Category: Thoughts

What do you believe? That the earth is round, there is a God, this is the twenty-first century? Have you ever examined your beliefs and how you have become married to them? Most people never question their beliefs. They simply accept them as truth, as matter of fact. We also assume our beliefs are universal and innate. This lack of perspective fuels ignorance which breeds conflict. We cannot change other people so let us examine belief in an attempt to be a better version of ourselves.

Believing in something lends energy to it. Belief is the substance of our experience. What we perceive is the product of what we believe. To expound upon this I will examine some ideas commonly associated in our western culture. Notice how this first statement sets off a chain of ideas. While a person may not be mindfully aware of this domino effect, they certainly believe it subconsciously: I must remain faithful to my chosen partner because the priest and society tells me it is so. I want to follow this rule because it is important to be seen as a good person and also, I desire to go to Heaven when I die. If my reputation is tarnished I will be an outcast in my community. People will not spend time with me and I may struggle at work. If I cannot work, I will not be successful. Then I will have limited funds with which to buy material things to make me happy. Lack of happiness leads to misery and maybe despair. I will get depressed and perhaps suicidal, wishing for my life to be over. When illustrated like this it seems blatantly absurd. Yet, millions upon millions of people behave as if it is so. This is the power of belief.

Belief is at the core of the human experience originating with the most prolific belief, that we can die. Fear of death has shaped humanity profoundly. We have used the threat of death to control people in countless ways. People endure and suffer because they believe it better than the final alternative. The other principal belief we hang on to is our birth. No one experiences their birth firsthand and yet we all believe that it happened to us. We watch a birthing and this leads us to assume that it happened to us. The two experiences are not the same.

Humans rely heavily on their basic beliefs because they are the roots needed for every other belief to blossom. Politics, religion, and family are some hot topics that come to mind. How much violence and suffering has humanity initiated and endured from these three pillars alone?  Think about the countless debates humans have had and will continue to have in the spirit of God, morals, values, laws, progressives, conservatives, and responsibilities. What is right for one person most certainly will be wrong for another. Bad and good are values assigned by cultures. Nature does not believe in anything. It just is. When winter arrives and kills off much of the living, do the plants whine and shake a fist at the heavens? Yet, when humans encounter other humans with radically different views they lash out with judgement and in some cases violence. The next time someone says or does something that you vehemently disagree with think of yourself as a stout sunflower staring down a flurry of snowflakes. Everything will be alright.

Belief starts in early childhood when we learn to communicate with other humans. The messages our caretakers shower upon us are loving and nurturing, but they also plant the seed of belief. It starts with language. Parents usually begin identifying objects and people. By labeling things, the mind starts to believe. This is the formation of the ego. It believes it exists because people communicate with it as well as nurture it. If someone perpetually spoke in your direction, gestured at you, and gave you food, you would come to a stark conclusion; you exist. Among the first identities we believe in is whether we are a boy or a girl. Indeed, we only believe we are male or female because our parents tell us it is so. Then it is solidified and perpetuated by peers and society because they too were told at a young age what it means to be a man or a woman. For those few people who might have been raised by wolves rather than other humans, they too are not immune to the power of belief. It is only that their belief systems will be wildly different than that of common society and communities of people. Beliefs become a self-reinforcing web beautifully woven, that no ego can escape. This is why it works so well.

Collective belief describes how groups of people agree upon and manifest their reality. Evangelism is a prime example of this. When people become filled with the Holy Spirit and pass out , that experience was created by not only the person touched, but by the entire congregation. If the room were filled with skeptics, it would be less likely to happen. Another great example is media. People watch their favorite news program such as Fox News or CNBC because it reinforces their belief system. They hear the side of the story that most aligns with their perspective and often it is delivered with such passion and gusto that it becomes difficult not to identify emotionally.

The key to dispersing the web is to stop blindly believing something if it is not in your experience. In fact, one should not indiscriminately believe unless it is directly experienced by them. This is the trap of spirituality. Seekers will hang on every word of a guru, mystic, or spiritual teacher in the hopes of gleaning some nugget of truth. This forms the basis of dogma and spreads like wildfire. The egoic mind clings to belief, literally, for dear life. So many traps lay bare for seekers to stumble into. For example: there are gurus who will take your money with promises of special powers. Some teachers will impress upon their students rules and steps with which to attain enlightenment. The irony here is that these pitfalls only snare us if we have something we need to learn by them. So, in a twisted way, these teachers are helping us along our path.

When one starts down the rabbit hole of spirituality, little do they know, their reality has begun to unravel. This is usually done slowly so as to not unsettle the mind. If the illusion were to disappear abruptly, the mind would struggle to process the new perspective. In other words, the truth is so radical, it is a medicine best taken in small doses. This is the purpose of awakenings. Each one reveals a perspective that subsequent awakenings can expand upon. What we consider real is a beautiful illusion. It is a network of beliefs layered and tightly woven such that each belief is predicated upon another. This intricate weave forms our experience, our reality. To examine each belief on its own is the only way to unwind the tapestry. Thread by thread it comes undone until there is nothing left. It is inevitable that the illusion will fail and the truth will be known. Reality is born of belief.

