Learn why you must learn about the primary causes of mental blindness, perception loss, and distortion. When blindness is in the mind, not the eyes, it renders the analytical and intuitive powers of the mind useless. Don’t let this happen to you.
The distortion of perception causes psychological blindness. This condition leads to unhealthy thinking. When we hear the term blindness, we usually think of the eyes. But the eyes are just one tool of perception. All perception takes place in the mind. A good example is dreaming. When we dream, we create a landscape with the mind.
People who experience blindness of the eyes can still visualize and see things in the mind’s eye. People who are deaf can describe the effects of sound vibration.
But people who experience perception loss and distortion see reality differently. They adopt unhealthy values and beliefs to justify harmful actions. These mental distortions are blindness.
The Three Primary Causes of Mental Blindness
Blindness of the mind has three primary causes:
1) Diseases of the Eye
2) Sectarian Religious Beliefs
3) Harmful Political Views
Only one of these key influences on perception loss and distortion involves the eyes. Medical science successfully treats the eye diseases, such as macular degeneration, cataracts, and diabetic retinopathy. However, these physical ailments aren’t responsible for most cases of blindness. The mind’s inability to consider and accept ideas and facts is the worst type of blindness. It’s known as perceptual, psychological, or mental blindness.
This condition is more common than you think because it is framed as an acceptable worldview. That’s crazy but true. When blindness is in the mind, not the eyes, it enables some to deny facts and replace them with myths, superstitions, bias, and prejudice.
Overcoming Perception Distortion
Sadly, there are a great number of people who live with psychological blindness. Those who live with this condition don’t realize it. You can’t use logic and reason to point out the inconsistencies and fallacies of their thinking, because their beliefs are not based on logic and reason. Their beliefs result from exposure to groupthink manipulation tactics and self-hypnosis techniques.
Groupthink manipulation tactics use peer pressure to convince groups of people to believe the same things. It works because people don’t want to stand out or cause trouble. They also want to feel accepted by the group. These tactics are used in religion and politics when leaders use certain tactics to make everyone agree. They might use fear or make people feel like they belong if they follow the group. This can lead to unhealthy and biased beliefs because people stop thinking for themselves and go along with what the group says.
Self-hypnosis techniques are used in group settings to place people in a suggestive state. In religion and politics, leaders might use this to make people believe certain things without questioning them. They might repeat messages over and over or use emotional language to make these ideas stick. This can make people believe things that aren’t true or that are harmful, without even realizing it. You see evidence of this in religion when people fall down at the wave of the hand, or in politics when people deify leaders.
To overcome psychological and mental blindness, one must be able to recognize these distortions. It makes overcoming perception distortion difficult but not impossible.
The Key Influences on Perception Loss and Distortion
Humankind’s struggle to free itself from controlling these maladies isn’t new, but it is causing a widening gap in the world’s culture. Modern civilization has one foot stepping forward into the enlightened future with science and facts, while the other is firmly rooted in mythology and superstition. In many cases, the primary causes of mental blindness are rooted in childhood religious and political indoctrination.
There is a medicine for this mental disease; logic, reason, and scientific facts are the antidote. But it’s a hard pill to swallow. This disease is in control of many cultures. There’s just too much money and power at stake.
In every era, some people awaken. If there is room in the culture, they can free themselves from these spiritual prejudices. But this struggle is not without consequences. Persecution continues in today’s modern world. If you do not align with their mythology, then being ostracized is the least of your problems.
When Blindness is in the Mind, Not the Eyes
Religions that identify with right-wing conservatism empower a range of atrocities in the name of their deity. Through politics and violence, they seek to control and dominate the cultural narrative. They do these things with a clear conscience because their beliefs justify their means. Yes, when blindness is in the mind, not our eyes, our conscience is also blindfolded.
Politics is simply a tool of religion. Harmful political leaders align themselves with religion to gain its social power, although their actions are often devoid of any spiritual merit. So, we must take responsibility for our minds and learn how to disengage from the rhetoric. Instead of following the dogma, they conduct independent research, learning to discern the facts from fiction. The problem is that religious and political ideology propaganda undermines critical thinking.
