…the fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them.

HL Mencken

Neurons that fire together, wire together was a line I remember from the movie I saw recently.

You become good at thinking what you think. You become good at doing what you do.

The first time you think something. it is as if you roll a wheel across level ground. The twentith time you think it, it has gotten easier as if a rut has been worn into the ground of perception guiding the wheel on its way.

If we care about truth, then we will naturally want to percieve reality accurately because accurate perception is true perception. Thus the Buddhists tell us that we cannot see a thing clearly unless we are indifferent to that which we see.

So, where are we then when we take up a cause? Before we took it up, we were indifferent to it. At the time we took it up, our previous indifference allowed us to see it clearly and accurately and thus to make a good judgement about it.

But now, having seen it, we’ve engaged with it. It begins to be central to us. The more we work on it, the more important it begins to seem. What was once hidden has now been revealed and we see it easily where once we saw it not at all.

If we think the thoughts of an environmentalist, we fire the neurons of environmentalist thought. If we fire them, we wire them and what was before a level field of perception now begins to acquire the ruts of long use – the ease of habit – the current thoughts being guided by the ruts of the thoughts that went before.

Where once, from the clarity of indifference, we saw a significant pattern and decided to engage it, now from the habit of long practice, we can’t help but see the pattern everywhere and the more we see it, the more significant it seems to be and the more we feel called to engage it.

Where then lies truth?