Is Belief what we’re fighting for?

Once upon a time, there lived Believers. It was important to Believers to Believe. And so they did. Of course, the First Difficult Thing was that they didn’t all have the same Beliefs.

Before I explain why this was Difficult, it’s important to explain what Beliefs were. Beliefs were ideas about Being, and yet the Beliefs that Believers Believed were not the Being part, they were Symbols of it. Very much like the shadows that are made when a Being gets in the way of the light, they were like Being but weren’t Being; rather they were an approximation or representation of Being.

The Believers subscribed so strongly to their Beliefs that they eventually lost sight of Being, and here’s why the First Difficult Thing was Difficult: Everyone saw the same Being, but called it by different names, and they believed that their different names made the Being different. This couldn’t possibly Be, but it was difficult to see that once you Believed in a certain Description. It was equally difficult to see how others could have another Description, since they Believed that there could only be one Description of Being. Naturally, this caused some problems, because,

The Symbols, the Sum and the Substance

That humans are self-important needs no supporting argument. Uncle Frank always used to say that egocentrism was unavoidable and at the time I hated that idea; it invalidated the foundations of my ontological reality at the time and placed me squarely in the middle of the existential vacuum: a universe where my perspective was always prejudiced by this thing called Me.

I began to think about the nature of Me and over many years of reading and personal contemplation I understood that there were really many ‘Me’s’: There was Personal Me, the identity that was determined by my Self, which included the dynamics of my personality (the things I did), my inner space (feelings and thoughts, beliefs and values) , and the physical reality of the body I lived within.

Then there was National Me, the aspect of me that had a sense of belonging to a Nation. Of course, I had had no choice in the matter. But I was subject to it’s laws, exposed to and took part in it’s customs, spoke it’s language, and used it’s infrastructure, and so in a sense, I belonged. Whether or not this stretched beyond the pragmatic reality was not something I was convinced about.

In addition there was Religious Me, the part of me that had a sense of

The Secret: Positive Thinking’s New Clothes

No doubt, you will have heard of The Secret. If you haven’t, Google it and check out the video.The Secret’s claim is quite simple – you can have whatever you want, just visualise it, and it’s yours. Apparently, we create our reality with our intentions – our thoughts cause things to happen, not just within ourselves, but in our external reality too.

It doesn’t take much to see that this is really karma and positive thinking with new clothes – only here you no longer need to DO any good, you just have to THINK it. Self-directedness just became moral – after all, if the Universe supports it, it must be right?

Except that the new clothes don’t fit. And the ‘lack of fitness’ I speak about is the relationship these ideas have to reality. They simply do not, in fact cannot, work in the real world.