We Aren't Taught

More human sorrow comes from bad teaching than almost any other failure of mankind.
We aren’t taught our perceptions can fail us when we need them most. Instead, we are taught there is some hope we can rise by our talents and persistence to a place where we can see clearly whatever is referred to by the term "reality." We aren’t taught to distrust our own minds. And despite all the blather and verbiage about revelation, at some fundamental level of our mental processing, we don’t respect it. We are emotionally attached to it as Christians, but we don’t actually respect enough to take it for what it is. We insist it has to come through an intellectual filter which is hostile to revelation’s most basic assumptions.
We aren’t taught cynicism about our own inclinations. While we recognize on some level how our feelings and emotions can mislead us, we refuse to recognize the emotional aspect is hard-wired into our brains. We aren’t taught it’s our conscious minds as a whole which fail most. We aren’t allowed to see how this primary mistake is an insult to God, because we assume on some unconscious level God is accountable to our logical analysis. We don’t know how to make our conscious mind serve, but make it master of all things. Despite a vast wealth of proof we cannot unwind the emotional influences and fundamental biases, we insist we can somehow overcome that.
So when we celebrate how a positive emotion can change our outlook on life, we never notice how this gives the lie to our false hope in superior logic and scientific method.
We then paradoxically assume that thing called "love" is somehow magical and can’t be tamed. Yet we keep trying to control the source of affection like a druggie trying to enslave his own dealer. We aren’t taught how love can be built as a natural result of wise choices, because we ignore the source of wise choices in the first place. Instead, we react directly to the warm positive emotions as if they were something we can’t control without controlling the persons who seem to give us those feelings. We aren’t taught there is really nothing we can do, nor anything we should do, which binds another person’s choices. We think the harvest is something we can grab without having to sow.
We aren’t taught how the very thing which controls everything we see is itself not something we can get with our own perceptions. We aren’t taught this world, this realm of existence, isn’t the actual "reality" we need to worry about.
So we go through our lives constantly wounded and outraged, broken on the rocks of our failed understanding, all because we aren’t taught. It’s time to change the teaching system.