but required many repeated demonstrations before it was widely accepted.

Living with the Mystery

There is a further problem with “proof” about reality. Even in science, many things that seemed to be proven in the past have eventually been shown to be mistaken. For instance, experiments “proved” that light was a wave – many experiments conducted under the assumption that light was a wave provided confirming evidence for this starting assumption. Things were therefore settled – until it was discovered that if you set up the experiment the other way round, using the assumption that light is made up of particles, that the “evidence” switches sides and confirms the new assumption. In many less dramatic examples, evidence tends to confirm the beliefs of the experimenter, creating the notorious “experimenter effect” that colors every single attempt to pin down what “reality” really is.

It is hard to come to grips with just how mysterious this world in which we find ourselves living really is. So much is unknowable – yet at the same time, most of us have a great need for something solid to believe in, to take as our “givens” as we make our way through this complex and confusing universe. We want to think we know how things are, so that we will know what we can count on, what we can expect. Yet in truth, the only intelligent response to the dilemma of “reality” is to approach its mystery with humility, to see that there is no need to make sweeping generalizations about what is finally true – and to recognize that being a prisoner to the need for certainty leads more often to error than to truth.

How then do we function in such a mysterious world? If you have to make a specific decision in your life, take everything you know into consideration, and then make the best decision you can – while holding open the possibility that what you see and understand at this moment might not be the whole truth, and that your understanding could well change in the future. If you need to act, or decide something, then act and decide with courage and confidence, yet all the while having the strength and courage to realize that there is much you do not know – and that you might be wrong. Humility and courage are invaluable tools in dealing with the mystery of “reality.”

Returning, then, to fire-walking Indonesians, breath-holding yogis, and Tibetans drying blankets, many people tend to disbelieve phenomena from other cultures simply because their consensual reality does not recognize them. But one’s consensual reality provides no assurance as to final truth. Each consensual reality excludes many things that are included in others. Millions of Chinese see realities that most Americans do not see, and millions of Americans believe in events that most Chinese would consider ridiculous. Millions of tribal people have had experiences that skeptical scientists do not believe could happen, and many scientists believe in “laws” that tribal peoples find laughable.

In an attempt to bridge one such cultural divide, Harvard Professor of Medicine Herbert Benson went to Tibet four times and studied the reports of Tibetans drying wet blankets while in meditation. His report:

Our teams documented that monks could indeed dry icy, wet sheets on their naked bodies in temperatures of 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Within three to five minutes of applying the dripping three-by-six-foot sheets to their skin, the sheets began to steam! Within thirty to forty minutes, the sheets were completely dry, and they were able to repeat this process two more times.vii)

In coming to terms with reality, the crucial point to understand is that our cultural conditioning is necessary and important, but it might not provide “the truth.” In fact, our consensual reality might be hiding the truth as much as revealing it. Thus our challenge is to use our consensual reality as a tool to live in relation to others, but to understand that it is not absolute truth. And most importantly, that deeper truths might lie hidden behind the veil of the way we were conditioned to “see.”

One final point: Some post-modern thinkers have argued that the above evidence suggests that all truth is relative. However, the mysterious nature of reality does not suggest the absence of truth. This is the fallacy of “some” versus “all.” There is no question that some things we take for truth arise from our consensual reality, whether that consensual reality be scientific, skeptical – or that of a devout Christian, Hindu or Sikh. But “some” does not equal “all.” The above arguments do not suggest that all truth is relative, only that truth is very difficult to know.

As this relates to the spiritual dimension of life, all we can conclude is that those who argue that such does not exist make this argument from within their consensual reality, and those who approach its existence from within a particular faith system do so from that consensual reality. Thus all sides are subject to Einstein’s observation that “it is the theory that decides what we can observe.” Perhaps this suggests that if there is a “real truth” out there, or if there is an Unseen Order (Chapter 10), it is mediated by the thought that, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing,” that we will discover the real reality only when we are free of our enculturated expectations, fears, agendas, and beliefs.

1 Everyone does not seem to agree with my high school civics teacher, even about things she stamped "right" or "wrong" on the final test!

i There are many such experiments, beginning with Blakemore, C., and Cooper, G. F., Nature, 228, 477 (1970)

ii Charles Tart, Waking Up, P. 76,

iii Charles Tart has a similar example in Waking Up, P. 77,

iv For a good discussion of this, see LeShan, Lawrence, The World of the Paranormal, Helios press, 2004, p. 42-43,

v Eddington, A.S., Science and the Unseen World, New York, Macmillan, 1937, p. 34

vi (Kohler 1964),

vii Benson, Herbert, Timeless Healing, Scribner, 1996, p. 163