by David V. White
Often I walk in the mountains, following trails that were laid down by wolves, or elk, or animals so far in the distant past that there is no record of them now. Humans have taken over the maintenance of these trails in recent times, and we improve them for the benefit of all, be it bear or deer, chipmunk or tourist. (Once, on an old trail seldom used by humans, I saw fresh signs of a large bear. A brief shudder, then a smile crossed my face – in appreciation of the wildness that once ruled these lands.)
In the mountains, it is much easier to travel if someone has blazed a trail – and if others have maintained it through the years, the centuries, the millennia. It is not necessary that they have done this intentionally, for simply to walk the path is to preserve it for the next traveler.
Trails are essential in life, whether in the mountains – or in becoming a doctor, lawyer, or Cherokee chief. Cultural trails create pathways for living, channels through which wisdom and knowledge flow, guiding each new traveler toward a common destination. When laid out wisely and well, they make smoother and safer the journey for each of those with a similar aim.
Yet trails also create limitations – limiting what one can see and where one can easily go. Trails define where to look, how to look, and what is important to look at, and for. Outwardly, trails are visible to the naked eye. Inwardly, trails are less visible, but no less real – for they are the beliefs, values, expectations, and assumptions in which we are imbedded. Inwardly, trails are the worldviews by which we live.
It would be impossible to make it through even a few moments of the day without a worldview. How would decisions be made? Fortunately, a workable set of assumptions was embedded in each of us as we grew up. At some point, we each also began to modify these assumptions by the decisions we made for ourselves about where we would focus our attention, the people we would hang out with, and what we would believe – and refuse to believe. But even as we made changes, we continued to live within a worldview, for it is the way we understand who we are and what life is about. It is the path that we follow – but it is also our prison. It is path because it guides our thoughts and our understandings into manageable channels. And it is prison because it predisposes us to see things in a particular way, thereby blinding us to seeing and knowing ourselves – and our world – in a different and more complete way.
In India a trainer ties an elephant, when young and small, to a large tree with a strong rope. The rope holds tight against all pulling and tugging, creating the belief in the young elephant that it is useless to try to escape. After this belief has been thoroughly embedded, the trainer can thereafter use a flimsy rope and a small tree, and the grown elephant does not try to escape – continuing to assume that the childhood experience of the rope being too strong to resist still applies.
Like the elephant, many of us are deeply embedded in our worldviews, so much so that we do not even recognize we are in one, for the assumptions by which we live seem to be truth itself, given by God or the Laws of Nature, incontrovertible and unassailable. Yet those of us standing in such a place have no position from which to question or challenge our worldviews, even if they are filled with contradictions, or lead to actions that are destructive – or even absurd.2 As a friend described this situation, imagine a child who, when growing up, is given a set of rules for living, along with a brown paper bag containing “the full explanation” as to why these rules are right and true. But there is one further condition: it is forbidden to look inside the bag to examine the explanations. For the next 20, 40, 60 years, the child carries the bag around, never looking inside. If anyone asks what he or she believes, the established answer is easily repeated. If a questioner probes more deeply, however, challenging the validity of the answer, the only response is to point to the bag and say, sometimes with great authority, “I know, because all the explanations are right in there.”
Having our assumptions embedded in this way, as deeply experienced feelings of what is right and wrong, good and bad, can be a rich and meaningful way to live. Most people through history have lived in cultures that gave clear and consistent messages in this way, and members of most tribes and communities through the ages have shared the important underlying assumptions with their neighbors. This simpler state was not necessarily a better way to live, but living within such a unified and shared worldview did prevent much of the personal angst, and many of the societal problems we see in the world today. And for many, living within a set of such “givens” led to a fulfilled and productive life.
The Problem with Trails
However, although inner trails are crucial and can greatly enhance life, these trails – our embedded assumptions – can also lie at the very heart of our problems. What cannot be avoided is that some cultural systems are unhealthy, some highly dysfunctional. Others might be healthy for the majority of people within them, but not for everyone. And even the healthiest systems were designed for the very purpose of curbing individual urges and desires, to restrain impulses that might – if fully expressed – cause trouble, harm to others, or conflicts within the community. So inevitably there will be conflicts between our inner urges and the worldview we were given, which give rise to the moral dilemmas and painful choices many of us face. For instance, we often “know” what we are “supposed” to do, but strong urges within us lead in quite a different direction. But which is the “right” path: the worldview we were given, or the inner urge that seems to carry life’s energy and vitality for us? When is the inner urge a passing whim that would be best relinquished, and when is it the call to a fuller and more complete life?
