What is COGNITIVE DISSONANCE?
My facebook friend, Brick Mudge shared this insight today
and it propelled me to add this essay to this blog.
Thanks Brick, your explanation here is perfect.
"People tend to seek consistency in their beliefs and perceptions. So what happens when one of our beliefs conflicts with another previously held belief? The term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the feeling of discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs simultaneously. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.
How exactly does cognitive dissonance work and how does it influence how we think and behave?
Answer: Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed a theory of cognitive dissonance centered on how people try to reach internal consistency. He suggested that people have an inner need to insure that our beliefs and behaviors are consistent. Inconsistent or conflicting beliefs lead to disharmony within, which people strive to avoid. Cognitive dissonance can be seen as an antecedent condition which leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads toward activity oriented toward hunger reduction". ~Brick Mudge
MY OWN PERSONAL TAKE
Cognitive dissonance is affecting nearly everyone on the planet right now whether through the result of other people's beliefs (or lack thereof) or on account of their own. Many people have a really difficult time accepting what IS true because it conflicts with their own personal story.
Everyone has a story (Government has a story), and more likely than not, a lot of that story was fabricated from belief in things which are not true principally in nature.
The biggest belief of untruth I can think of affecting my fellow Americans right now is the belief in authority outside oneself. The belief that "some people" are better suited to rule/ govern/ manage others is actually a result of people buying into the lie that society is inadequate to solve problems on their own. This lie has grown so huge today that every institution of government, education, medicine, etc, desperately DEPEND on your belief in it.
I'm not closed to the idea than humans at the beginning of Civilization possibly "needed" a moral guide, someone to put them on the right course of action, but what has ultimately occurred is that a rift was created between people as a result, separating them from trusting each other to be sensible enough to EVER be capable of doing the right thing on their own. The fear of chaos, over the centuries, has grown to such an inept amount that the contradictions stare us glaringly in the face, in light of what we have discovered to actually be the case.
And the case is that free-will expressed in a love & a moral capacity will expand consciousness, while free-will expressed in fear & immorality result in the imprisonment of growth/ expansion and could actually cause it to begin degenerating and shrink back to the point of animal.
So now, we're living in a predicament where we have managers, leaders, and governments who are there to re-enforce this erroneous belief. So, people like sovereigns become suspect in a system like that who are actively engaged in outgrowing this outdated mode of consciousness. The status quo is quite literally a stagnant playground for bullies. The bullies re-enforce their behaviors and the rest of us comply.
My point is that if you are "under" the authority of what you presently know as a "superior", you are experiencing cognitive dissonance within as a result.
A component to cognitive dissonance that doesn't receive enough attention is the role our emotions play on our cognitive thought processes. Our thoughts may be thinking one thing while our feelings react in aversion to what we ourselves are thinking, or knowing is true. It's an internal conflict that results in our taking actions in the world which produce effects of the same kind.
Everyone has a story (Government has a story), and more likely than not, a lot of that story was fabricated from belief in things which are not true principally in nature.
The biggest belief of untruth I can think of affecting my fellow Americans right now is the belief in authority outside oneself. The belief that "some people" are better suited to rule/ govern/ manage others is actually a result of people buying into the lie that society is inadequate to solve problems on their own. This lie has grown so huge today that every institution of government, education, medicine, etc, desperately DEPEND on your belief in it.
I'm not closed to the idea than humans at the beginning of Civilization possibly "needed" a moral guide, someone to put them on the right course of action, but what has ultimately occurred is that a rift was created between people as a result, separating them from trusting each other to be sensible enough to EVER be capable of doing the right thing on their own. The fear of chaos, over the centuries, has grown to such an inept amount that the contradictions stare us glaringly in the face, in light of what we have discovered to actually be the case.
And the case is that free-will expressed in a love & a moral capacity will expand consciousness, while free-will expressed in fear & immorality result in the imprisonment of growth/ expansion and could actually cause it to begin degenerating and shrink back to the point of animal.
We are not only facing tyranny, we are also facing the extermination of free-will resulting in the loss of
our capacity to imagine our way out of the prison we are actively creating for ourselves..
My point is that if you are "under" the authority of what you presently know as a "superior", you are experiencing cognitive dissonance within as a result.
THE DIVORCE OF THOUGHT FROM EMOTION
A component to cognitive dissonance that doesn't receive enough attention is the role our emotions play on our cognitive thought processes. Our thoughts may be thinking one thing while our feelings react in aversion to what we ourselves are thinking, or knowing is true. It's an internal conflict that results in our taking actions in the world which produce effects of the same kind.
We "say" we want something
but it always turns out that what we "say" we want,
we generate the exact opposite.
Well, guess what happens next?
One day down the road, the company secretary hands you new paperwork to fill out and says to you, "If you want to continue having insurance with our Company, you're going to have to fill out this new Obamacare paperwork".
What do you think now?
Most people at this point generate a feeling within that signals desperation, fear of the unknown, and insecurity.
Why is this opposite feeling generated?
Because people have been conditioned their entire life to believe in authority outside of themselves. People literally do not possess the tools to face the unknown on their own. People are reliant on others to make important decisions for them. This is called "abdication of personal responsibility".
to be sub-servient to our emotions rather than
commanding our WILL with our Reason.
