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Believing

Context

TL;DR: Some notes on beliefs.

Content

Belief Systems

Belief systems are tools through which humans can accomplish thoughts they are intending to have.

The way I perceive belief systems is as you would a freeway to take to arrive at a vacation destination of thought while the details are the hotel room accommodations you make when you arrive.

Are belief systems systematic ways of life? 

Living a life you want to live starts with having thoughts you want to have.  Belief systems are helpful ways to guide your thoughts into certain contexts of thinking, but ultimately you should find a way of thinking that suits you and stands the test of time with others.  When I say that, I do not mean it shouldn’t clash with others, as every sword needs its battles to be worth wielding, but having beliefs that respect others while still being your own are the happy spot we should all be trying to find for ourselves instead of looking to align with.

Belief systems are merely the means to arrive at your perspective, they are not your perspective.  That is like saying your heart is your circulatory system when it is only a component of it.  Things arrive at it and it is certainly vital to your life, but it is not the only important piece of the puzzle and neither is your perspective.  Perspectives are as limited as the belief systems are guiding.  If a belief system is going to fast track you to having a perspective that is like missing all the exits on the freeway as everyone drives to the same destination vacation.  What results is overcrowding, a disagreement over whether there is even a good beach to find, and a giving up because we’re too tired to go back to the car and we might as well catch some rays and feel the warmth of arriving at a perspective that didn’t take much looking.  

Having the belief that your belief system is the ‘best’ or ‘only’ way to think is denying yourself the opportunity to think in different contexts that would otherwise help you in circumstances and is like having a GPS open to see there is an untouched beach just nearby that no one is experiencing for themselves.  If we believe there are no other ways to think then we cannot perceive there are any beaches out there like that, there aren’t perspectives available to us that could be even more exhilarating and fulfilling to experience. We have resigned to what is easy.

Believing You Deserve More.

Believing in the concept of something as valid is the first step in allowing it to materialize into something real.  It takes a non-zero component of selfishness to do this and a hyperbolic proportion of grit for each degree of selfishness to get there.

Having more selfish desires is how you <excerpt>.

Whenever I encounter a situation I’m challenged by, what I try to ask myself is what a bigger version of myself would do to overcome that obstacle and then pull that person into reality by stepping into the idea I’m choosing to believe in.  Whether it is right or wrong is really only determined after you let that person truly exist so that person can be observed for who they are.  Keeping that person in your head means some other version of yourself in a different universe is having a potentially better experience of life than what you chose to have for yourself.  I feel like we time travel when we go back and evaluate choices we could have lived into if we made them and the kind of life those choices could have unfolded into but we never bother to change our position in the present based on that sensation.  We tend to look at ourselves in the present say “oh well, it’s too late for me to feel the way I want to feel about life”.  That is suffocating to think about as over time we continue to tell ourselves more and more what we cannot do and reinforce beliefs about ourselves as incapable, inept, stupid, and misguided in our thoughts.  

Having the power to live into your beliefs starts with the belief that you can craft the world you want for yourself based on the belief that you actually can.  What I feel we all know for ourselves is that we actually can but we feel confronted by what something represents for us and let it stand in our way.  We let this obstacle tell us who we are when we make the decision to back down from opportunities to self express the way we want.  We become more and more a passenger to a mindset of thinking instead of a navigator of this world as a free-thinking individual capable of thoughts that are independent of influences we do not want to have.

Fairness.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/am-i-right/201205/its-not-fair-what-is-fairness

Believing in What You Have

Though it is important to use goals as a tool for crafting the world you want into existence, you need to also believe in the idea of being happy with what you have right now, even in the face of failure, knowing you have tried.

It is about resolving to be happy through the struggle, it is about preserving our humanity through our trials, it is about taking a deep breath before going into battle.  If you do not resolve something into being, then you will have no focus of what is important to you in your next steps.

You need to believe in what you have as a stake to fight for and not something to cultivate into being good enough to deserve.  This is how what you have can get taken away and we learn the meaning of valuing what we have lost.  Believing in what you  have is a kiss on a cheek as a person leaves for work, it is something warm you take a step from as you move into the realm of action.  It is something bright and comforting to you and needs to be your lighthouse during the times that are dark, treacherous, and lonely.  It is finding reassurance within oneself because a belief is something you are constantly living into and never truly fulfilling.  It’s something that needs to pull you through your next steps as if it felt like your destiny to take your next steps and speak your next words and be the person who does the actions you will take. It’s something you still have when you fail, and will fail, many many times.  Nothing truly worth having is gotten easy and that isn’t by my own terms, just look at your own life and you will see for yourself the evidence I use to make this truth.  What truly matters to us is actually what is hardest for us to achieve and for us to find more that matters to us in life it means we must continue to grind against life like a stone and, from its friction, spills forth meaning. 

Believing in what you have isn’t about asking yourself what you stand to gain but in what you stand to lose.  We stand to lose everything in some way in every trial we face and if you act like you don’t have yourself to lose then you are losing who you are and what really pulls you in this life each and every day. 


Believing You Can Conquer Your Greatest Enemy

It is what stops the subconscious from tending to its real wounds, it’s what holds back the smallest inklings of a new perception we’d want to have, it’s what restrains us from action when we have developed just enough intention to fall at its hands once more. 

The greatest power evil has at its disposal is our belief in the idea it has power over us.

The greatest weapon against evil then is not in believing we can conquer it, but in realizing we need to work with it in order to understand who we are. The greatest weapon against the problems we have is to realize we are creating the problems and to understand where it is coming from so we can work with it.  

Believing it Will Be Okay

Ultimately what we want most in the moments before making critical decisions is knowing whether things will be okay and the reality is that it will be even if it isn’t temporarily.  Life normalizes and what you think is okay in this moment will be your definition of what chaos is in a different life context, you just need to accept that by and large you will turn out just fine in your next step.

Believing it will be okay is what permits you to feel choice in a matter where you perceive either choice as not having any obstacles or barriers to taking that next step and if you are waiting for barriers to be lowered for you to clear the way then admittedly you’re living a riskless life.  You’re the kind of person that invests everything into government bonds and never diversifies their investments because the end goal for them is comfort.  Comfort does not equate to a happy life, it equates to a life that avoids challenges as a keystone to everything and you not be the kind of person who stands up to anything, resists what you don’t like, or takes a stance on something that requires hard work to tackle or accomplish.