What was I thinking about earlier? Man versus the monster. Fuckers love to wax pop-philo over this one. I guess it verily begs the question, what is this monster you speak of? I’ll tell you what it is. The monster is the unknown, manifest in our inability to conceive it. Our generations of primitive survival-think has led us into mental habits that are such well-worn pathways that we consider them to be permanent, instinctual. One of the most hard-wired habitual pathways is predictive behaviour. We’re hooked on predictive ruminations. In fact – civilisation, as we know it, could not exist without applying this skillful illusion. We identify patterns; name and categorize the patterns we discern in the swirl of relationships that is the universe. We get to know these itemized patterns and build predictive strategies based on observed behaviour. We store these patterns and use them to further explore our reality – it spreads out from our first spark of consciousness like an organic root spray. What we know contributes to what we learn.
We navigate in this way. We’d be lost without it.
So we’re motoring along, using our categorical pattern prognostication strategy. If we are very, very (un)lucky we perceive something that doesn’t fit into our well-established root system of conception. In fact, it is so unlike any aspect of the known navigable universe that we suffer a near catastrophic derailment of the whole system. OR, we make a major leap and jam the new thing into one or more slots in a wild effort to deal with the situation. But it just gets crazier from there, because what our mind is telling us we are perceiving may not make sense with our predictive systems and how we are comfortable with how things are supposed to work.
In this, there are monsters. The unknown. This is why children are often quite concerned with “monsters” because they are still developing their cognitive systems and there are a lot of things that they don’t have a reality for yet. So, if they see something completely new… or even slightly off kilter from what they are used to, they get quite freaked out and often report unusual perceptions.
