The average person understands quite a lot but when it comes to their own mind they may be oblivious to what is happening. Strangely enough, people just don't talk back and forth and listen to everything that was said. Sounds weird doesn't it?

People use something like a filtering system to place in front of their ears. They only hear what slips through the filter. They don't even seem to be cognizant of the other things that were said and were filtered out.

I discovered this some time ago when my cube mate at work(an atheist) had difficulty in understanding some of the things that I was talking about. I have found that this filtering system is different for nearly anyone. For the atheist it was to reject anything that he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. Anything else was totally filtered out! Then there are the people who take those things which do not fit with their way of thinking and they actually redefine them. They change it to something that they are comfortable with, or you might say they rationalize it.

Ever talk to friends and ask them if they ever saw a flying saucer or something else weird? They either do one or two things. Either they brighten up and become happy to discuss the things with you because they have seen something that they can not explain, or they use several rejection techniques. They laugh at you trying to get you to drop it and joking with you. They ask if you have been talking to little green men, or some other bizarre behavior.

People that have no filtering system would look at things differently. They would be curious, intelligent and ask and probe for information outside the arena of the common. They would turn it around in their mind in an attempt to understand it or failing that, to store it for future reference. That is the intelligent thing to do.

There must be an extremely few individuals that are able to do this however. Most people, maybe 99 out of 100, will filter it out and can never open their mind to review the data. Find this interesting? I do.

I noticed that young people who are supposed to have that great capacity for learning would not accept invaluable advice from an elder. They already had a filter in place it seemed.

It seems to me that people who live in this prison of the mind can not be able to relate to others. They live isolated in a well defined (safe) environment . Then could this be a defensive mechanism? Probably so. Perhaps they at one time tried to make sense of something that confused them and they considered that confusion a danger so they filtered out the cause.

Some people are afraid of handling money. They spend with wild abandon. To try to make sense of their expenditures would be too much for them. They suspect a form of pain if they had to reduce their spending habits and they are right, so they filter out thoughts or things they hear from others on controlling their problem.

Consider that your filter is not protecting you, instead it was probably put in place by you as a child or juvenile and does not serve you well as an adult.

I have known Christians who could simply not accept current devine intervention. They filtered it out. I wonder to myself sometimes how anyone could mature spiritually if they filtered so many things out. Most of what a Christian should believe is clearly beyond the natural. Why should someone who was blind try to read about it? Just remove the filter!!

I think that they live in a state of compromised sanity in a compartmentalized mind where they feel safe. There was only one thing that threatened my sanity when I was a very young kid. I had the capability to see scenes in vivid color that ran from one to another so fast and I seemed to have no control over them. It frightened me and so I stopped it, and I cannot visualize anything now. especially colors. I do not think in pictures like most people do, I think in words and concepts. The mind is a strange thing and more powerful than we imagine.

My only suggestion to you if you think you might have a filtering system in place is to remove it by listening carefully to things that would have frightened you. Be open to all things, and if they bring confusion beyond your capability to analyze them then store them somewhere in your head until you hear more on the subject. Then bring out the old data and compare. Then see if you can understand it.

Lets put it in computer terms. If you had a very powerful computer that could do some rudimentary thinking for itself how would you deal with data outside its comprehension? It seems to me that if it got a file with a strange file type it should look to see if it had application anywhere and if it did not then do not delete it, just save it. Run an infrequent background task to review these data later on. One day the user adds a new application and the background task compares the strange data and MATCH! The data has a purpose and a place. To me that is the sane and rational way to think when dealing with abnormal data.

If you want to be fully aware and achieve your maximum human potiential then you have to be able to communicate truth without manipulating it or deleting it.

The OldSalt