Why do you believe what you believe? We all believe things, but very few of us really take the time to question the why of our beliefs. Why might you believe or for that matter, not believe in God? Why do you believe in right of the government to impose laws? Why do you believe that one fast food establishment is better than another? Why do you believe in anything at all?
De-constructing our personal belief structure can be one of the most brutal things we do to our selves .It can be ego shattering. We often find that what we “believe” is nothing more than brainwashing. Granted, the scrub job was often done by well meaning people, (our parents, teachers whomever) but the end result is the same; a brain filled with codes and general purpose sub-routines that we follow without ever wondering just why.
I think each person has the duty to themselves to pull apart the very fabric of their beliefs and see what lies beneath. Find out why. Question everything. Then and only then can you truly understand who you are and really begin to think for your self. It can be a scary thing, and if you find out that in the end you are really just nothing, its o.k. You can start over. Like that movie guy said “you can’t fill a full cup”.
5 comments:
Belief/faith without experience to support it, is indeed worth questioning. However, that which we might want to believe in, may be beyond the language of the intellect. The thing is not the word (paraphrasing J Krishnamurti).
What concerns me more is "belief" in man-made constructs (i.e. governments, religions). To me it is irresponsible to "believe" in these entities, as an excuse for thorughly researching their activities and positions, and making a conscious decision about whether you support them.
Oh the long talks we have yet to have! *smile*--Lydia
Belief is a function of training we are most often forced to adopt. If we can break the old mode we can adopt a new preferred-belief. Ah.............but here's where it gets "tricky". Often, people find themselves "slipping back" to the old unpreferred-belief. Why? Usually, because they have this deep-seated sense (this underlying gut feeling) that, somehow, the old belief is "more real", "more solid", more "how things really are", than the new preferred-belief. The independent existence of the material world is an illusion. This is very startling--or it should be very startling.
As Niels Bohr once said, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
Schrödinger, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics, understood just how radical this is. To dramatize it, he imagined putting a cat in a box with a radioactive atom and a detector that would trigger a bottle of poison to break when the atom decayed. Since the whole thing is unobserved in the box, the state of the atom, and consequently the state of the cat, is not determinate. Just as the photon does not take one route or the other unless it is observed, the cat is not alive or dead unless it is observed. This is so outrageous that even some quantum physicists find it hard to swallow. Yet that is exactly what quantum mechanics itself says. There is even hard evidence now that large macroscopic objects can exist in these strange non-local quantum states. So, although the objects of the world do not actually exist objectively, they appear as if they did. Compare this situation with the words of philosophers
Franklin Merrell- Wolff and Immanuel Kant: “Just as we must regard the presence of objects as a seeming, and no more, so is the vanishing only a seeming. The nonderivative Reality is unaffected in either case. All existence and all change in time have thus to be viewed as simply a mode of the existence of that which remains and persists. . .The unity of experience would never be possible if we were willing to allow that new things, that is new substances, could come into existence.”
When this really sinks in. When you truly get and understand that there is no "real" reality, you will no longer have that lingering feeling that the old belief is more "real" than your new preferred belief. You will thereby not feel any deep-seated "need" to slip back to the old belief, because it is somehow more representative of "the real world".
These philosophers eloquently describe that "reality" itself is a human construct! In Hinduism, the concept of relative reality, "Maya," is illusion, the veil which seperates us from the Divine. Yet, Maya Herself is Goddess, not at all seperate from the Divine.
I agree that humans slip back into old "programs" more commonly than they actually can implement change.
I am interested in the idea of being "forced" to adopt training. I can imagine certain behaviors that we surely must adopt to function in soceity, but can you give me examples of the forced trainings that you are thinking about?
Namaste
--Lydia
I think nObOdy is referring to the parental influence, as well as certain professional ones. The biggest forced belief training that I think exists is religious in nature. It extends from our belief as children that our parents are the repositories of all wisdom.They tell us that there is a god of a certain type, and we tend to believe them, regardless of the fact that one religious system is no better than any other.I tend to think of it as an extension of the logical fallacy "argument from authority" and perhaps as well "argument from antiquity" This is why logic and rhetoric should be taught in high school again.
But to address Lydia's first comment, I think we should question all beliefs regardless of where they come from or how we arrive at them. In a universe of constant change and endless possibilities, we have to accept that any and all beliefs may be irrelevant at the current expression of being. Nothing can stand in the way of entropy.
It all starts with parents, at least for the individual. The “forcing” program of reality upon people happens at every level of life. Only when you break out of any form of social patterns can you start to get beyond the distortion of others. Someone has to take an amount of control in social or herd mentality and humans are herd animals at heart. Listen to the TV to your preacher, priest or whoever is you religious leader. Oh and please let’s not pretend that politics, News media, or just the simple sit-com are not for many people today there religion. We all know that people pray for moral guidance and life lessons from each of these sources. In all of these presents a paradigm they expect people to follow. In an age where people have studied how to influence groups of people and even individuals for well over 1000 years can we think that they are not “forcing” Ideals on the masses? Education is undervalued people are taught less and less critical thinking skills, logic is considered a non subject in public “education” all the while every aspect of life is increasingly edited and scripted. We are told to hate theses people to envy this person, this is impossible and nobody thinks like that. Peer pressure on an epic scale. Even hating Christians for persecuting the pagans is a farce. No one is clean no one can say we never…No one not even nobody. We are all trapped by expectations and thus programmed even when we think we are rebelling. But soon someone will push too hard and more people will begin to see that the we can choose what is real for us.
Post a Comment