The point of knowing, exploring and challenging worldview is that you open space for self-awareness. You see all of you - your past, your environment, your religion, ethnicity, the color of your skin - and how it fits in with the rest of the world. Understanding even the concept of worldview allows you to accept constructive criticism and to see how your actions and behaviors, regardless of intent, impact the world around you.
Exploring and challenging your worldview is an attempt to align your deep values with the world. It is more than simply respect, which, if you are unwilling or unable to dig deeper, is the basic standard. Challenging your worldview creates the moment that empowers you to change your mind about something you hold to be fundamentally true. Once you experience that shift - where your intellectual self displays momentary mastery over your intuitive self - you begin to search for it. It creates a hunger for it.
Much work has been done on how we settle on concepts and worldview. Jonathan Haidt posits that our limbic system acts first. This is the reptilian part of our brains responsible for our survival - our lizard brain. Once the lizard brain creates a position, the executive function (frontal cortex of the brain) goes into action to rationalize and protect that position. According to Haidt and many others, this is why facts very seldom shift a person from a position fundamentally held to be true. In many cases, it hardens the lizard brain position.
Finding ways to challenge your worldview create opportunities to de-link, even for brief moments, the limbic and frontal cortex. It opens you up to constructive criticism, new ideas, change, breaking bad habits and a whole new world of empathic understanding. The crazy part of this is, that if you don't understand this, you are unable to experience it at any level. This puts any challenge to your worldview into the wheelhouse of your limbic system where your survival instincts take over. You are unable to absorb the new idea.
Hamlin Garland once wrote, "the sun of each person's truth shines on the earth at slightly different angles."
We're all shadow dancing with each other.
