We get invitations to question and critically reflect on meaning perspectives almost every day. Generally, we just don't see them. The meaning perspectives get in the way. All our meaning perspectives are as smart was we are, and they defend themselves as well as we defend ourselves. In that we feel very deeply if without question that these meaning perspectives form absolutely indispensible parts of our identity, our ego defends those perspectives and what we feel is our identity from any disruption caused by questioning and critically reflecting on these meaning perspectives. This makes for a false and unhappy dualism within our whole being. Our identities serve as a presence in the world and to our selves. Identity gives us a sense of substance, or existence. As such, our ego protects our identity as it protects meaning perspectives. The existential paradox that arises from this rather neat arrangement comes when we discover that such a defensive mechanism leaves us wide open for acting in destructive ways to others and to ourselves. The invitation to question and critically reflect may feel like a threat, but it's also an invitation to something life enhancing and even life saving. We also end the false duality through resolution not through struggle and inner domination. We exist as a whole being ready to find our natural inner unity.
The invitation to question meaning perspectives comes every time we experience a critical moment. These critical moments come when we experience something directly that causes us to feel cognitive dissonance. Many in the Middle Ages through the Renaissance followed Aristotle's, often called "The Philosopher," views of reality absolutely. If he said something, it was a fact. To paraphrase a bumper sticker: "The Philosopher said it. I believe it. That settles it." One such believer was taken to see a dissected body and shown how the nerves actually go to the brain and not the heart as Aristotle asserted. The man felt a disruption, a dissonance in his thinking, in his cognition—cognitive dissonance. After a moment he answered, "That's very convincing. If Aristotle didn't say otherwise, I would believe it." This answer represents a meaning perspective, thus identity, defended by our ego using the powerful tool of self-justification.
When we say, "I am a believer in Aristotle," we make that belief an essential part of our identity. We actually say, "I be a believer." We have made that belief a way of establishing our public persona, our external self, and we don't want that persona violated. We don't want to question or critically reflect on the meaning perspective that represents. We can see this as an amusing and harmless delusion on the part of the Aristotle believer, but if he were a physician, it might become quite a dangerous belief and justification.[115]
Even more dramatically, defending meaning perspectives and identity can put our whole being in jeopardy. Many years ago, I began to experience incidents of profoundly disabling vertigo. The incidents were increasing in number, and my life looked as if it would take a permanently disabling turn. A doctor told me that he had heard in the hallway of some medical conference that reducing salt had helped some patients with this disorder. I was quite a salt eater at the time ("I am a salt eating person" or "I love salty foods"), but that dissonance didn’t keep me from taking salt completely out of my diet. My meaning perspective told me I couldn't give up salt. My whole becoming self told me I could give up disabling vertigo, and the salt as well as the vertigo ended. However, I have told others who would benefit from such a choice in diet any number of times, and I was often if not almost always told things like these: "I couldn't give up cheese," "I couldn't give up salt," and "I don't think that would help." The meaning perspective and our identity trumped the well being of the whole being.
I have seen this self-justification, sometimes in the form of simple denial, most strikingly in students with diabetes 2. One woman told me that she and her family loved to cheat on their diabetic diet together: "It's our favorite thing to do." She died—death by denial, death by meaning perspective, identity and ego.