Using beliefs versus abusing beliefs
Friday, July 20, 2007
You’re an explorer. You’ve decided life is more than just the daily grind. You’re on a mission to find out what underlies it. Like the Scooby Doo team, you’re a mystery hunter. But not for you the spooky fairground or the haunted mansion. You’re investigating the mystery of Life itself.
You look around to see if anyone else has figured it out. Plenty claim to have worked it out. They package their ideas as beliefs. And they want you to join in and share their belief. People take comfort in having shared beliefs. The more people they can get to believe their idea also, the easier it becomes for them to believe in it totally themselves. Ideas are like that.
Beliefs are just packages of ideas orbiting around a particular theme. The theme is the big idea. The mothership idea. And it is hungry for your energy. It lives and thrives by accumulating believers to feed it with belief energy. An idea can only run and run when it has legs. Yours!
So here you are in a whole world of beliefs and paradigms. They are all jostling and fighting for your attention. You have the one thing they need to survive. Attention.
To really understand a belief, you have to experience it from the inside. But there is great danger because once you are inside a belief, it has your attention, and it doesn’t want to let it go. Beliefs are clever little things. Devious even. They are structured to make it hard for you to let the belief go. Stop believing and you’ll be an outcast, an outsider. Stop believing and you’ll be… damned! Fear is a useful weapon in sustaining beliefs and retaining people’s energy and attention.
Explorers seek to live above beliefs though. Explorers seek freedom and liberation and inifinite states of energy and understanding. Explorers seek to improve upon what is known. That is abhorrent to beliefs. A belief has to be static, fixed and limited. Only by its defintion can it have life. Beliefs are threatened by evolution. Some beliefs even ban the concept!
But there are some benefits to beliefs. And we explorers don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater do we? What’s the point of exploring anything if we don’t take what’s of value from it. (Gosh, listen to me, I would have made a great colonialist!)
We can derive comfort and confidence from certain beliefs. We can use certain beliefs to give us a mental structure (a navigational point) with which to explore this life.
Imagine if you found yourself in deep outer space, a zillion miles from Earth and everything you know. You’ve no body, just consciousness. How would you know which way was up, or down, left or right? You wouldn’t. You would have nothing to navigate by. No way of understanding or relating to where you are. You would have to start naming things, and forming a belief about where you are. It’s made up. It’s your best guess. But it gives you a basic framework to work with. And you derive some comfort from that.
It’s like when the first European settlers got to America or Australia. Everything was new and unknown to them. So they would set up a village and name it after some town that was familiar to them back in the mother country. That made them feel more secure.
So, beliefs can be useful.
But, as stated, beliefs don’t like to let go of you. Beliefs as memes want to infect other people. They want you to become converts and apostles. Beliefs need you to ‘spread the word’ and pass on the virus. Beliefs need fresh host minds to propogate in. So, beware! If you use a belief, keep your escape hatch open. Don’t lose yourself in a belief. If you do, you’ll stop being an explorer and will instead be a believer. And believers abuse beliefs by seeking to infect others (often against their will) with the belief meme.
At least, that’s my belief! ;-) .
And you’re welcome to share it! :-))
You look around to see if anyone else has figured it out. Plenty claim to have worked it out. They package their ideas as beliefs. And they want you to join in and share their belief. People take comfort in having shared beliefs. The more people they can get to believe their idea also, the easier it becomes for them to believe in it totally themselves. Ideas are like that.
Beliefs are just packages of ideas orbiting around a particular theme. The theme is the big idea. The mothership idea. And it is hungry for your energy. It lives and thrives by accumulating believers to feed it with belief energy. An idea can only run and run when it has legs. Yours!
So here you are in a whole world of beliefs and paradigms. They are all jostling and fighting for your attention. You have the one thing they need to survive. Attention.
To really understand a belief, you have to experience it from the inside. But there is great danger because once you are inside a belief, it has your attention, and it doesn’t want to let it go. Beliefs are clever little things. Devious even. They are structured to make it hard for you to let the belief go. Stop believing and you’ll be an outcast, an outsider. Stop believing and you’ll be… damned! Fear is a useful weapon in sustaining beliefs and retaining people’s energy and attention.
Explorers seek to live above beliefs though. Explorers seek freedom and liberation and inifinite states of energy and understanding. Explorers seek to improve upon what is known. That is abhorrent to beliefs. A belief has to be static, fixed and limited. Only by its defintion can it have life. Beliefs are threatened by evolution. Some beliefs even ban the concept!
But there are some benefits to beliefs. And we explorers don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater do we? What’s the point of exploring anything if we don’t take what’s of value from it. (Gosh, listen to me, I would have made a great colonialist!)
We can derive comfort and confidence from certain beliefs. We can use certain beliefs to give us a mental structure (a navigational point) with which to explore this life.
Imagine if you found yourself in deep outer space, a zillion miles from Earth and everything you know. You’ve no body, just consciousness. How would you know which way was up, or down, left or right? You wouldn’t. You would have nothing to navigate by. No way of understanding or relating to where you are. You would have to start naming things, and forming a belief about where you are. It’s made up. It’s your best guess. But it gives you a basic framework to work with. And you derive some comfort from that.
It’s like when the first European settlers got to America or Australia. Everything was new and unknown to them. So they would set up a village and name it after some town that was familiar to them back in the mother country. That made them feel more secure.
So, beliefs can be useful.
But, as stated, beliefs don’t like to let go of you. Beliefs as memes want to infect other people. They want you to become converts and apostles. Beliefs need you to ‘spread the word’ and pass on the virus. Beliefs need fresh host minds to propogate in. So, beware! If you use a belief, keep your escape hatch open. Don’t lose yourself in a belief. If you do, you’ll stop being an explorer and will instead be a believer. And believers abuse beliefs by seeking to infect others (often against their will) with the belief meme.
At least, that’s my belief! ;-) .
And you’re welcome to share it! :-))
Labels: belief systems, beliefs, believers, paradigms