We panic at the thought of being uninsured, we begin to imagine scenarios where we may need the insurance to reinforce our feeling of uncertainty, we go against our original thought of not signing up, and we wind up doing the very thing we claimed we weren't going to do; signing the paperwork against our own good conscience.
What does this produce within the person?
It produces cognitive dissonance which is internal confusion, unsettledness, and is literally, a war raging within.
And the human condition is quite used to going through the motions of this exact scenario.
It applies to paying bills, paying taxes, following orders we know are immoral and will cause suffering, and several day to day "problems" and "daily stresses" we face associated with our family lives, relationships, and even while driving.
In fact, anytime one "tolerates" a wrong just to "go along to get along", that in itself IS cognitive dissonance in action!
Now let me ask you a question?
If you are at war with your own self, does it not come to reason that this is why the external world is in the exact same State out there? We are actively manifesting through our actions the very circumstances we find ourselves pulled into. We are giving life therefore, to the things we say we don't want. But the worst part of all is we aren't doing anything to change it. We rationalize with fallacious logic scenarios where we convince ourselves we can continue doing wrong behaviors and they will somehow become better naturally.
For instance...
- We pretend that voting is going to change things.
- We pretend that our kids will grow out of their nasty attitudes, as if it's just a part of growing up.
- We pretend we are happy and that one day if we can just find the right person to complete our life, we'd be set.
- We pretend that things just magically work themselves out only to receive more confusion, drama, and stress.
- We pretend that someone or something is going to save us from our bad behaviors, cycle of destruction, and consequences. Will it be Y2K? 2012? 2020? 2046?
WAKE UP!!
The time is now! This present moment. No more stalling, pretending, procrastinating, sitting on your hands, and being passive. If you want things to be different both within yourself and the world around you, it begins by saying NO and STOPPING.
STOP LYING TO YOURSELF!
The bitter truth is hard to swallow because it's just that, BITTER! Truth is like the red pill that Morpheus offers Neo, it dissolves away contradictions causing you to become enlightened, aware, and truly awake.
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From a Biblical perspective, if we correspond Truth to God and correspond Satan (the opposer) to contradictions, it becomes self-evident that we have been lying to ourselves for thousands of years. The red pill is truth, the blue pill is Satan, which are you ingesting?
HOW WE NEGOTIATE WITH REALITY
This website clarifies pretty effectively how our "choices" are the very things we need to be paying attention to. If we decide to follow through with a choice that ignores certain aspects of reality, we are sure to facilitate more ignorance. It is in our own best interest to be critical of the information we buy because there is MUCH information out in the world that is only there to get you and me to keep buying it so that in the future it creates a market for our dependence on that information to be true. This is known as a poisonous information stream.
This poisonous information stream is completely reliant on your buying it. It would not exist were it not for our "belief" in it. Were it to be recognized for being erroneous, we would withdraw our support from it and the only thing that would remain is "what is" i.e. TRUTH.
People today grow up physically but mentally and emotionally are never raised above the level of whiny babies. We tend to continue on into adulthood crying, screaming, and abdicating our own authority and personal responsibility.
We cry about our liberties being taken while at the same time doing actions in the world that result in our own liberties being taken.
If we expect to be free, we MUST allow freedom to be free. Stop putting a price on freedom, stop negotiating with evil, and become authoritative and free. This includes freedom for all people, the free-flow of information, resources, and ideas. Regardless of what we "think" about opposing religions, beliefs, premises, traditions, and dogmas, we can only have freedom if we give freedom. Freedom is a result of our ACTIONS that once initiated will manifest back to us an ENVIRONMENT incoming more freedom. This is a universal principle of nature; what you put out into the world is a measure for what you receive in return.This is an IMPERATIVE principle to understand. It involves the study of natural law as the foundation which everything else springs.
A natural result of Stopping is becoming. When one stops buying into lies, a natural result is that the Truth will overtake our thinking like an ivy climbing a brick wall.
To stop being led is to begin leading.
To stop ignoring is to begin knowing.
To stop pretending is to begin reality.
THE MARRIAGE OF THOUGHT TO EMOTION
It is prerequisite to understand how our thoughts, emotions, and actions operate together to manifest our reality. We are constantly marrying our thoughts to our emotions and producing an action into the world.
In the ancient mystery school traditions, our thoughts were considered the divine masculine aspect while our emotions the divine feminine. And when the two are in alignment, a metaphoric "sex act"/ consummation occurs where a child is born into the world. Traditionally, in the mystery schools, they have always symbolized this as being a male child. When we remove the allegory, the male child is our Actions.
The principles on which the science of eugenics sprung can be over-lapped to understand this in relation.
What this image is saying is that the Parents of our actions and decisions are our thoughts and emotions and ultimately, it boils down to the fact that cognitive dissonance is not going to produce a healthy action. Rather, the action that will be produce from such bad breeding of the two should have been aborted.
Our free-will to change things is the solution to the abomination in which humanity has given birth to by way of their cognitive dissonance..
This article is a work in progress and will be updated soon.
Fight the Good Fight,
Love and peace,
Mike Kovach
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