Our Prior Legacy

Summary

Former Zen monk Ivo Mensch borrows ‘priors’ from predictive neuroscience: the brain’s expectations, “best thought of as unconscious pre-existing beliefs”. They’re stacked, the deepest about selfhood and agency, beyond the reach of talk therapy. Deeper change needs embodied, emotional work, where “Language needs to be that of metaphor and the poetic.” Individualism, he argues, is “an oppressive social hyperprior”.

Rationale

‘Priors’ was among the ideas that pointed us beneath belief. Mensch stays mostly with the individual; we also look to the relationships and surroundings that hold priors in place.