Welcome to our new Sunday Morning Service by Dr. Dean A. Banks, D.D. Every week Dr. Dean will be engaging subjects that are pertinent to your growth and expansion into recognition of; respect to; and communication with your inner spirit. Please feel free to comment or suggest topics for review. May the Divine always bless you and your families! ~Dean A. Banks, D.D.

SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE WITH
DR. DEAN A. BANKS, D.D.

"INDIVIDUAL PREJUDICES"

NOVEMBER 25

Each one of us, as individuals, has our own prejudices. Succumbing to external cues, internal programming and emotional reactions, we look at things with our own individual skews. Prejudice is an unfavorable/favorable feeling that creates and opinion based on thoughts without corroborating knowledge or reason. It is a pre-conceived notion that someone or something has an effect that you either desire or reject. It is based on a tendency that prevents an unskewed consideration of a question; a bias. A bias is a point of view that is based on a pre-conceived notion; usually arrived at by the ego. Remember, the ego’s job is self-survival and it will do anything to protect you. In order to conduct a truly scientific experiment about the origins of your behaviors, you must recognize and remove all personal bias. Objectivity requires that you separate fact from opinion. Facts are things that exist in time and can be observed, measured and logged. Opinions are a judgment rendered as to HOW the facts affect you; or others. To remove individual bias, you must not make conclusions about your experiment before all of the data is logged, collated and subjected to the Law of Parsimony. The source of the information that you gather is just as important as the information itself. Applying critical thinking will keep your individual bias at a minimum.

What is critical thinking? It is series of mental processes and skills that actively evaluate, analyze, synthesize, conceptualize and apply information collected from observation to reach the simplest answer or conclusion. It is process that employs Logic and the Law of Parsimony. Logic is the science that investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference through reason. The Law of Parsimony declares that when there are alternative explanations of events, the simplest one is likely to be correct. By utilizing critical thinking, an individual can analyze observations of their behavior and begin to get to the root of its origins. Without it, individual bias, guided by the ego, would come to conclusions based on protecting the fragile ego. In order to indentify individual bias, a person must look to the sources of bias.

When an individual conducts their own scientific experiment they must be very careful to not come to conclusions about the origins of their behaviors until all of the data has been analyzed by not just themselves, but another person who thinks critically. The choices an individual makes about what data is collected and how the data is presented can influence the outcome of the experiment. Are you aware of all of your behaviors and their outcomes? Are you not testing certain behaviors because you do not think they are relevant or they hurt you emotionally to even think about them? Always consider the source of what information is collected and how the information is collected.

The sample of your behaviors is important to revealing the underlying emotions that you express. The larger the sample of behaviors, the more information is available to arrive at informed conclusions. Randomly take samples of your behaviors at different times of the day or seasons. Note your reactions to environmental conditions at different times. A clear picture can only be seen when a significant sample of the bigger picture is collected.

An aid in accomplishing the gathering of informative data is to download and take a battery of psychological tests and surveys that reveal your emotions. These individual surveys of who and what you are can be quite enlightening. However, they should be used as an adjunct to the raw data you observe about your emotional reactions to your thoughts and your environment. Many times when people take surveys or tests they answer the questions the way that will make them look the most favorable. This is the ego kicking in again by protecting itself and making you look as good as possible. Use any tests and surveys to get a good look at your survival mechanism, but not as the definitive answer to the origins of your behaviors.

Finally, a scientific bias is always lingering in the shadows. What is it you are actually trying to assess? Are you designing your experiment to only reveal what you want to know about yourself or what you need to know? Are you examining all of the facts or are you examining the facts that won’t threaten what you are trying to discover? Are you overlooking obvious conclusions because you are trying to minimize your aberrant emotional behaviors? Are you truly conducting your experiment scientifically or are you just giving the appearance that you are? Being truthful is what the goal of science seeks. To understand who, what, where, how, when and why things occur the way they do and to design methods and techniques of making them better. Only through scientific experimentation can one cut through to the truth of what they are trying to understand. Only a complete analysis of the truth can be used to reveal your motivations and emotional reactions. Then, and only then, can you design a plan to minimize their deleterious effects and maximize their creative power.

Excerpted from the book "Spiritual Growth: Articles Of Expectation." Please click here to order the book:

https://www.createspace.com/3691279

©2017 Dean A. Banks, D.D. All Rights Reserved.