Harmful forms of politics often link prejudicial ideas to religious beliefs. This is because religious believers comprise a large and easy-to-manipulate population. These beliefs are often accepted as a legitimate worldview and are thus accepted as part of the cultural narrative.
Religion and politics create the most devastating blindness of the mind and are hard to overcome. These two sources cause irreparable impairment of perception, logical reasoning, and rational judgment. How does this happen? Why do people choose this type of perceptual blindness?
Religion silences critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries. — Darrel Ray
The Impact of Psychological Blindness Factors
Psychological factors can significantly impact vision, leading to various forms of mental blindness. Here are some implications of this condition.
1. Psychogenic blindness, referred to as functional or conversion disorder, happens when psychological stress or trauma causes thinking impairment with no apparent physical explanation. This leads to distorted thinking, hallucinations, and cognitive dissonance, causing significant emotional and physical distress.
2. Unintentional blindness happens when a person fails to notice an unexpected stimulus in their beliefs and values. It highlights how cognitive load and attention can influence what we see. These psychological blindness factors undermine rational thinking and logic.
Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. It encompasses the demands placed on an individual’s cognitive system when performing a task. High cognitive load can occur when the task is complex, involves a lot of information, or requires significant problem-solving and decision-making. This is complicated by Western organized religion, which is contradictory, illogical, and based on myths rather than fact.
Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. It involves focusing mental resources on specific information, tasks, or stimuli, which allows for better processing and understanding of that information. Attention is crucial for effectively managing cognitive load and ensuring that important details are not overlooked.
3. Emotional blindness (Alexithymia) involves difficulty in recognizing and describing one’s own emotions, which can indirectly affect visual perception and awareness. People with alexithymia might struggle with interpreting visual cues related to emotions.
4. Change blindness occurs when a person does not notice significant changes in their environment. It demonstrates how our perception can be limited by our cognitive processes and attention.
5. Cognitive blindness is a broad category that includes various ways our thinking can be biased or limited, such as overlooking logical errors or inconsistencies. It can affect decision-making and how we process visual information.
These psychological factors illustrate the complex interplay between beliefs, values, and reality, showing that psychological or cognitive blindness stems from non-physical origins. Understanding these effects can help us in identifying and overcoming perceptual distortion.
Learn to Recognize Harmful Psychological Blindness Factors
Awareness of the primary causes of mental blindness is essential to addressing the underlying beliefs and values. Not all religions or political opinions cause perceptual blindness, only those that promote harmful values. What are these destructive values? They are belief systems that sell hate and spawn genocide, wars, and discrimination of races, ethnicities, and genders. All the while proclaiming they are agents of love. You’d be surprised to find that most people who have religious beliefs ignore these contradictory messages.
What belief systems do you think fall into the harmful category? The Abrahamic religions are the dominant religions of the world, sponsoring sectarianism and discrimination. What are the Abrahamic religions? They are the Semitic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
These paradigms (1) cherry-pick doctrines to fit their needs. It shows up as religious prejudice and discriminatory practices aimed at race, ethnicity, or gender. This programming justifies torture, murder, and genocide. It’s the belief that their beliefs give them the right to harm others who are not a part of their group.
The eyes are useless if the mind is blind, ― Mark Venturini
The Abrahamic religions use propaganda, mind control, and fear tactics to promote and install their values. All extremist political groups use the same techniques to sell unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories. And it is not just extremists who are affected by the psychological blindness factors. Moderates and fringe believers are pulled into this groupthink manipulation, supporting the agendas of those on the far right. These are the key influences on perception loss and distortion of beliefs and values.
Religion is like drugs, it destroys the thinking mind. — George Carlin
Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind, then, is never free. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Making belief superior to facts is like putting on a blindfold. When blindness is in the mind, not the eyes, they can program us to believe anything.