Perspective is unique to the one experiencing it. “It’s all relative.” This popular statement means the same thing. Every experience or thing exists in relation to something else. This is very important to understand because it is the source of all human conflict. Each human being experiences their own reality. This is the reason we struggle to understand one another. This concept of a separate or unique reality is a little difficult to apprehend given our indoctrination, but maintain an open mind for the duration of this post and it may become more clear.

The dogma that science adheres to is that reality is an objective thing that can be measured and observed and the entire universe resides inside that reality. Through my own experience, I can assuredly state this is not the case. However, it is what ninety-nine percent of humans buy into. Do not make the mistake of assuming that the majority is infallible. The majority is also just a collective perspective. The universe is set up in such a way that we think we are separate from everything else and vice versa. It is the atlas of the grand design for us to believe this. Only when we transcend this belief of separateness does this become clear. That is beyond the scope of this post though and it will be discussed in future posts as it is a more advanced topic. Instead, this post will dissect perspective to show how it shapes our reality and our relationship to one another.

This may seem trivial and obvious, but it is hugely important to acknowledge and understand the concept of relativity. We only know darkness because of light. Something is only soft in relation to something hard. Silence can only exist relative to sound. Something only arises in the presence of another. A thing can only exist if you give it attributes or qualities. Those labels that you ascribe to said thing are in relation to another thing. In describing a tree we may say that it has a slender, brown, rough texture on one end and a robust, green, waxy and smooth texture on the other end. The adjectives used to describe the tree separate it and make it distinct from the wide, boxy, straight-lined, grey house next to it. Thus the tree emerges in our conscious mind and we give it the label of “tree.” This is how we create all of reality. We divide it then label those divisions so as to maintain a separate egoic self. Science is very good at doing this. In fact it is the entire premise of science. It is the nature of the egoic mind to separate, quantify, label, define, etc. Notice on a daily basis how often you find yourself pointing out distinctions between things and people. Its so habitual that we aren’t even aware we are doing it.  

One thing to consider is that when we define something we put limitations on it. A frog can only be a frog based on the qualities that we believe it to possess. Therefore, anything not having the properties of a frog by definition, cannot be a frog. It must be something else. And so it goes on and on to infinity. When we encounter someone, the mind immediately projects onto them labels and categories so as to be able to make distinctions between self and other. The egoic mind must make these distinctions in order to maintain the sense of self. So when we define those we meet, we are in a sense denying them to be other than these definitions. For example: we meet a well groomed man wearing a suit who happens to be driving a Mercedes Benz. Our mind has preconceived notions about people who present this way. Before we know anything about this man we have already put him in categories and given him qualities. Our interaction with him will be jaded and the potential to experience him as he truly is will be gone. This is the game reality is playing with itself. Not only are we the perpetrators, but we are participants. Some would say we are victims because there is something much larger than ourselves at play here. Victim is a label the ego likes to use. One who recognizes the game takes responsibility for it and the concept of victim no longer exists.

Since humans have the gift of self-awareness as well as the ability to form complex communication we find ourselves in a sea of vastly different perspectives. In speaking to one another, we find that other people don’t experience reality the way we do. Everyone has a unique perspective and opinions abound. This is the origin of all human conflict. We absolutely cannot understand why we disagree. The reason is that there is no objective version of reality. Do you honestly think that Mozart’s reality was the same as yours? Do you think Taylor Swift experiences reality the same way you do? Is your version of reality the same as Hitler’s? These examples may be extreme, but they more clearly illustrate the point. Every human system interprets sensory input differently. No two people identify with the same thoughts or feelings. The mind conceives of different concepts when interpreting experiences. Everyone’s perspective has been and continues to be shaped by their experiences. This is so fundamental, but almost no one considers it. No two experiences are the same, and each human being is the sum of their experiences. Since everyone’s perspective is unique there must be as many versions of reality as there are perspectives. Reality is ever evolving infinite perspectives overlapping which collaborate and co-create.

In reality, there is no such thing as moral objectivity. The idea of right and wrong doesn’t inherently exist. These are ideas that we have created and projected onto reality. As a collective society we decide how we want to live by creating laws and social norms. In nature it isn’t bad to commit murder; we as a collective have assigned that value to murder. Again, this is very important to comprehend. We move through each day labeling things as right and wrong, good and bad, pretty and ugly, etc.  These are all arbitrary values we project onto our experiences. By doing so we paint ourselves into a corner and create our own suffering.

When we incessantly label and define everything around us we are experiencing our own projections. Mooji said, “You are perceiving what you are conceiving.” Not only do we deny ourselves the perfection that is happening all around us at every moment, but we also limit our experience. This life can be so much more than the mind can imagine if only we’d be open to the possibility. Concerning our interactions with others, if we can be mindful that everyone’s perspective is unique and that placing values and judgements on our experiences only limits them, we’d find ourselves living a joyous and harmonious life.