The Hole in Our Mind

By Anna Von Reitz

One summer a friend of mine worked in a tomato harvesting factory.  She worked in the Sorting Room -- a huge warehouse-like facility with conveyor belts running along tables and teams of workers standing on either side of the belt pitching rotten tomatoes into bins and gradually separating produce quality fruits from canning quality fruits.  It was quite an operation and over time, the workers became very adept at plucking tomatoes off the conveyor and sending them here, there, and everywhere that tomatoes needed to go. 

Our brains have similar capacities for sorting information.  We are able to process large quantities of input via our neural nets and respond appropriately most of the time based on our sensors and our information sieves that sorts out our thoughts the same way that those workers sorted tomatoes. 

Some thoughts are big enough to rise to the level of consciousness, while other thoughts get shuttled away into the trash bin or warehoused for future reference or even acted upon without any very conscious thought taking place at all.  We even have built in information categories that batch together similar thoughts or similar kinds of information and we have biases related to our perceptions that help keep us from being overwhelmed. 

We learn that, statistically, that tickle on the arm is most likely caused by a mosquito, not a spider, not a wasp, not a bee, not a twig hanging down from a nearby tree. So we act upon our sensory perceptions according to patterns and habits and prior experiences, which provide us with assumptions about all the various stimuli we receive.

Sometimes this lack of care in observing actual facts in favor of assumptions about facts costs us very dearly, especially when our assumptions are provably wrong and we cling to them anyway. 

This is what I call the "Hole in Our Mind" phenomenon. Suddenly, without any warning, a gaping hole appears in our mental conveyor belt and all the "tomatoes" -- our thoughts -- get dumped into an unseen trash bin under the table and we just carry on as if nothing happened.

Mankind as a whole isn't able to deal with certain perceptual realities.

For example, we consistently get mixed up about the relationship between an actual thing and a symbolic representation of it.  This weakness is fully exploited by the purveyors of money, who give you an intrinsically worthless representation of value -- a coin, a pretty piece of paper, a wampum bead or whatever -- and confuse you into believing that the symbol has value commensurate with what it represents.

Queen Semiramis began the practice of representing the value of a bushel of wheat as a small gold coin with a picture of a basket of wheat stamped on it.  That way instead of transporting actual bushels of wheat back and forth, she could just move the value of the wheat using symbols.  Money was born. 

Suddenly, you could represent the market value of forty bushels of wheat as a small pile of coins, and that was, of course, very convenient.  As long as nobody caught on or objected, you could trade the value of those forty bushels of wheat ---supposedly represented by those forty little coins---- for ten horses and two large sacks of figs.  Why not? 

The fact that there is in fact a very large difference between forty bushels of wheat and forty little coins "representing" wheat quickly got lost in the neural net, dropped through the hole in our mind, and the game was on.  Suddenly those little gold coins were thought to have intrinsic value in-and-of-themselves.  They were magic coins. They could be transformed into any good or service so long as people would trade for them. 

Alas, inflation set in, and the Queen began stamping two bushels of wheat on each coin.  By the end of the first great experiment with money, there were thirty-one tiny, tiny wheat baskets being stamped on each coin and one day the people woke up and said, "There's no way that this little coin is worth thirty-one bushels of wheat!"

Everyone got upset.  Wars were fought.  The economy and the civilization it supported collapsed. 

Did we stop and learn anything from that?  Not a bit.  The idea of "representing the value" of actual commodities using coins and other symbols--even digits in a bank ledger--- had taken hold, and even though we have cause to know that this is logically impossible, we can't seem to shake the delusion. It drops right through the hole in our minds. 

No doubt our Creator knew about this design flaw in our logic sensors and that is why at Exodus 20:4 we read that we are not to take unto ourselves any graven image "representing" anything at all.  What does it mean to "take unto" ourselves?  To accept in trade, to receive, to hold onto graven images--- money, in other words. 

As usual, the Bible forewarns us and gives us good advice, which we ignore and then suffer from as a result.  Within the context of scripture, graven images  are idols and the use of money to "represent" other things is every bit as much a part of idolatry as using a little carved statue to represent a god. 

And it is just as silly and primitive, too. 

Consider this fact--- if I were to gather all the priests and pastors and teachers of Islam together in a great convocation --- who among them would not be an idolater if I had them empty their pockets?  

Somehow we have to mentally grow up and step far enough back and away from what we are doing to realize that the whole idea of money is an illusion which has enslaved us and made us dependent upon the purveyors of money---which is nothing but another "manufactured commodity" to be managed and manipulated by goons. 

We are so far deluded about money that we don't even realize that we can carve our own littleTiki-gods and set a price on them and be much farther ahead without all the middlemen.

Maybe its time that we took the Bible's advice, realized that symbolic thinking is not our forte, and focused on learning to give each other credit, instead.  

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See this article and over 800 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com