Knowing versus 'Knowing' 177approval of society to help them cope with any remaining traces of the
teenage mental conflict between logical truth and blind 'faith.'
Ideally, this internal conflict between facts and 'facts' would be
completely resolved during the teenage years and a person would be able
to enter adult life with Perceiver thought fully integrated, undivided by any
no-man‟s land of mental uncertainty. However, I suggest that there are
several factors which conspire to extend this mental contradiction into a
lifelong cold war between truth and 'faith.' Let us examine these points in
more detail.
Suppose that a person tries to resolve the conflict within his internal
Perceiver world by giving in to emotional 'truth' and therefore choosing to
base all of his 'facts' upon a foundation of emotional status. In other words,
he decides to put Perceiver strategy permanently to sleep, as a kind of
frozen statue staring mesmerized at the brightness of Mercy thought.
If the Perceiver observer is always passive, this means that 'truth' will
be 'believed' only if it comes from accepted experts or if it is burned in by
the extreme emotion of agony or ecstasy. Culture will become deified and
the parental gods of childhood, or their substitutes, will remain the
accepted gods of adulthood.
When we refer to people who follow only emotional 'truth,' we
probably think about jungle dwellers living in a primitive, isolated village
at the edge of the stone age. There is some truth to this image. Tribal elders
are obeyed and even worshipped.
Most village behavior is guided by
tribal custom, and culture can remain
unchanged for countless generations.
Traumatic experiences from nature
are a major source of Perceiver 'truth'
and fear of jungle powers, spirits, and
sacred sites determines many
Perceiver 'beliefs.'
However, modern man does not
have a monopoly on common sense and lately we have been learning that
in many ways the so-called primitive tribesmen are not actually that
primitive after all. Tribal elders often have a wealth of common sense in
areas such as herbal medicine and jungle survival.
I suggest that it is pain and pleasure from the physical body which
restricts Mercy emotion in the tribal individual from completely
mesmerizing Perceiver thought. These feelings generate common sense,
for instance, in areas such as medicine and survival. The primitive tribal
member‟s social behavior may be guided completely by culture, tradition,
authority, and fear, but the village in which he lives is also located very
close to the natural world. And, physical encounters with nature and
natural law help Perceiver strategy to learn principles of common sense.