Much of how we see the world is not how the world actually is, but how we are.
Our individual conditioning presents us with very different interpretations and viewpoints of reality.
Our beliefs, thought patterns, feelings, programming, and instincts all offer very different perspectives on how the world works and what it is.
This is true for every human being.
Our religions, science, philosophies, politics, and every other set of ideas, ideologies, and belief systems are not how the world is, but how it appears to us based on a certain set of conditions.
All belief is a cover up for insecurity.
To simplify, a belief gets formed when we are presented with something we are uncertain of and begin to construct ideas about what we think is true or false about a situation.
This process covers up the fact that, deep down, we are all insecure about the moment or situation.
We use beliefs to cover up the fact that we don’t actually know the truth, and then we proceed to think that our beliefs simply are the truth.
This is something to marvel at.
A human being on an unconscious level can realize it doesn’t know something and then fool itself into thinking it does.
This is extremely profound.
To start this off, I want to define what a belief is:
A belief is something that is accepted, considered to be true or false, or held as an opinion.
Summary: A thought that you think is true or false
Our beliefs change every single aspect of our lives.
Our politics, diet, mental health, happiness, money, metaphysics, and epistemology are all affected by our beliefs (and a lot more are too).
There is not an area of our lives that goes untouched by our beliefs.
For now, I’m going to talk about beliefs and culture and their effects on you, and later I will talk about how beliefs work.
Ever since I was very young, I have been suspicious of cultures.
I was suspicious of groupthink and ideology, and I could intuit that something was off about them.
I could never completely make out why I felt this way, but I did, and I knew that much.
At this point in my life, I can say why I was suspicious of them.
Culture is a way of identifying with a larger sense of self and maintaining that identification at all costs.
Culture is a way for us to define who we are in relation to what we believe we are not.
Culture is something our minds construct and simultaneously something that constructs our minds; they coevolve.
Culture feels like what reality simply is once you are thoroughly programmed by it.
Why does culture exist? Culture exists for many reasons, but here are the main two:
Culture creates a collective identity, which makes it easier to survive and reproduce.
Culture is a higher-order phenomenon among social creatures.
Culture is a house of cards; each belief reinforces the other, and through that process, we create an elaborate view of the world.
This allows us to create things like laws, money, political systems, etc., which makes survival a lot easier.
All of these things are constructions that we have made.
Eventually we buy into them deeply enough, and they end up having a reality of their own due to our beliefs in them.
After we place a strong enough meaning on our own constructions, ideas, and beliefs, they then take on a life or reality of their own.
These constructions become our realities.
This is the power of belief.
So how do beliefs work?
A massive challenge that we all go through in life is the fact that we are born and know nothing.
When we reach age 2, we begin to slowly make sense of the world.
We begin to understand language, and our minds are just beginning to be able to form a view of ourselves and the surrounding world.
Quickly, our minds begin to distinguish between what we believe is true and what is false.
This is not an easy thing to do.
What happens to most people is that they blindly accept what is served to them at a young age, and that comes with a lot of delusion.
Through that process, we soak up a lot of false beliefs and begin to run with them as if they were true.
Our entire attitude towards life becomes misguided because of falsehood.
Take this possibility seriously.
Maybe you’re completely deluded about how you believe the world works and what the world is. After all, where did you even get this information from?
The person who fools you the most is yourself, and the reason why this is true is because beliefs, thoughts, ideas, etc. work in very twisted ways.
We like to believe that we can accurately represent reality with our ideas and beliefs.
Meanwhile, ideas are not what they are attempting to represent.
There are limits to what you can represent with ideas. A representation is never the thing itself.
When this happens, when we take our ideas too seriously, when we think we are 100% correct, when we think our ideas are what reality is or how it should be, we stop being open to our actual experience of reality.
We stop being open to experiencing reality for what it actually is.
When we fill our minds with a lot of ideas about what we believe is true or false, that then removes the search for deep, direct experiences and realizations of what is true.
If our culture delivered to us the most profound truths about reality, then everyone would be a sage, but clearly that is not the case.
What humans have discovered over and over again throughout the course of history is that reality does not work in the ways we believe it does.
Our assumptions of how reality works and what it is are false, if not only partially true.
This continuously happens over and over again.
When our mind is full of ideas that we believe are true, we can no longer partake in a serious inquiry into life because we think we already have the truth and there is nothing left to do.
To even begin to inquire into the truth is already a problem because we don’t even know how to do a proper inquiry.
We need to first learn how to do an accurate inquiry; otherwise, we will continue to be misguided.
Before we make any claim about what is true or false, we need to inquire into the actual process we used to arrive at the claim.
I’d like to end this by explaining three stages of beliefs.
3 Stages of Beliefs Are:
1. Proudly defending your beliefs to the death.
This happens within all belief systems.
2. Expanding and refining beliefs.
Rearranging beliefs so they are more truthful is what this stage is about.
Getting your beliefs to reflect reality more accurately.
This way of thinking allows you to grow, challenge beliefs, and find validity in opposing
beliefs.
3. Dropping all beliefs.
This stage realizes that reality has nothing to do with beliefs.
There is no such thing as a belief that is the truth.
The actual experience of reality that we are having right now transcends any belief or idea we have of it.
Truth will never be a belief or an idea because it isn’t possible to encapsulate reality itself into a belief system or set of ideas.
Not many people are at this stage. Most people are around stages 1 and 2.
There is nothing good or bad about any stage.
Higher does not mean better, and lower does not mean worse.
In conclusion, beliefs are responsible for a significant amount of the way you live your life.
It is impossible to not have beliefs, but it is possible to be aware of them and not take them as absolute truths.
Do not remain loyal to any belief or set of ideas.
Be open to all of them, search for the little bits of truth in all of them, and simultaneously challenge all of them.
Have the courage to drop your beliefs and live in direct experience.
Probe into reality through your senses and continuously open in deeper and deeper ways.
Use your mind as a tool. Stop being a slave to it.
- Lucas