Edward Sapir said,
The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group… Forms and significances which seem obvious to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out the patterns; outlines and implications that are perfectly clear to these may be absent to the eye of the onlooker.
As Kluckhohn put it,
Any language is more than an instrument of conveying ideas, more even than an instrument for working upon the feelings of others and for self-expression. Every language is also a means of categorizing experience. The events of the real world are never felt or reported as a machine would do it. There is a selection process and an interpretation in the very act of response. Some features of the external situation are highlighted, others are ignored or not fully discriminated.
Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole their experiences. The language says, as it were, notice this, always consider this separate from that, such and such things always belong together. Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of life.
That explained a lot of what Phædrus had heard on the psychiatric wards. What the patients showed wasn’t any one common characteristic but an absence of one. What was absent was the kind of standard social role-playing that normal people get into. Sane people don’t realize what a bunch of role-players they are, but the insane see this role-playing and resent it.
There was a famous experiment where a sane person went onto a ward disguised as insane. The staff never detected his act, but the other patients did. The patients saw he was acting. The hospital staff, who were playing standard social roles of their own, couldn’t detect the difference.
Insanity as an absence of common characteristics is also demonstrated by the Rorschach ink-blot test for schizophrenia. In this test, randomly formed ink splotches are shown to the patient and he is asked what he sees. If he says, I see a pretty lady with a flowering hat, that is not a sign of schizophrenia. But if he says, All I see is an ink-blot, he is showing signs of schizophrenia. The person who responds with the most elaborate lie gets the highest score for sanity. The person who tells the absolute truth does not. Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Phædrus had adopted the term static filter for this phenomenon. He saw that this static filter operates at all levels. When, for example, someone praises your home town or family or ideas you believe that and remember it, but when someone condemns these institutions you get angry and condemn him and dismiss what he has said and forget it. Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions and preserves the desirable ones.
But it isn’t just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data. When you buy a certain model of car you may be amazed at how the highways fill up with other people driving the same model. Because you now value this model more you now see more of it.
When Phædrus started to read yachting literature he ran across a description of the green flash of the sun. What was that all about? he wondered. Why hadn’t he seen it? He was sure he had never seen the green flash of the sun. Yet he must have seen it. But if he saw it, why didn’t he see it?
This static filter was the explanation. He didn’t see the green flash because he’d never been told to see it. But then one day he read a book on yachting which said, in effect, to go see it. So he did. And he saw it. There was the sun, green as green can be, like a GO light on a downtown traffic semaphore. Yet all his life he had never seen it. The culture hadn’t told him to so he hadn’t seen it. If he hadn’t read that book on yachting he was quite certain he would never have seen it.
A few months back a static filtering had occurred that could have been disastrous. It was in an Ohio port where he had come in out of a summer storm on Lake Erie. He had just barely been able to sail to windward off the rocks through the night until he reached a harbor about twenty miles down the coast from Cleveland.
When he got there and was safely in the lee of the jetty he went below and grabbed a harbor chart and brought it up and held it, soaking wet, in the rain, using the boat’s spreader lights to read by while he steered past concrete dividing walls, piers, harbor buoys and other markers until he found the yacht basin and tied up at a berth.
He had slept exhausted for most of the next day, and when he woke up and went outside it was afternoon. He asked someone how far it was to Cleveland.
You’re in Cleveland, he was told.
He couldn’t believe it. The chart said he was in a harbor miles from Cleveland.
Then he remembered the little discrepancies he had seen on the chart when he came in. When a buoy had a wrong number on it he presumed it had been changed since the chart was made. When a certain wall appeared that was not shown, he assumed it had been built recently or maybe he hadn’t come to it yet and he wasn’t quite where he thought he was. It never occurred to him to think he was in a whole different harbor!
It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.
If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past facts which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too.
Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life-saving skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia, so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding like that of the bruj’o in Zuni with the same kind of vigor it uses to destroy crime. It can’t distinguish between them.
Phædrus recognized that there’s nothing immoral in a culture not being ready to accept something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the gains the culture has made in the past. The solution is not to condemn the culture as stupid but to look for those factors that will make the new information acceptable: the keys. He thought of this Metaphysics of Quality as a key.
The Dharmakaya light. That was a huge area of human experience cut off by cultural filtering.
Over the years it also had become a burden to him, this knowledge about the light. It cut off a whole area of rational communion with others. It was not something that he could talk about without being slammed by the cultural immune system, being thought crazy, and with his record it was not good to invite that suspicion.