Much of the great literature of the world revolves around such conflicts between inner urges and societal rules: for instance, what to do about a love outside of the accepted norm (Romeo and Juliet being one of the countless examples.) Countless conflicts have arisen between people who were otherwise dear to each other in clashes over worldviews, leading to pain and misery on all sides. (Think of the many stories of children estranged from parents for such reasons.) Or consider the many tales, in literature as well as in real life, of those drawn to a path for their lives that their parents or culture did not approve, leading to difficult choices, anger, resentment, and sometimes great loss. (These stories are often found in the lives of artists, adventurers, and many spiritual trailblazers such as Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, and in recent times, Ramana Maharshi. Each of these and many more faced painful conflicts with family, the culture they were in, or both).
In another vein, we need only look in a few biographies, or in mental wards, to find mountains of sadness and grief expressed about paths not taken through choices driven by cultural constraints, or on the opposite side, at lives ruined by rebellion against the cultural or family norm. Or at the many lives wracked by guilt and shame in those who have acted in ways that they had been conditioned to believe were “wrong,” even though the same actions would have been totally acceptable in an adjoining country, community – or even in the family next door. Who is free of these conflicts? Even the most respected saints have their struggles: speaking for many, the Apostle Paul cried with anguish, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
Yet perhaps it is only the saint who can truly know with certainty which action is the “good,” and which “evil,” for the rules we were given, or the ones we have adopted, are not always right, or good. The moral codes of many societies, even very religious ones, have justified slavery, torture, abuse, child-labor, mutilation, and sexual practices of great harm to the disempowered.
Over and over the dilemma comes back to the question: When do we follow the rules of right and wrong we were given, or we have adopted as part of a cultural group, and when do we follow our inner compass? For you see, our inner compass is made up of urges and desires that give us vitality and energy, but can also harm others, sacrifice long-term good for a moment’s pleasure, or even result in our being cast out from society’s embracing net.
To make matters even more complicated, some of the greatest moral leaders through history are precisely those who have broken society’s rules in service of a higher calling, who have proclaimed a “right” and “good” in conflict with the established order. Thus the great prophets of Israel called on the kings and the people of Israel to abandon the cultural “norms” they were following in favor of a corrective vision. Jesus repeatedly stepped outside the boundaries of his society to proclaim a new vision – as did Confucius, Mohammed, the Buddha, and many more. In recent times, Martin Luther King captured the issue succinctly in his letter from the Birmingham jail: “There are two kinds of laws: just laws . . . and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
So sometimes the cultural rules we were given, or are now following, are flawed, perhaps even corrupt, and a good life can only be lived by challenging and overcoming the rules we are now taking as “given.” Sometimes society is right, and following its rules will keep us from harm, as well as protect those around us. Sometimes society is partially right, yet our life energy and vitality, our unique individual paths, can only be discovered by breaking free of someone else’s rules so we can get in touch with the deeper currents of meaning for ourselves. This is the hero’s quest, the central myth of history as elaborated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And for many who are not able to break free in this way, life energy is frozen from its full expression into life.
These then are the powerful reasons for learning to step outside of our worldviews – at least for a moment. How else will we ever be able to see if our worldview is guiding us in a healthy direction, or causing our problems?
Thought Experiment: Recognizing “ropes”
To catch a glimpse of your worldview “ropes” (the ties that bind you in the same way that our friend the elephant is bound), think of a point of view you strongly disagree with, perhaps held by someone in another religion, a different social group, or another political party. To you, these views might seem completely wrong – perhaps even unhealthy and dangerous. Why do they not see it as clearly as you do? It must be because they are looking from a different framework of assumptions, a lens that is quite different from the one through which you look. Can you, for just a moment, step into their point of view?
The Power to Rationalize
You say that yes, many cultural patterns are clearly flawed, but that you have strong, rational arguments for the assumptions that you now hold. Perhaps, but here’s the rub: part of the package of a worldview is a set of arguments for why that worldview is right and true. Everyone within the worldview is enculturated into the arguments, and then they constantly reinforce each other’s conviction as to their strength and beauty. For a real test, try making your “rational” arguments to someone from a completely different worldview, and you will quickly see that these arguments rest on assumptions in your brown paper bag – which those outside your “worldview circle” do not accept. How else to explain the existence of hundreds of dramatically different worldviews throughout the world today?
Rather than looking for challenges to our worldviews, however, most of us spend a good deal of energy trying to protect our views from such an affront: we avoid those who hold different assumptions; we might even go so far as to condemn them, or create battles with them. Yet it is often in encounters with those from a completely different worldview that we discover the hidden assumptions in our “bag.” This must be the reason a sage once remarked that no one ever understands their own religion until they had understood a second one.
