Beyond Belief

Part 1

[This topic will be presented in parts because as my husband so matter-of-factly put it: “You thought you could talk about a topic like belief in one piece?”]

Have you ever thought about why you believe what you believe? I mean a thorough examination of the beliefs and systems that have composed your individual guiding beliefs.

Consider for a moment some of the things you were told as a child that you gave little thought and instead accepted with child-like trust—even faith, because the people you loved and trusted told you these things were true. Chances are you accepted these things without much resistance, aside from the quintessential, “Why?” so common to childhood.

As you emerge into young adulthood and experiential wisdom unfolds, do you continue to believe all of the things that you were told are true? The idea of Santa, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy spring to mind here. As you evolve, hopefully, so do your beliefs. “A belief is just a thought that you keep thinking,” according to Abraham-Hicks, twentieth century mystic. For the purpose of this discussion, this is a workable definition for how we think about belief. With this definition in mind, let’s consider childhood beliefs that we adopted, held dear, and yet eventually discarded as something made up for the entertainment—dare I say control, of children. You probably stopped thinking of Santa as an actual person who descends the chimney bringing gifts to children, the Tooth Fairy as a broker in the pearly whites trade, and you accepted that rabbits do not lay eggs—in spite of the magick of Springtime. Chances are high that you eventually stopped accepting these things as real, thus ending the firmly held beliefs in them.

Why did your beliefs change about these things? Simply put, for most people, when scrutinized they each failed to bear out. The foundations upon which the thoughts were built begin to crumble to dust and blow away. What is left behind is your suspicion that your loved ones may have possibly been untruthful about other things, things as important to you now as Santa, Easter Bunny, and Tooth Fairy were when you were a child.

So, you may begin to question your learned beliefs, one at a time. But as you wade out into an ocean of questions, your fear of such drastic change in foundational beliefs meets you there. Circling like sharks, your doubts, fears and uncertainty either lead to panic and you opt to retreat—resigned to search no further, or you fight those sharks with everything you’ve got, determined to know the Truth. Fortunately, as your courage reveals Truth to you, you discover that these are toothless sharks. The only danger they pose is the abruptness of change that a shift in beliefs brings. The more determined you are the more power you take from these perceived dangers, and those sharks dissipate like clouds. Swimming out deeper and deeper still new beliefs break into waves of new questions. You begin to find the freedom of riding the wave.

Let’s go back to the idea of Santa. Maybe you held onto that belief, in spite of questions, because the belief offered some benefit. I remember being told at about nine years old, “If you don’t believe, you won’t receive.” Naturally this declaration made me want to believe. I mean, duh, I wanted to receive! Why should I be left out of receiving gifts simply because I had questions? So, I remained silent so as not to rock the boat and miss out on the bounty that gift-giving season brought to good little girls and boys.

But once the truth could no longer be denied, I felt a slight sense of betrayal. How could the people who loved and nurtured me convince me to believe in something they knew wasn’t real? I was so disappointed that I made a vow to myself to never teach my children to believe in Santa, or any of the make-believe figures I had been taught to believe were real in my foundational years.

However, in my effort to protect my own children from the heartbreaking disappoint of betrayal that I had felt, I had neglected to tell them not to discuss such things with their friends—whose grownups had likely taught them what mine had taught me. One afternoon, upon my arrival at my youngest son’s preschool, I was informed that the director wanted to speak with me. I was led into her office where she proceeded to tell me that my son was an otherwise sweet and smart kid, but for reasons that were clearly baffling to the adults, “Miles told the other children that Santa isn’t real.” My first thought was one of pity for those children because I knew full well that he didn’t just tell them, he argued the point like an evangelist at an old-timey tent revival preaching hell-fire and damnation.

I apologized and explained to her that we forgot to tell him not to tell the other children, and I thought this would assuage her anger. It did not. She was absolutely appalled that he got this information from his parents. I mean, how dare we go against the socially acceptable norms and teach our children to be critical thinkers who also question things that don’t make sense to them? Yes, he was only “three years old,” she reminded me as if that was supposed to change the truth. It is never too early to learn to think for yourself.

Many years later I thought back to that event when I found myself at a spiritual crossroads. I had been a licensed Christian minister for over ten years when I found myself with questions of my own that seemed to have no clear answers. That was simply unacceptable to me. I’ve always believed that everything has its opposite, so for every problem or question there must be a solution or answer.

My family was predominately Christian (on both sides,) and though my mother had dabbled a bit in astrology, she had always remained Christian foundationally. I had maintained a strong curiosity of and a mild belief in astrology in spite of the way most Christians I had encountered viewed the things of the occult. “Withchcraft!” they’d call it—emphasis on witch to drive home how frightening the whole idea was. When I inquired as to why witches are bad, I was told that they don’t get their power from God but from the Devil. 

This assertion of course led to more questions for me. Who decided this? Based on what evidence?

For a while—many years in fact, I chose not to question this explanation.

But in true fashion I picked this explanation apart during the first time that I had reached a kind of existential crisis—a spiritual crossroads, and ultimately chose the road that led to the so-called dark night of the soul. I had questions and was determined enough to find answers that I was willing to throw out the whole belief system in which I had been immersed my entire life, to rebuild little by little—into what, I had no clear answers. This proved to be a most terrifying prospect.

Consider this, when you claim a belief in something yet simultaneously assert a doubt in its truth or validity, you become a double-minded person in a sense. You are the farmer who plants her tomato seeds in fertile soil then, doubting the seeds ability to do as is natural for the seed to do—that is seek out the nutrients in the soil, push roots deeper to absorb those nutrients then push up to find more nutrients and sunlight above ground as a tomato plant.

You decide that seeds must not know what to do because it’s been a few days and you see no progress, so you go to dig up the seeds to try and devise another way. But you discover the seeds have become roots with a tiny stalk that was making its way up through the soil. But you’ve impeded the natural process of manifestation. Your doubts became a destructive shovel (as or more destructive than weeds,) to destroy what was growing and preparing to yield fruit for you, in its season. Do you stop to question why you believed that since you couldn’t see any progress, none was being made? Do you consider that perhaps you’ve been conditioned to believe only in what you can register with your physical senses, leaving little room for things that live outside of your human ability to perceive?

Perhaps you were taught by repetition that seeing is believing and it requires too much effort to convince you subconscious mind otherwise.

What about your religious beliefs? Why do you believe what you believe? For most people religious beliefs are family tradition; they are handed down from generation to generation. You don’t dare question these beliefs because it’s what you’ve always believed and your whole group believes the same. But why? Who gave these beliefs to you grandparents? To their grandparents? What was the motive of the one/one’s who handed them down in the first place?

Chances are, the more passionately fervent (or repetitive) one is in working to convince you of their beliefs the more likely you will be to accept those beliefs as true and therefore incorporate them into your own belief system or they replace your belief system all together.  

You become so convinced of the truth of these beliefs that you would be gripped with fear to question their truth—or lack thereof. Your fears cause you to cling to beliefs that would make no rational sense to you apart from fear. You have the nagging feeling or irresistible urge to ask, “Why,” like tugging on that errant piece of yarn in the sweater you were gifted, but never quite felt like it was your style. Still, fear of punishment for even questioning leaves you in the dark with nothing but questions of what if this is not my path; what if this is not really true; and why can’t I ask for clarification on these questions?

Now you have two options: dismiss that feeling that something doesn’t add up and pretend to believe anyway, or to pull that loose string and unravel the whole sweater for the sake of ascertaining Truth—which cannot be threatened. Join me down the rabbit hole… see you in part two where we will dive deeper, fear be damned.