“You can see the flesh and bone component of your existence, but can you see the spirit component?”
“No. But we infer its existence based on its works and products.”
“I want you to pay close attention now: you just said you inferred its existence based on its works. In other words, your inference depends on the degree to which you can actually see its effect. What if you can’t see it?”
“Then we have no knowledge of it.”
“Based on this, then, have you not indeed defined ‘spirit’ as something of which you have no real knowledge?”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s what it comes to.”
“Then it is obvious that you people don’t really know the true nature of their existence.”
“We are unable to discern and comprehend with things that are outside our knowledge.”
“Yes, but since you can’t discern exactly what or how much you don’t know, can you actually tell the ratio of what you do know to what you don’t?”
“Well, no, for that we’ll have to know the exact amount of the things that we don’t know.”
“Since this isn’t possible…”
“It is impossible for us to know ourselves under these conditions.”
“Exactly! Without knowing the whole of something from its beginning to end, one cannot say whether it’s right or not, for what may seem right in the experience of an individual may be wrong in respect to the big picture. For example, the Earth that you walk on may feel as though it is flat, as for centuries it was thought to be by humans… Only after humans were able to rise above it and see the Earth as a whole were they able to realize its spherical shape!”
“Yes, but some already knew this without having to physically see it.”
“Indeed and were labeled crazy!”
Gonul joined in:
“So, it’s pretty much all about the conditionings that we’ve been exposed to then?”
“A very good point… what is and what isn’t ‘conditioning’ is what we need to define first. At birth, the human brain is open to receiving all kinds of information, just like a blank tape, on which all incoming data is recorded. So, if a baby touches something that is hot and his mother says ‘Don’t touch! It’s hot!’ he’ll know to record that particular impulse as ‘Hot: not to be touched’ so that whenever he encounters a similar wave of data, his brain will immediately make the judgment: hot. As such, he will also store cold and hard, then good and bad, then more complicated data until you finally have a brain that has formed with all of this programming!
“If the circuits of research, thought and evaluation have not been activated in his brain, he will live completely subject to the conditionings he receives from his environment and will be driven by his impulses, parting from your world like a robot programmed by his environment.
“But there is a much more important matter… Without really knowing the reality of the ‘human’ species, it is not possible to know how it gets conditioned and under which conditions!