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“Don’t believe anyone’s BS (belief systems) entirely. And Don’t believe your own BS either.” –Robert Anton Wilson
It’s funny how our beliefs become so vital to us. They seem solid things, like lucky rocks we carry in our pockets and feel vulnerable without. It often takes much more than the presentation of absolute proof for us to loosen our hold on our beliefs—it takes time. It took the Roman Catholic Church 359 years to officially declare Galileo’s discovery that the Earth circled the sun was, in fact, correct.
We seem to be programmed to form a judgment and corresponding belief about everything that comes into our perceptual field. The initial belief we form about something is the most basic and involves discerning whether something is harmful to us or not. This is actually useful. But we don’t end it there. We start moving into preferences, liking or disliking, becoming more and more elaborate with our judgments, beliefs, and labeling pontifications about things.
This critical labeling is especially true about issues related to race, politics, and religion. Then our opinions, judgments, and beliefs expand well beyond what enters our immediate awareness. We can start judging other people based on where they come from, how they look and speak, or what they hold as beliefs. We have seen how easy it has become to dehumanize a person based solely on their race, religion or political affiliation—and how easy for them to dehumanize us.
We are constantly forming opinions and beliefs throughout our day. Often unconsciously and habitually, like the habit of offering a blessing to a person who just sneezed. Most of us carry countless beliefs and opinions in our brain that clutter up our neural net with useless nonsense that has nothing to do with our immediate life situation.
We can be so invested in our beliefs that they become a large part of our identity. I am who I am because of what I believe. We form tribes around shared beliefs. Not only are our belief systems solid to us, they become living things, interwoven with our self-constructed ego/personality that organizes our brains like an operating system organizes our computer.
Our constructed belief systems dictate the nature of our habitual responses to the circumstances of our existence. Are we generally an angry person or happy, a sad person or glad? This is ordained by what we believe about who we are and our place in the larger scheme of things, and if we believe that larger scheme of things to be friendly or not. Our beliefs become our experience. Our experience solidifies our belief systems, and we find ourselves on a feedback loop to nowhere, the so-called echo chamber that we share with the like-minded.
I’m always looking to grow, to become something greater, to become more skillful at the art of consciously evolving myself. I believe we are all built to do this. I’ve discovered that a life of continual evolving or becoming is much more interesting than a life of just acting from my unexamined belief systems and doing the same thing over and over while only changing the outer clothing of circumstance. And this wondrous becoming has led me to the discovery of meta-beliefs. A meta-belief is essentially a belief about beliefs.
I lightly hold two meta-beliefs that have radically changed how I move through the world. They have empowered me to create a more enlivening energy for living.
The first meta-belief is that I don’t necessarily have to generate a belief about things that enter my awareness (beyond the whole “Is it harmful or not” assessment, that is), unless I decide that forming a belief will be beneficial in some way. For example: when some celebrity or politician says or does something that many judge as stupid, I don’t have to engage it one way or another. This frees up a lot of energy that can be directed towards things I find more worthwhile (although, I believe voting is important, and recommend it highly).
The second meta-belief that I have found useful is that any belief I do choose to carry will impact how I perceive and move through my daily life situations and limit my choices and possibilities. So, it is a good idea to be mindful of the beliefs I do take on. For example: If I believe that I only like warm pasta, then I will never discover the joy of the countless cold pasta dishes that could be available to me.
The first meta-belief takes a lot of pressure off and invites a greater mental spaciousness, freedom from nonsense, and spontaneity. The second invites me to live with a greater depth of awareness and responsibility, becoming more mindful of what thoughts and beliefs are flitting through my mind and being watchful of their benefit in a given moment, and their effect on my movement through my day.
There is a third meta-belief that I am circling—that beliefs and belief systems can be extremely malleable, and I can change them in an instant. The value of subscribing to this meta-belief is that I wouldn’t have to rely on my beliefs or any belief system to be an integral part of my self-identity. This seems a road to the type of freedom that saints, mystics, and Zen masters point towards—the freedom from what I think I know about things, the freedom that results from a more fluid mind that can be fully mindful with the unfolding of life in this present moment.
I’m still fleshing this out, but it feels like I’m onto something here. I believe that loosening my grip on my beliefs will lead to more experiences of flow, or being in the zone that athletes speak of, acting from a place that transcends thought and belief. This more spacious headspace seems to engender the clearest and most successful results of human action.
At the end of the day, I know that I need to retool my approach to life if I want my life to evolve. Seeking for positive change seems to be about letting go of patterns of thinking and belief systems that may limit my growth and keep me mired in contracted mental feedback loops.
We can see this with the poo flinging that is so rampant in today’s politics. So many of us seem trapped within our own opinions, beliefs, and labels that we can’t even recognize each other as fellow Americans, or even fellow humans anymore. It’s too bad really. Bringing a greater awareness and understanding to how I form beliefs and how those beliefs affect my daily experience seems a no-brainer that we could all benefit from.
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