DANGEROUS FILTERS O ur lives give us filters through which to view the world. When the social pressures of others begin to dictate the terms of those fil- ters, our very sense of cognition is altered. This chapter discusses the role of three of these socially dictated filters -- the media, our sense of community, and our pursuit of money. We live in an age of symbol manipulation, by television, popular music, press releases, movies, MTV, fax, VCR, newspapers, and so on. We hear the term "virtual reality" and wonder what it means; perhaps we really don't want to know the answer. The longer the symbols are manipulated the more they are accepted as reality. Quickly we stick labels on all that is. Labels that stick once and for all. By these labels we recognize everything but no longer see anything. We know the labels on all the bottles but never taste the wine. A child does not draw primarily what he sees on his retina but what he knows to be in front of him. But he makes a pattern of those elements, much as the ritual artist makes a pattern of the received forms of an icon, and so the drawing comes alive. The trained drawer acquires a mass of schemata by which he can produce a schema of an animal, a flower, or a house quickly upon paper This serves as a support for the representation of his memory images, and he gradually modifies the schema until it corresponds to that which he would express. It is not schemata that are the problem-there are "w" birds in Van Gogh's skies, and Leonardo used schemata-the problem
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