Understanding Default Position Summary

[Juan Cruz Giusto]

“It’s hardest to see the ground directly beneath your feet.”

Default Position: It’s a position that a person holds without knowing that is a position. It is also a “natural” position, requiring no burden of proof. An overlooked assumption or perspective that masquerades as reality. You take beliefs as a given, without any burden of proof.

Examples

·         Atheism: They like to position themselves as having no position. They have a belief saying that there is no god.

·         Psychedelics: People assume that what they are seeing right now is Absolute Reality and with psychedelics you are just tripping.

·         Death: You believe that you will die.

·         Naïve Realism

·         Everything in the universe is rational

·         Reality is made out of discrete separate objects

·         Time is absolute

·         Energy is always conserved

·         You can’t get something from nothing

·         Occam’s Razor

·         Skepticism

·         Modern science is true because it works

·         Consciousness is in the brain

·         You are the body

·         Physical pain has to be pain and it’s bad

·         You have free will

·         Need to get married

·         Homosexuality is unnatural and unmanly

·         The educational system teaches truth

·         Enlightenment is an experience

·         Nihilism

·         Emotions are something that happens to us

·         Humanity is highly evolved

·         Society is healthy

·         Happiness comes from external conditions

There are no givens and everything must be empirically investigated.

How to face this?

1-      Raise your awareness

2-      Self-honesty

3-      Objectivity: Develop the capacity to look at a situation without any biases nor preferences.

Stop giving your beliefs special status!

[Morten]

I think this video fits nicely with this subject, to confront default position of "this we see is reallity"