To describe religions as mind, viruses are sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion. — Richard Dawkins
Fanaticism is the greatest threat today. Literally, the 21st century threatened by fanatics, and we have fanatics in every religion, unfortunately, and what can we do against them? Words, nothing else. I’m against violence, but only words? — Elie Wiesel
These systems are harmful to society. Their goal is to promote ideologies that support justification for violence and discrimination. They tell you what is wrong and right, and this propaganda captivates some people. The beliefs become your identity, and you will protect them with violence if necessary. Of the three main causes of blindness, these two are the most dangerous.
Tactics For Overcoming Perception Distortion
This indoctrination often starts early in childhood and targets society’s vulnerable. When you are in need, you are susceptible to groupthink manipulation tactics. The effects of this type of systematic indoctrination depend upon how integrated you’ve become into the propositions they are selling.
Without a doubt, this describes the characteristics of the Abrahamic Religions (2). These are the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions are the re-branding of mythologies of the ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian empires. They are mythology presented as fact.
Even if you aren’t a follower of one of these religions, they still affect people because of their colossal social reach. They infect our society through their political acolytes. They prove the eyes are useless if the mind is blind. The level of influence depends on how much social integration they have in your life. There are specific tools of doctrine for integrating people into these paradigms.
1) Acknowledge specific beliefs concerning a God
2) Accept boundaries for acceptable and unacceptable behavior and values
3) Follow all rules for maintaining good standing to get afterlife rewards
Sadly, the people in charge of many governments place the dogma and values of these religious traditions above fair and fair treatment of people and the environment. They create a slippery slope leading to fanaticism that results in violence.
You Have Two Options
The First Option
The first option is trying to ignore the three main causes of blindness. That’s right. Try to ignore the evidence. Pretend that your belief in an imaginary friend is harmless. Involve yourself in more groupthink manipulation tactics. Try to drown out the facts and your conscience. This is where the true believers reside.
Trying to ignore the issues doesn’t reduce the impact of psychological blindness. You can try to drown them out with entertainment or slip deeper into conspiracy theory mania. But trying to suppress the realizations provided by greater conscience will only add to the pain of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced when simultaneously holding differing points of view or facts that don’t fit your paradigm.
You can pretend that the social injustice and inequities you see are someone else’s responsibility and then try to deal with the guilt. To have a positive vision and conscience in a world filled with hate and selfishness is hard. If you go this route, you’ll likely experience the effects of Cognitive Dissonance above.
The Second Option
The second option, do something about your increased awareness and growth of conscience; if you do something about it, congratulations! We need more people like you.
If find yourself experiencing the effects, you are experiencing this kind of distress, it’s time to take a break. Then, when you’ve regained emotional equilibrium, engage in your independent research. Remember to be gentle with yourself. Trust your intuition. The discomfort is trying to tell you something is wrong. Don’t run from the conflict. Face it with logical reasoning.
How can you learn about the internal aspect of our paradigm? The Enneagram of Personality Profile is our recommendation. It uses a questionnaire to identify your default personality and instincts. Learning about this default setting will help you understand how and why you choose some things over others. It will teach you first-hand that you are not your personality, and you can go beyond these default settings. It’s one of the best tools to begin serious inner work.
We also recommend that you use a tool we call comparative analysis. It’s a scientific process for investigating and comparing your belief system’s elements.
The growth of awareness also results in the illumination of conscience. The issues mentioned above have always existed. We can remove the blindfold. Unfortunately, just being aware of the problems doesn’t eliminate them. You have work to do, both internally and externally.
It is hard to do if you live in a culture where religion and not reason rule society. It also depends on how you handle the level of indoctrination. You’ll likely need help and support to deal with it.
In Conclusion
The conflict between science and reason on one side and religion on the other is an ongoing battle. It proves that the primary causes of mental blindness are not diseases of the eyes but result from exposure to groupthink manipulation tactics. Perception loss and distortion come from two sources, Western organized religion and right-wing conservative politics.
Resist the religious influences in the cultural narrative. It’s a battle raging for eons, but we can overcome “the mind blind mode” with persistence. People use a variety of tactics to ignore the facts that contradict their beliefs. Don’t let this happen to you.
References
(1) Paradigm.
(2) Abrahamic Religions.