Let’s talk about beliefs today. How do you form them? What’s your process? Do they just appear and suddenly exist somehow?

The whole concept of belief is an interesting one when you get right down to it. They’re an interesting sort of phenomenon that manifests somewhere around the edges of cognition, intellect, communication, and consciousness.

Beliefs are also pretty closely tied in with assumptions. Assumptions, you will remember, are what Don Miguel Ruiz warns us never to make in his third of Four Agreements.

Fact-based experiences and sensory perceptions of our immediate surroundings provide the bedrock of our empirical beliefs. You have to stretch things pretty far to suspend your belief in things like gravity or the laws of motion.

But when it comes to things that we can’t quite feel or touch, it’s the Wild Wild West. That’s why stories, myths, and narratives are so important. A spellbinding tale told with conviction over many generations can generate entire cultures of belief, no matter how implausible.

Refusing to believe something is quite easy to. My late grandmother on my fathers side lived long enough to see the Apollo astronauts land on the moon on television. She was quite sure that this was impossible and nothing more than an elaborate television production.

You may well understand the paradox I’m about to describe, perhaps it applies to you. On one hand, I try to work out the facts or the science or the credible sources on a given topic, and I like to have some degree of assurance that my sources are indeed credible.

On the other hand, there are things that I place some credence in, in spite of there being no scientific basis for them whatsoever. Astrology for one. The research community has yet to figure it out, but to me, the patterns don’t lie.

I suppose the degree of importance makes a difference. If someone behaves contrary to their astrological archetype, it’s no big deal. If I fall for a conspiracy theory that puts my life in danger, that’s another story.

I got to thinking about all this recently because I ran into an old friend of mine who expressed some beliefs somewhat different than mine about current events of the past few years.

He used phrases like “I heard that…”, or “Someone told me…” and It occurred to me later that perhaps he was getting most of his information much in the archaic manner of person-to-person storytelling. Even online one could choose to simply create a belief system based upon stories.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the oral tradition, that’s how we got to where we are today. He also shared with me about an acquaintance we have in common who is so hardened into her extreme beliefs that she’s lost many of her friends over the last few years. Sad.

Terence McKenna liked to say he believed nothing, because that would mean he’d stopped questioning it. It’s one thing I never asked him about.

Which brings me around full circle to fascinating quote from a book I’m currently reading. In The Manticore by Robertson Davies, Dunstan Ramsey was fond of admonishing his students with this bit of wisdom regarding the value of faith:

“Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don’t choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you.”

It got me pondering the whole topic. We have more free will in the matter than we might imagine. In fact, we can edit our beliefs like the publisher of a manuscript or curate them like works in a gallery. Life as art, indeed!

Onward and upward, much love till next week!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine