Belief is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Philosophers have wrangled with it for millennia, yet it remains a deeply enigmatic phenomenon. Belief is woven into our culture, religion, politics, education and language. We are taught to believe in things. Believe in God. Believe in a worthwhile cause. Believe in the American way of life. Believe in freedom. Believe in Santa Claus. Believe in life after death. Whatever we decide to turn our attention to, believing in something is better than believing in nothing. Or is it?
It is useful to consider belief as a psychological condition rather than a philosophical standpoint. Belief is often perceived as the forerunner to knowledge; knowledge being classified as proven, true belief. Though the concept of criteria for truth seems vaguely preposterous to me. Belief is a propositional idea, a suggestion, a work of conjecture. It is at best a working model. Though this does not dilute the potency of belief in any way. On the contrary, belief is a blade that sculpts wood as readily as it cuts throats. Is the wielder of a belief as responsible for its use as the originator of the belief?
Challenging Beliefs
Certain belief systems are so important and deep seated, that those with heavily vested interests in their preservation will go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.
An historical blink of an eye ago (375 years), Galileo was forced to stand trial for heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. The sentence meted out to him saw all his published works banned, required him to renounce his heretical notions, and worse, the 69 year old physicist and astronomer was ordered imprisoned. The sentence was later commuted to house arrest, under which he spent the last 9 years of his life, eventually going blind.
In 1947 psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was pursued by the American authorities because they didn’t like his concept of orgone energy (a cosmic electro-magnetic energy) and the machines he built to harness its health promoting benefits. Reich posited that all illness originated from the depletion or blockage of orgone flow within the body. His machines accumulated atmospheric orgone flow and focussed it on an individual who would sit inside a phone booth style box. Reich claimed the orgone accumulators could help cure many common and more serious ailments including cancer. Someone somewhere didn’t want this research to continue.
A letter to the FDA from the director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission, triggered the beginning of the end for Reich. The FDA pursued Reich until finally in May 1956, he was arrested for violating an earlier injunction when an associate transported some orgone-therapy equipment across a state line. Reich got two years in jail. Meanwhile FDA officials went to Reich’s place in Maine, destroyed the accumulators and burnt his books. Later on that Autumn, the remaining six tons of his journals and scientific papers were burned in an incinerator in New York's Lower East Side. Reich died of heart failure in November 1957 in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Not a single psychiatric or established scientific journal carried an obituary. The establishment had already buried him.
Synchronistically, in 1974, cult writer William Burroughs sited his own self-built orgone accumulator at his New York pad, The Bunker, in the same Lower East Side location that had previously seen Reich’s works destroyed. In the cool depths of The Bunker (a former YMCA gym), various well known artists, writers and musicians would try out the effects of Reich’s machine. Burroughs was a convert. He felt that the machine helped alleviate his own heroin addiction. He said, “When I went into the accumulator and sat down I noticed a special silence that you sometimes feel in deep woods, sometimes on a city street, a hum that is more rhythmic vibration than a sound. My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal. I began to eat and could not sleep more than eight hours. I was out of the post cure drag.”
Absence Of Proof
It is easy to overlook how certain seemingly unshakable and universally held truths, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than memes. Within this context, the prominence of scientific evangelists and technocratic materialists is an illustration of what can happen when belief backfires. Good intellects (processors), yet lacking the necessary spiritual humility and subtle perception to fully connect with the universe and hence gain real transcendent knowing. They are captives of the ego; psychic antennas naturally atrophied with disuse. The third eye calcified. Anyone who wears the “I am an atheist” t-shirt is treading on thin ice. Better to wear the one that states “I know nothing… but I know I don’t”.
Nevertheless, we cannot and should not claim that agnosticism is in itself any sort of destination. The agnostic viewpoint that ‘the truth value of claims relating to God, the afterlife and the nature of existence cannot be known’ is operationally useful and yet offers no prospect of transcendence or salvation. The philosophy of I don’t know so I won’t bother has limited functional scope. Can the human mind truly be content to lay aside the deepest and most profound questions of existence in favour of a life of frivolity and distraction? Only the fearful and disturbed find consolation in such extended periods of psychic coma.
The Ultra Soup
There is comfort in knowing that a thing will be the same today as it was yesterday. It is easier to orient oneself in a world with defined parameters, comfort zones and standard templates to work to. We believe that the chair exists; we can see it and touch it. It was there yesterday and it will be there tomorrow. It is a defined experience, well evidenced and self apparent. Yet this thinking is wholly erroneous.
In actuality, all things are in a constant state of flux at all times. Forms arise, shift and dissolve in each moment. Energy perpetually transforms itself from one state to another. In Buddhism, this is called Annica (impermanence) and is one of the ‘three marks of existence’ that characterizes the illusory world (the others being Dukkha; unsatisfactoriness and Anatta; non-Self). Annica teaches that as all formations are impermanent, spiritual growth begins with the careful observance and experience of the present moment. Creation occurs only in the instant of now.
In the Zen tradition, this impermanence is called mujō; indicating the transience and mutability of all compound objects. It is a vital principle in understanding the flow of the unreal. The Zen student begins to understand that nothing lasts – but nothing is lost. From the ultra soup of infinite energy arise all forms and patterns, and back they go to tell their story, before once more separating out for the next voyage.