Complicating the picture even further is the fact that the mind is extraordinary at creating rationalizations to convince us that we are “right.” A Yale graduate student had an interesting demonstration of this point back in 1956. He asked a group of people to rate the desirability of a number of items – then gave each person the choice of keeping one of the two items they had rated as desirable. (Each item was equally desirable before the choice was made.)
After participants chose the item they would keep, they were then asked to rate the items again, and “suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster.” Uniformly, the participants began to convince themselves that they had made the right choice, to rationalize their point of view to themselves. As summarized by columnist John Tierney: “In general, people deal with cognitive dissonance – the clashing of conflicting thoughts – by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.”3 Other examples will be given in later chapters, but it is crucial here to realize that our minds are organized to constantly rationalize our worldviews, and can quickly change both the facts we are seeing, as well as our own perceived reactions, in order to keep in place a worldview in which we are invested.
Your worldview may be contributing to the problems of the world
Just as your worldview may be causing some of the problems you personally face, the clashing of worldviews is responsible for many of the problems of our world. Looking backward, much of history is a recounting of struggles between competing worldviews. Today, as the world becomes more and more crowded, these conflicts are ever more numerous – with endless clashes between nations, between cultures, and between factions within nations. And when worldviews collide, the reaction of most is to “support the home team.”
I have always loved sports, and have been an avid fan of various teams through the years, especially the football and basketball teams of my university. At times I have had a deep sense of identity with these teams, even when I did not know one person associated with the team, and probably shared little in common with anyone on the team. Yet when they did well, I felt better about myself, felt for a moment that I was more capable, more likely to succeed in my own life. And when they failed, I felt like I too was somehow crushed by the defeat. These feelings were at times so strong that I easily (and unconsciously) convinced myself that “we” deserved to win. Without any evidence, I believed “we” had worked harder, had the best players, and that it was simply fair for “our team” to win.
Watching fans in stadiums, on TV, and reading the sports chatter on the internet, it is clear that I am not alone in having such feelings. And the fascinating thing is, when I step back for a moment, it is clear that the supporters of teams “we” opposed could be just as fervent as was I. How can this be? Doesn’t “my” team deserve to win. How can the other team deserve it when they are playing against “us.” It is hard to take in emotionally when one is a fan. Yet there it is. When two teams collide, the fans of each side can be equally convinced they have a right to win.
How much more intense, then, is the feeling when worldviews collide? If we can so easily convince ourselves of our right to victory in a game, how much greater must be the tendency to convince ourselves we are right with regard to core beliefs, the ideas around which we are making the crucial decisions of our lives. Thus when worldviews collide, as they often do in the modern world, it makes for a dangerous planet. Yet as Abraham Lincoln wisely observed, “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.” (Lincoln’s solution to this dilemma was equally wise: to spend less time claiming God is on one’s side, and much more time examining one’s own motives to make sure one is acting on the side of the good oneself.)
Since these clashes have occurred for thousands of years, several solutions have been tried. One common approach was for one group to try to persuade others to adopt their point of view. If this didn’t work, the strongest group would sometimes use force to demand that everyone else comply with their view. When this failed, as it usually did, an attempt was sometimes made to expel or completely eliminate all those who did not agree.
Amazingly, these solutions are still being tried in various parts of the world today – amazing because such attempts have been completely unsuccessful. After several thousand years of such efforts, the world today has more competing worldviews than ever. Further, almost all attempts at force have brought, over time, almost as much difficulty to the victors as to the vanquished.4 It would seem obvious then, that after thousands of years of failure, we would realize that these solutions do not work. Yet we often act like those in a sinking rowboat who are furiously bailing water, but dumping the buckets of water into the back of the same boat they are in.
What to do? Each of us searches for a solid place to stand, wants to believe that our beliefs and assumptions are true and right, are giving us valid guidance about how to live a full and meaningful life. Yet many of us also feel confused, struggle with decisions, make mistakes, and find ourselves sad, angry, or depressed. When we look around to see how others are doing, we discover that a large number of people in the modern world are alienated, confused, angry, depressed, or sad. Many are spending their time on things that seem shallow and meaningless, and most do not seem to be finding greater fulfillment or happiness than we are finding for ourselves.
Some of us have the opposite tendency: to look out and project on others the view that they are doing well, while we are not – leading to the feeling that “there is something terribly wrong with me.” (It is fascinating to discover that when I talk to those who feel this way, and ask them to give me an example of a person we know in common who is doing well, they often point to a mutual friends who I also know to be struggling. This tendency to see others as doing well, while you yourself are not is a very common pattern, perhaps from being given a deep wound of unworthiness as a child. And it is reinforced by the tendency of others who work to project an image of doing well to the world, even when they are struggling).
