When "Wrong" is all in Your Head

We are all born with the gift of purity—no predisposed opinions or biases to stop us from coming into this world as a completely clean slate. Unfortunately this precious birthright is snatched away from all of us not long after our lives start to progress as we are exposed to many different types of people and experiences. Our minds are quickly molded into something closely resembling the environment around us and often times we act not out of our own free will, but in learnt behaviors that respond to societal norms and expectations.  

We don’t get to choose the surroundings we start out in, and for a varying (or perpetual for some) amount of time, are not capable of viewing life from any perspective other than the reality we exist in. Until the day comes that we experience a new environment that requires modifying our behavior (and for some this day never comes), and as long as our basic physical and emotional needs are met, there seems to be no primitive factor that necessitates voluntary change or desire to fully understand another reality.

Keep this concept in mind the next time the urge to judge a situation you view as “wrong” arises, and try to ask yourself whether this situation really is “wrong” or just “different”. If one man is brought up in one religion and his neighbor is brought up in another very different religion, who is “right”? Chances are good that these two have one thing in common : they will probably both put a mental label on the other one as being off-track, in need of learning the “truth”, and so on. Maybe there will even be a lack of respect between the two, leading to larger scale conflicts similar to ones that have repeated themselves time and time again throughout the history of the world.

This type of instant classification we’ve been trained to do is what’s hurting us as a whole, and by “us”, I am referring to the entire world. Ultimately we are all living in the same home, facing the same problems, that lead to the same consequences, and by all making the same mistake—defining each other as “bad” or “incorrect” for the points of view we’ve adapted from various environments we did not choose to be born into—no progression can be made.