Don't fence me in

People see what they want to see, what they expect to see and perhaps even more importantly, people do not see what they choose not too. Whether that choice is conscious or unconscious, human beings have an amazing ability not to see things that are counter to what they want to believe is true.

Limiting ourselves to particular news organizations, religious indoctrination, and regional beliefs; permitting only particular organizations to tell us what they want us to hear, keeping outside sources at arms length, limits our abilities to see the truth.

People claim they want truth, but usually what they mean is they want the truth as it lies within their personal belief system. Cross that line and they come up with all sorts of excuses for why that is not a good thing.

Different cultures have different lines and that is where mistrust, wars, bigotry, prejudice and misinformation comes from. People within every government, race, religion, ethnicity, whatever, have people whose job it is to convince them theirs is the best. The right one! The favorite.

It is a story of immaturity, of children vying for their parent's favor, of school yard bullying. It is nature's version of territorial rights. It is looking at the world through narrow parameters that eliminate all sights not acceptable and crushing all experiences into a form that fits a particular story.

Near death experiences translate the act of a brain disengaging into something people can articulate. We are a wondrous creation and our bodies can make sense of almost anything in some way that our culture has told us is possible.

If we need comfort badly enough our body can even provide that in some cases. Multiple personalities, supernatural creatures, wish fulfillment, call it what you like, it comes from within.

We are truly wondrous creatures who seldom know how, or chose, to use all of our gifts for goodness. Instead we limit ourselves to the things people invent to fence us in and inculcate us with from the day we are born. And, unfortunately, sometimes we even validate our less than good characteristics by justifying them according to whether they lie inside or outside that fence.