There are two powerful currents at this crossroad to which we have come: 1) the tendency to support the “home worldview,” the need to believe our worldview is right and true in making our decisions, 2) while at the same time, there is for many of us a sense of our own alienation, confusion, sadness, anger and depression, along with a recognition that the same feelings are present in many of those around us in the modern world.5 One common response to this dilemma is to redouble our efforts to convince ourselves, and others, that our worldview is right. Yet down this path lies increasing conflict within, as well as without. Within, we try to suppress our own feelings, leading to depression, drugs, or escapism. And without, toward others in the world, this approach can lead to much conflict, fervent righteousness toward others, and even vicious battles between the various “worldview teams.”
Finding a cure
Maybe it is time for radical measures! Do we dare to begin questioning the underlying assumptions from which we are living? Is it possible that our worldview is more cause than cure of our disease? To put the matter succinctly, our worldviews could be wrong, or misguided, or contradictory. They could be causing a lot of the problems we face, as well as contributing to the problems of the world. But how would we know? Our worldview seems “given” to us – it seems the framework within which we must solve our problems and answer our questions. And even if we suspect that this is not true, how do we get to a perspective far enough outside of our assumptions to consider their true efficacy?
A Thought Experiment
Think of someone you know who is struggling in life right now. If you look carefully, you might be able to identify some of the assumptions that person is making that create their difficulties – a fantasy, an expectation about how the world is supposed to work, a stubborn belief, a “moral” position that does not seem wise, or even moral to you. If you can see the stuck place, why can’t your friend? Because his or her assumptions are embedded, accepted as reality, and are assumed to be the path to answers, rather than the source of the problems.
But how do you know you are not caught in your own framework of assumptions just as they are caught in theirs? Could this be the cause of many of your problems – just as you see from an outside perspective that it is the cause of your friend’s? Can you identify just one example of this in your life?
So is there a place to stand that is solid, that will hold firm through the trials and tribulations of life? I believe there is, but to arrive at this solid ground, we must first explore the un-firm ground on which so many castles of belief have been built. Examining the nature of these shifting sands, perhaps we will come to a clearer understanding of the firmer ground that will hold through the tides and turbulence of life.
To begin this process, we will try to understand how we got here, the framework within which we make our decisions, and what alternatives for this process there might be. Catching this glimpse, gaining a perspective from which to understand and evaluate our worldviews, we will explore the ways in which these beliefs and assumptions create many of the problems we encounter. At that point, we will be ready for the exhilarating and sometimes scary step of participating more fully in the creation of our own lives.
The following chapters, then, will consider how our worldviews arose, how they aid us, and how they hinder. From this place we will consider how to use them most effectively, while escaping their imprisoning effects, in the creation of a fulfilled, happy, and meaningful life.
1 However, thanks are in order to all those who have traveled the trails I have walked in my life, inner as well as outer. And a special word of thanks to all those who have set out, consciously and intentionally, to maintain and enhance the trails of my life journey.
2 On the opposite side of the spectrum, some people hold their worldviews so loosely and malleably that they have a very hard time making decisions, knowing what is right and wrong, or deciding what is worthy of effort and attention. More about this later.
3 Go Ahead, Rationalize. New York Times, November 6, 2007,
4 The negative consequences for the victors might be more subtle, but are nonetheless real and powerful: revenge attacks from the vanquished or their allies, perhaps for generations; a weakening of the military of the victors that invites attack by other enemies; setting in motion a process that continually narrows who is "acceptable" in the society, leading to fights between smaller and smaller groups, and eventually to civil chaos (the French Revolution as an example, or current day Pakistan); a backlash of effects that often haunt the victors in bloody struggles, as portrayed in many Greek tragedies, such as the dire fate of many of the victors in the Odyessey; and at the moral level, an undermining of the values of human decency in those who attack others, for the perpetrators of harm to others cannot escape the consequences concerning the kind of people they become, and the kind of society they create by their actions.
5 Sometimes we encounter those who profess to happiness and contentment, but often they seem to be adopting this stance because they think they should, or because they wish to feel superior - while the feeling one gets is that of bravado, of a salesman trying to sell an overvalued product, to themselves as much as to you. Yet there are also those few rare souls who seem truly to have found a sense of meaning, of purpose, of contentment, of fulfillment, of joy, or peace. It is crucial that we not forget their presence among us, and it is to them we will turn in later chapters for guidance in the living of our own lives. But in the meantime, it is important to recognize that for the vast majority of our fellow men and women, Kierkegaard was probably right in saying that there are two types of people: those who are suffering, and know that they are suffering, and those who are suffering, and do not know that they are.
