I don't know what I believe. I think there's a belief system, I'm just not sure what it is.
Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.
I grew up with Scientology - my parents at one point were clerical. It's a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it's had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It's not a threat or some cult.
The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits.
The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems.
All I can say is that these cult stories are totally untrue, are without any foundation, and trade on a deep bias against Westerners who dare to embrace an Eastern belief-system.
We were greeted by the minister whose inclusive, non-judgemental smile was no more than a whisker away from a smirk. Have I made it clear? I don't like belief systems and even less like those that peddle self-righteousness. I have no doubt the minister was a sincere man, but I am not as impressed by the idea of sincerity as the sincere seem to be.
Spirituality, as expounded by the great saints and sages of the past, is a very broad path. It accommodates all types of belief systems. You need to satisfy everyone.
I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea. You don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art or to write beautiful things... science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated.
More than most, I believe I'm highly attuned to how heresies eventually become mainstream belief systems and how the vast majority of people who consider themselves 'edgy' are those who only embraced radical ideas LONG after it became safe for them to do so.
Science is methodology. As a belief system it's disastrous.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.
We can look at any experience in two ways: through the eyes of lack, or the eyes of plenty. Fear sees limits, while love sees possibilities. Each attitude will be justified by the belief system you cherish. Change your allegiance from fear to love, and love will sustain you wherever you walk.
Those of us who have transcended mythical belief systems know without any doubt that there is no God up in the sky. But when we awaken to what I call the evolutionary impulse - the mysterious passion to evolve, to become, to develop on every level-we rediscover who God is.
The issue is that if you hold onto the resentment against yourself, you're just going to recreate that destructive pattern in different forms because unconsciously it's still a belief system that limits you.
Your belief systems limit your reality to a sub-set of the solution space that does not contain the answer.
We must teach the next generation to not just learn languages, but whole cultures and belief systems. We will then make more of an effort to understand people and their different cultures.
Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality.
As a kid, I succumbed to peer pressure; I created an image of myself that was not true. But that belief system ended with the death of a close friend. It was then that I reached out for help from my father. It wasn't the teachings of The Four Agreements exactly, it was just my father's teachings in general. And because of this, I am grateful to continue my family's legacy. In this way, I say "thank you" to my family and teachers before me.
You can say, "I don't believe in anything," but you do because you believe in nothing. That is your belief system.
We find that alchemy has to do with magicians or magic and may even have roots in the Chaldean people who lived in the land that we now call Iraq.Abraham emerged and took a flock of people with him into Egypt. They were later called the Hebrews because of the valleys that they came out of. The alchemy that they saw was a transformative power within the individuals to affect the "out there" reality - and that, of course, is the basis of shamanism and is the basis for most magical and so-called Third World belief systems.
If you don't have some sort of belief system by which to center your life, it's hard sometimes to understand why you would put up with your family.
Society in general maintains such a vested interested in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die - or kill - than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular.
For me, it's the slow release of my ego and certain belief systems that I identify with that give me comfort and an identity, and it's scary to let go of that.
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