The “Gating” of Attention to Symbolic Realities

What inhibits our growth and development and prevents real healing? We live in a society where we are taught, since childhood, not to pay attention to what feels important. We find we have to adjust our needs to the world and can only meet them symbolically. We develop "acceptable" substitute, symbolic, deflected, “should”, or trivial activities. From early on, we develop mental structures that, before we even know it, "gate" our cognitions and feelings to regressive secondary or symbolic realities. Our preconscious gaiting mechanisms determine what gets entered into our experienced reality.

These realities become all that we know and can even imagine as reality, even if we imagine ourselves as spiritual beings. Our lives, for the most part, become only a symbolic acting out of what we originally “knew” and wanted. We become “should-ists” rather than "is-ists”. We become obsessed with following (or resisting) “shoulds” and “responsibilities”. We end up believing our own propaganda and story about our lives and "happiness" (or lack of it). Currently many of us do a "spiritual bypass" using “spirituality” as a way of avoiding what is in front of our face.