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By either active or passive means, we eventually accept certain things to be true–these are our beliefs. They’re anchors for the way we live our lives and make decisions.
Beliefs are not confined to “religions” like Christianity or Islam or Shinto. We make use of beliefs in many places.
And it makes sense from a processing standpoint that we have them, we can’t spend all day analyzing everything, so our brain starts filling in axiomatic principles that we abide by and don’t waste energy on questioning.
But, we should be very aware that when something becomes a belief, we grant it a monopoly over our minds. Other thoughts aren’t entertained and are given no chance to compete.
This is deeply problematic. Our beliefs could be wrong or incomplete, causing us to apply them incorrectly.
We learn constantly and the world changes. What we need is a method for taking what we learn into account and update our belief systems. The problem is that beliefs are foundational principles, so trying to modify them causes the system to start to lean, lose its function, become complicated, and eventually tumble. (We can see this happen with theories in science. People will try to make the evidence fit within their model, but eventually, someone realizes that the model is terribly wrong).
With this in mind, it would seem that we may need to be more aggressive if we wish to learn and grow to the fullest. The conclusion:
From time to time, you need to destroy your belief system and build it from the ground up.
-Kevin V.
3.7.2011
