Beliefs are a luxury of the idle and disconnected. I can say this because I am idle and disconnected enough to observe it in myself. Yet when I share this observation with others, some ask, “What about values and morals; aren’t they based on beliefs?”
“What do beliefs mean,” I reply, “when we are out at sea and angry waves are tossing our boat around like a leaf in the wind? Let’s say I am a Christian, you are a Muslim, and the next person is an atheist. Does it matter to the gale? Or to put it simpler, sharks find vegetarians and meat-eaters to be equally delectable.”
Still, the strongest exposé on beliefs comes from within. The rational mind feels nothing, which is why we can hate, criticize, and kill. When we scheme and manipulate, we are functioning purely from our rational minds, with our egos at the helm.
The ego runs the show, and the ego is amoral. Notice I didn’t say immoral. Morality is simply not in the ego’s vocabulary. The ego has only one motivating force—self-survival. Anything goes: aggressiveness, lying, cheating, judging, even beliefs. All are weapons in the ego’s self-survival arsenal.
Here is where I sometimes get a reaction, as beliefs are commonly taken to be what elevates us above the crass affairs of the ego. Yet stripped of the pleasantries in which we wrap “beliefs” in order to make them palatable to ourselves and acceptable to others, they show themselves as nothing more than another amoral manipulator the ego uses to promote itself.
In the wilds, the ego can—and must—manipulate and kill. All hunters do it to promote their own survival. However, when I am disconnected from the means and ends of my existence, killing and manipulating all of a sudden don’t look so pretty. In a farming region or city, the animals I end up preying upon turn out to be of my own kind.
Here is where beliefs come into play. The ego needs to disguise its actions in a new way, so rather than stealthily stalking an animal, it wraps its intent in altruistic-sounding platitudes—what we call beliefs.
When we speak purely from our heart-of-hearts, we say what is. We don’t run it through the filter of our beliefs, where love is good and hate is bad, but where love is love and hate is hate, and there is no difference between the two.
Thank you, Tamarack. Somehow though, I feel this needs a follow up, an addition in a next post? Be well, be at peace, all of you.
I think you’re right; a follow-up is in order. A friend of mine named Paul Rezendes, who wrote about beliefs in his book The Wild Within, wrote this reply to my post, and I thought you might enjoy it:
“It seems that we, as humans, at least most of us, believe that we need some kind of creed to live by, some ideological principle, an authoritarian principle of some kind. Without that, we have no morals, no law, nothing to tell us how to live and how to behave. That makes us dependent on thought for our morality. Thought decides what is good for us and what is not good for us, how we and others should live our lives. We sure have a lot of people running around thinking they know best, and everyone should cop to their idea, or else. These authoritarian ideologies and belief systems are at odds with each other, in conflict. I don’t see that they are solving any problems, but only creating problems. We find security in our ideologies and belief systems, which are threatened by other peoples’ belief systems. Thought is at war with itself. It is busting out all over the place and there is a lot of fear. Armies can’t defeat ideologies. We think all we have to do is replace one ideology with another one. I don’t think that is working at all.
“One of the real big problems with these belief systems is that the people who believe in them don’t believe that they are made up by thought, but it comes from God. God said we should live this way. There seems to be a lot of different gods laying down a lot of different rules and we are killing each other over them. It is not just the Moslems. Look at what happened to the witches in Europe, the Native Americans, a lot of it done in the name of religion.
“How is a belief system going to judge itself? It’s being right is built into it. It can only judge other belief systems, and it sure is biased. How can it not be? Is there a way of looking at all this that is not biased? If we can see all this in an unbiased way, will that bring about moral or right action? Is openness and the passion for truth attached to any belief system, or any bias at all?
“Does morality and living at peace come through ideologies and belief systems? Is there something that can bring us out of our dependence on ideologies? Are we as humans awake to what we are doing? What does waking up mean? What if we woke up to the limitations of ideologies and we all gave them up? Would there be chaos, or maybe peace?”