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Writer's pictureLaura Grá

Preconceptions: the upside down ideas of a stale mind

Updated: Mar 5, 2020

Our lives are fashioned by the tendency to build various patterns: behavioural, linguistic or emotional. These patterns are the outcome of the empirical experiences in our living environment. Normally, most of us are in search of structure, meaning, rules, forgetting that all these unwritten set of regulations imposed by the society are theoretical guidelines established in a certain time sequence according to the necessities of an entropic context. Taking seriously this social law facilitates the birth of preconceptions,as sole prejudices against our selves.

Preconceptions appear from our inner fear of daring, of thinking out of the box, of dreaming, of escaping from the society, from ordinary . They work against our freedom of thinking constructing an armour of judgemental concepts. Like the construction of the term ''preconception", its meaning lies in the very body at the word aiming at the prefix "pre"that stands for "ante" or "fore" experience happening before even the conception has been built. Preconceptions encompass the situations prior an idea or the concepts before they come into existence, so we could say that a preconception is a hasty and undocumented notion that foreshadows a bleak future of a theory without even giving it the chance of reaching the state of self-assurance. Preconceptions are like buttercups:they look colourful and bright, but in fact they keep the poison of a stiff thought in them.

Have you been apprehended by preconceptions?

Everybody considers himself or herself as being free of these toxic elements of a stern mind or there are others who see preconceptions as true symbols of a balanced society but not naming them as we all do. There are two categories of people: the ones who think they have some preconceptions but they are not affected buy them and those who believe they don't have them at all but, in fact they are captured by them. In reality, we think each person suffers unwillingly from narrow-mindedness at a certain point in life. We shall identify two types of preconceptions: the inner ones that inhabit the structural thinking of our minds,coming from within and outer preconceptions, the ones invading our inspirational thinking acquired as social impulses from the external territories of our mind. The most dangerous preconceptions are the inner ones due to their sense of intimacy with our ideas. These kind of mind prejudices were born in our childhood at the same time with the inception of thinking process. They have been germinating into their formal conceptualization of our inbuilt tendency to find the accurate ideas about our existence. The inner preconceptions follow the internal ethics of our mind in accordance to the universal belief in beings beyond our reach, like God. It is the inner preconceptions that process mechanical duality of knowledge.:on the one hand, representing certain conceptions having its roots in our pattern of thinking and on the other hand, being in relation to subsequent notions that fit to our cognitive paradigm. For example, we believe in God's existence and when we hear a Big bang theory's enthusiast speechifying about the cosmological model of the universe, an ironic smile of "we know better" will bloom on our faces , reflecting that this idea contradicts our established set of knowledge regarding the topic.

Another way of exemplifying the bipolarity of preconceptions is that referring to our tendency of treating new information with a self-conceited doubt, even if we don't know exactly what it's all about.

Other sample of inner preconception is the one in which we find out about an alternative system of education and in a ready-made impulse we react in total lack of trust, dispelling the radiance of the novelty.

Another one could encapsulate the imagine of a middle-aged woman falling into temptation of wearing a fancy, defiant, made up of little fabric, backless, sleeveless, strapless dress; her natural drive would be to grab the dress and come out into the world in an impertinent and confident ostentation. On the other hand, her thinking pattern impregnated with the passive preconceptions advises her not to dare to wear such a dashing outfit,unsuitable to her age. Obviously, our preconceptions will force us to stage our performance into the world.

The outer preconceptions cause robust and addictive pattern of thinking inside the box filled with self-serving thoughts that concord to the guidelines of our society. The outer preconceptions are born from our universe of social superstitions representing vestiges of magic that lost their power.These kind of preconceptions encompass certain conspiracies of the concepts established by the society that is not ready to accept the new, the change,the fashionable and the modern twist of life.

Taking the example of a modern middle-aged woman again, this time being caught into the splendid captivity of her own 21-year old soul. She perceives the world as a playground, a fairyland where magic happens when you believe in it. The perception of the onlookers is totally in contradiction to what the woman really is. People see her like a lunatic with an inappropriate clothes and an unsuitable way of thinking and behaving, an outlandish creature who barged into their world with such an unexpected nerve. People are onlookers, they are not watchers, they are not paying attention due to their lack of care and even if they would care, they are afraid of something that is beyond their realm of comprehension. Preconceptions appear when we don't want to step out of our comfort zone because we prefer dwelling in a bubble of safety, not being exposed to the unknown. It is fear that is responsible for setting up our world of preconceptions, the one that provides a cluster of excuses, building a shelter from creativity and existential bravery. Preconceptions and social labelling go hand in hand shaping a moral matrix of the society that leads to false and deceiving standards.

We are all enslaved by this paradigm of thinking that postulates other people's peculiarities as social burdens cause they are unreachable to our average understanding.

The question is: How are we able to regulate our preconceptions in order not to get hold on our minds in a malevolent way?

Usually, our minds are prone to stimulate answers to our inner questions even we don't know anything about a situation that occurred. We shall be able to tame another hasty manner of judging people around us, by rooting them in a context,in an empirical environment. We propose the mechanism of soul mirroring which predicates the dissection of our thoughts and reactions and use the social enactment in order to accomplish a veridical perception about people's appearance and behaviour, by borrowing their part of reality for a while.

If we want to avoid the poisonous effect of preonceptions we have to enter in their own structure and dismantle it, little by little until they vanish. So don't be afraid of other people's judgement! Dream big, swim against the flow, climb the highest mountain,make mistakes, express your joy and your sorrow, sing in the streets, dare to fly! Don't set your own limitations and don't let others cut your wings ! Judge things with your soul, not with your mind!Soul, unlike the mind, doesn't have preconceptions.

COLOUR OUTSIDE THE LINES!

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