Cognitive Dissonance is a term we might encounter in this modern age full of action and ideas. Definitions vary slightly, here’s a basic meaning:
Cognitive dissonance, anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cognitive-dissonance
So cognitive dissonance deals with internal conflict between our ideas, beliefs, or values. We simultaneously think or believe two different things that contradict each other — both cannot be true or correct but we think they both are.
Another dissonance we can encounter happens between our lived experience and our intellectual, mental world view. A contradiction between the experiences we have and our understanding of how the world and everything works. This dissonance can seem normal, but does hamper our tendencies to move in harmony with what happens around us.
An example:
The personality I used to exhibit was very confident that everything important could be explained with the tools of science and logic. Even years after I found meditation and transitioned into a world with more mystical dimensions of experience, the science/logic mental structures and processes were still largely intact. I had many experiences; every day there were tears and bliss and previously-unknown states of being.
But at the same time I still, in part, interpreted the world through the same old lens of science and logic that had served this person throughout his life experience. Science and logic still seemed to explain so much, although they couldn’t explain the experiences I was having.
Like this life proceeded for years, mystical experiences deepening and stubborn intellectual habits explaining everything except my own experiences. The conflict was obvious but it still persisted. Old and successfully self-reinforcing habits are not easy to discard.
The breakthrough came recently and suddenly. One day the intellectual mode of examining everything with science and logic just seemed less important. An internal shift had finally happened, and the mind understood the primacy of experience. The intellect re-assumed its original and proper role as a tool of the self, a tool to be used intentionally and not something with its own agenda to define and categorize the world based on very limited information.
Now there was an integration and merging of the understanding that came from experience and that which came from the intellect. It felt like a burden had been removed, a weight lifted. Now experiences happen and the mind doesn’t have to run after picking them apart and re-defining things until they can agree with previously-established models of reality.
Integration
Integration here refers to the process by which we reconcile these two worlds that so often seem to contradict each other:
- World of Experience, the daily experiences we have and the special, rare, and unusual experiences.
- World of Thought, the mental model we build of how the world works
Our intellectual models of the world have to allow for the experiences we actually have. We don’t have to explain all our experiences, but our experiences can’t contradict our explanations.
We might reduce our own confusion and stress by broadening our mental models of the world enough to accommodate our actual experiences.