Meditations on Psychology
I’m bias, being that I’m majoring in psychology, but I think psychology is the most important scientific field. The moment we created the atomic bomb, there could no longer be any doubt. We must understand the mind now that we, humans, are capable of destroying the planet. We are the first organisms, that we are aware of, that have an active influence on the course of our own evolution, the evolution of all other planetary life, and who hold the ecological fate of the planet in our hands. The factors that drive and control us are imperative to understand. I think psychology is the discipline that best addresses this issue.
There is no escaping the paradox that humans use the mind to study the mind. All scientists are dependent on the accuracy and objectivity of the tools they use to measure phenomena. Our minds cannot be objective in a strict and absolute sense. This train of thought could be expanded on much further, but it wasn’t the point of this post.
I had a thought a few moments ago that was triggered by the picture above. We use the mind to understand the mind. We have both conscious and unconscious dimensions of our mind. I can’t help but believe that there is a Platonic knowledge within all of us, a deeper and intuitive knowledge that most of us aren’t aware of, some catch glimpses of, and others are tormented by; why this is, I don’t know, but its existence is something I believe in.
Here is where it starts getting metaphysical and mystical. What if this deeper self is always there, knows you so completely that it understands you better than you are able too, and willingly withholds knowledge from you, knowledge it thinks you would not use well or that may cause you harm? What if for some reason it can’t help you? What if, what if, what if? What if this part of the psych is what we label God?
Is meditation, religion, psychedelics, forms of mental illness, or dreams glimpses of this deeper self?
Is our definition of science correct, or are we limiting what is understandable by the limitations of language? The truest irony I’ve experienced the last four years is that the more I learn, the more I understand that I know so little, and that there will be things I will never grasp. It’s a hard axiom to accept. I happily remain delusional to it for the time being.