Language & the Filter of Social Reality

Some 200,000 years ago, “we invented language and began to talk. As we talked with each other, we began constructing symbolically represented models of the world to go along with and extend the perceptually represented awareness of the world with which all animals before hominids had lived. Life in social reality has many wonderful advantages, but also a fatal weakness. It is very hard for humans to remember that we built social reality ourselves, as a synthetic construction. Instead, we almost always think it is actual reality. Because of this, our awareness is limited to the way perceptions are filtered through social reality and reflected, to paraphrase Plato, as images on the walls we have built around us.

Research over and over again shows that what we think shapes what we perceive, and what we think is in turn largely shaped by the social reality we grew up in and have lived in since. … The first trap of ordinary consciousness … is being unable to see social reality for what it is, and therefore unaware that we go through life experiencing a limited and somewhat distorted representation of what we take to be the real world.”

Richard P. Boyle. “Realizing Awakened Consciousness. Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind.” Columbia University Press, NY, 2015.