With our electronic age, a tipping point in information overload may have been reached, requiring new levels of management, personal and social. Today, almost unlimited information calls to us, generating an infinite potential for the creation of more information.

 

Humans, solving both physical and spiritual problems of survival, may have undergone, individually and as groups, evolutionary pressures to evolve smarter brains.

 

That means we might adapt better to all this new information, but it also means each of us is faced with the responsibility to manage an ever larger world of ideas and speculation.

 

Most times, we don’t realize what’s happening to us. We religiously watch one or a number of Internet or television programs. We hear about things that happen around the world, especially the proliferating ways of being both good and evil.

 

Each time we entertain a new thought or idea, especially if it is something we haven’t thought of or heard of before, we are less free and more constrained to waste our time thinking about it. The new idea might solve our problems or even help us survive on any number of levels. Yet, sifting through an overabundance of information can waste the time we could spend on happier things—like the basic sensations of the world or living in the NOW.

 

The human mind may have evolved creatively in order to experience the world and survive in it. But might there be a limit to our creativity? Might an individual within a community feel the freedom of just being, or just existing without all those troublesome notices calling to us—all the details cluttering our minds?

 

We guilt ourselves, or are guilted into, feeling responsible for all the new ideas that flood our minds in this advancing technological, space, and entertainment-oriented society.

 

Feeling responsible, we may constrain ourselves from further thought on any number of issues. Incapable of compartmentalizing our brain’s functioning, or pushing away disturbing thoughts, we may feel responsible for making things right.

 

Somewhere within our mindset, models are built—models of how we think the world should be or behave. When information we get from the television, Internet, or books allow us to explore a new idea, before that understanding begins, we are sometimes uncomfortable—we see wrongness in new and surprising information.

 

For example, someone tells us about a political candidate who rivals our own. He tells us a fact about his candidate that might make us want to vote for him. At first we might want to close up, to deny that his candidate could ever have done anything good or right. The more the other pushes for their candidate, the more we resist. But if we are left to ourselves, some of us, on our own, may explore this new information and develop a new perspective on the other candidate.

 

We need to think about new information and that takes time, or wastes time, as judged by how these ideas occupy our minds, as opposed to the advantages they give to us for our personal survival.

 

When we finally understand a new idea, we obtain a new perspective that gives us a more realistic view of some Absolute Truth that may lie hidden from us. Many of us, from our own perspective, resist listening to or understanding ideas we consider other, those that conflict with our models of reality—the ways we tell ourselves the world should be.

 

A recent study shows that those who run away from the Truth are just as physically and psychologically healthy as those who embrace it. However, hiding from the Truth long-term is dangerous to an individual’s or society’s ability to survive. (e.g. If you deny a tree is falling on you and it is! If an asteroid is bound for the Earth, but you believe it isn’t! In both cases there may be creative options for survival by acknowledging the Truth.)

 

The ability of those who free themselves up by compartmentalizing their thoughts resembles the mental behaviors of those who run away from, or resist the Truth. The real question is whether the new ideas ever get their chance—whether they are ever considered helpful, educating our truths, thus increasing our ability to survive.