Personal Experience and Common Sense

By Greg -
Personal experience and common sense is all we have. But common sense can be manipulated and personal experience can include manufactured illusions. They're all the same in the metaphysical mind space we call consciousness, and most of us don't even try to distinguish between the two. We are, generally, made to regard our unregulated experience as self-indulgent, and the general principles derived from it as suspect. We've learned to filter and refute experience that contradicts belief, and to defend our orderly world view from disorderly reality. Over the centuries our common sense has been trained to defend the ideal against the real using a diverse and inconsistent arsenal of excuses, but from the very beginning we learned to accept hierarchies as a natural and necessary organizing principle, with the pyramid or ziggurat as the tangible metaphor by which it was assimilated.

Age possesses wisdom derived from experience. When the dead began to speak we built altars to feed them and temples above their tombs to shelter them. Subsequent generations would build temples and altars on the ruins of the old, with the youngest resting on the oldest in an uninterrupted genealogy of authorization and legitimacy. But these tangible hierarchies weren't universal to our species, and most of us formed associations and societies without such formal and self-evident divisions. Those of us who could, who remained mobile and flexible and evaded the traps of local climates and deteriorating ecosystems, nurtured egalitarian cultures which, because they didn't require the perpetuation of awe that is essential to hierarchical control, never produced the artifacts we've come to associate with civilization.

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