“I think the most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”
Albert Einstein
It is often our beliefs that hold us in old paradigms that no longer serve our highest interests and indeed contribute to our personal and planetary suffering. Beliefs are the “stuff” of the mind. A place that the mind has come to concretize reality. From our beliefs come our opinions and often our judgements of self and others. It is the backbone of conflict on many levels.
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Admitting that we do not know is one of the most frightening things to our limited ego selves. Indeed our egos were created out of sense of not knowing at times we most needed to protect ourselves from feelings of vulnerability.
With steel willed tenacity, we will defend our beliefs at times because, to let them go, to change them leaves us feeling lost, unsupported and insecure. Strong beliefs become a part of how many of us identify ourselves, the sense of who we are. To challenge our beliefs is to challenge foundations we have lived with and known. Additionally, our beliefs are often shared with those we feel most connected to such as our family, peers and culture. To let go of these commonly held beliefs can feel like letting go of those relationships as well. One of our deepest needs as humans is to belong. Indeed we would not have survived without others to support us when we came into the world.
Not knowing how to navigate this immense world when we were young lead us into the world of the mind (with its beliefs) and away from our all knowing pure awareness. These beliefs were largely passed on by our families and culture. Not that this was wrong/bad. Indeed we needed to descend into the world of mind to help us navigate the larger world in a functional way. But something was lost.
That something is what keeps us searching outside ourselves in all directions in an attempt to relieve our discomfort from that loss (separation). Realizing who we really are and what we are up to lies beyond belief. And, many of the answers to our world issues will not be found in the land of current beliefs. Allowing ourselves to see beyond our current world view, maintaining a curiosity about what may be true, coming back to a deeper knowing inside ourselves opens up the field of possibilities and potential solutions.
When we recognize we are living in a world made of mind/beliefs, and mostly not directly experiencing life or being truly present in it. The mind/beliefs can create separation from our embodied presence. Life dominated by mind/beliefs, (head), crowds out other ways of seeing and experiencing the world and knowingly navigating within it. ie via intuition, gut/heart feelings. Notice how you feel when you go between these centers of being head, heart, gut. Our true knowing does not require belief.
The Importance of Questioning our Beliefs
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“At one point in time, we knew the Earth was flat, we knew that we were the center of the universe, we knew that a man-made piece of machinery could not fly. Throughout human history, intellectual authorities have pronounced their supremacy by ridiculing or surpressing elements of reality that simply didn’t fit within the framework of accepted knowledge”
– Terje Toftenes –
The Nature of Beliefs
“The reason you could not convince your friends in the past that the world is round, of course, is because you are so small in comparison to the earth. Since your experience is normally limited to a small geographical region, the earth appears flat even though it really is not. In other words, the apparent flatness of the earth is not a real flatness due to an earth that is actually flat, but rather is an illusory flatness due to the large size of the earth. To prove that the earth is round, you would need to go beyond your ordinary experience. For example, you could fly around the globe in an airplane, or catch a ride on the next space shuttle flight. But as long as you are confined to your ordinary experience, there is no proof that the flatness is an illusion, and no reason why you should not believe that the earth is flat.”
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“If people have been so deluded about reality in the past, how can we be so sure that we are not deluded now? As we have seen, just because our present notions of reality are consistent with our ordinary experience, does not make them true. Since our experience certainly has its limits, perhaps our idea of the objective world really is an illusion, just as much an illusion as the idea of a flat earth. What wonders might lie beyond the limits of our present experience? What truth might lie hidden beneath our present illusions?” Thomas J. McFarlane
The Illusion of Materialism
How quantum physics contradicts the belief in an objective world existing independent of observation: “Quantum mechanics demonstrates that the world as we commonly experience it does not, in fact, have an objective existence independent of its observation. This remarkable claim is entirely compatible with the claims of the mystics. See more
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“With spiritual work, the terms ‘is’ or ‘are’ become progressively replaced by the term ‘seems to’, which is due to the increasing realization of the degree to which perception is the mask that hinders truth.” David R. Hawkins
Transforming our Beliefs
“The reality of life is that all life is fluid. So any time that you feel rigidity…these feelings that say you have to do things a certain way…you know that it’s an illusion, because life itself is fluid…The big reality of life is that it is always changing. It is in complete motion all the time.” Maticintin, Wisdom Master
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The Biology of Belief
Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist and bestselling author of The Biology of Belief, advocates the idea that we have significant control over our biology, and with our intentions and beliefs we can ‘reprogram’ or ‘control’ our genes and our lives. See more
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Transforming deeply held beliefs
The KKK and racisim See More
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
Mahatma Gandhi