Earblock

We define ourselves by defining the things we dislike or hate.

There is no real reason why, why we chose to hate certain things other than we need to hate them to be. Or perhaps there is a reason.

There is what I would want to coin "earblock" -- we hear what we want to hear.

Verbal arguments go on forever; we never give enough credibility to what might constitute good proof, and emphasized fatal errors, making them up even if they arent there. Whatever aids our cause, is whatever that is understandable. Whatever not, absurd.

Even when reading, where we are trained to believe readily what the books say, we experience "mindblock" where things simply do not go in. In a milder form, we dont remember what we read even though we understood and disagreed. In a stronger form, we dont even understand, not because they are incomprehensible, but because we simply refuse to understand.

How are we to understand this "refusal"? It is not a refusal out of a committment to disagree, but simply because deep inside, we don't agree; there is something within ourselves that rebels against understanding it, almost as though understanding it is an offense to our very nature; that to understand we would no longer be us. That understanding itself is antithesis to the existence of our selves.

And how can the self wants the destruction of itself!?

Thus we seek our destruction with each advance in understanding. To survive, we need to delineate what we want to understand, what we hate and what we cannot possibly tolerate.

p.s. It is enough to skim through quickly what I wrote. If you get it, then you got it. For an example of the feeling of "refusal to understand", read Hegel or Heidegger.