Megan thank you for the well written essay, it’s great work. I have a vague estimation that your statements about beliefs are perhaps an understatement and applies across the abundance if not all of the human belief systems (religion, politics, values, prejudices, fears, hopes, economics — endless list). By this I mean that it may be that our “thinking” is not what we generally define linguistically as what “thinking” is hardly at all. What if we unconsciously and in ways not yet understood are building our filters of perceived “realities” around what would actually fit closer to the words in English like “stories”, “myths”, “visions”, “dreams”, “identification”, “superstition”, “coping”, “fears”, “biological impulses” and so on? We look upon prior civilizations and see their concoctions that they considered reasoning and we don’t view much of their belief system as thinking at all. It would be my hypothesis that we are not different, that we are doing the same things that we see in the last 12 millennium or so of recorded history and are just as oblivious to it as those past cultures and civilizations.