In 1980 David Bohm published his book ‘Wholeness And The Implicate Order’, articulating the same ancient wisdom but in modern quantum language. His view of the enfolded implicate order and the unfolded explicate order was radically different to the prevailing mechanistic physics of the time. Today in 2008, his ideas are still deeply antithetical to the reductionist fetishes of mainstream science. In Bohm’s model, primacy is given to the undivided whole, and the enfolded implicate order within the whole, rather than particles, quantum states, and continua. The universe is not a vast machine made up of atomic building blocks and there is no sustainable distinction between reality and consciousness. For Bohm, the whole encompasses all things, entities, structures, abstractions and processes. Nothing is entirely separate or autonomous. Sound familiar?
Fear Empowers Unhelpful Memes
The impermanence of all things can be an unsettling notion for the human mind that values stability and consistency as foundations of a well ordered life. But there is nothing to worry about. We must understand that consciousness creates the objects around us and they have form for our usage, and at our convenience. Belief (a working model) plays an important part in either opening or closing the flow of potential energy from this core teaching. For example, a useful belief is “I know this chair doesn’t exist, but I am going to sustain its existence with my consciousness because I would like to sit on it.” An unhelpful belief is “I have been diagnosed with a horrible disease and I’m going to die”. Why sustain a working model that does not benefit you? Why believe what might be your undoing? It is because of the compelling gravitation of the abiding memeplex (groups of memes) surrounding the idea of the body as a machine, hospitals, palliative care and the authority of western medical practice. Such powerful and well established ideas, with overwhelming consensus, soon overcome any individual conception of the body’s innate capacity to heal any dysfunction. That is a wishful dream that promptly evaporates in the hard light of someone else’s manufactured reality. But who’s reality is it? Who manufactures and propagates such disempowering belief systems?
Illuminism may be thought of as the extreme stratification of knowledge and technology through hierarchical forms of distribution. It is characterized by an emphasis on solar symbolism, numerology and ancient Babylonian ritual. Illuminists specialize in the creation of micro level events which have resonance in the collective consciousness on a macro level. Spiritually and creatively restrictive memes are a major Illuminist tool. The dominant human predisposition to identify with the bio-suit of the body is one of their crowning achievements. It is the oldest trick in the book. Get the plebs thinking they are dumb and powerless and only live for 80 years. That’ll keep them quiet. And in the main, it does. This potent memeplex of helplessness has established itself as a core belief system, taught from birth, and most rigorously in the west. Though under the aegis of the capitalist paradigm, its tentacles have spread much farther afield. Fear is the frequency of control.
Fearfulness predicates a neurotic and materialist impulse to have everything organized and classified. A box for this and a box for that. Every mystery reduced to nothing more than a missing label. This goes here and that goes over there. When the fear juice kicks in, the compartmentalization mechanism goes into overdrive. Organizational madness. Displacement activities desperately filling the void of spiritual crisis. In this respect, reductionism reflects a fear-based belief system founded on the egoic survival response. Belief has become the blade that cuts one’s own throat.
Velocity Of Consciousness
Someone says “I saw a ghost walk through a wall yesterday.” Either end of a belief-based response may elicit an unnecessarily biased and self-inhibiting reaction. “Rubbish. There’s no such thing as ghosts. You must be seeing things”. Or “Wow. Yes ghosts are around us all the time. It was probably your uncle Albert”. The balanced response is more along the lines of “That’s interesting. What happened?” No belief required, no judgement necessary. Go with the information and follow the ideas. Hold what is useful and discard what is not. If ontological enquiry is always undertaken within a strict framework of belief, it will always be exceedingly narrow in both range and discernment.
The parallel highways of (a) unveiling the Control System and (b) engaging with the universal mystery are set to converge within the next four years. There are those who focus largely on conspiratorial research and disclosure; endless labyrinths of secret societies, alternate histories, psychological operations, alien treaties and black budget projects. There are those who choose the path of personal transcendence, the way of the spiritual warrior, consciousness evolution, gnosis. Depending on subtle psychological and spiritual qualities, the right path naturally presents itself. In the end, ‘unveiling’ and ‘engagement’ are merely dark and light aspects of the same transcendental configuration.
As the velocity of consciousness quickens, as more and more data is fired down the pipe, a new quantum processing methodology emerges to deal with the influx. I propose that knowing does not originate from the brain nor does it have need of proof or substantiation. On closer analysis, such concepts are illusory anyway. At best we can determine degrees of certainty and inference, but never an absolute empirical ruling. The scientific method quantifies, reproduces and classifies. Within its rule set, empirical statements can be made - but when extracted from the controlled environment and viewed from a broader plane of felt experience – we observe instant wave function collapse. There is simply no reference point for empirical judgment.
Knowing is an experiential phenomenon, not a philosophical or intellectual construct. Critical reason, judgement and intuition are valuable in their capacity to increase the resolution of incoming data. Belief is not required in the sacred practice of deepening and expanding one’s consciousness. The mystic is not seeking to persuade or convert, he is seeking simply to know. It is a useful experiment to jettison belief altogether (for a period) and see how its absence affects learning and growth. It can truly be a weight off your mind.
It is useful to consider belief as a psychological condition rather than a philosophical standpoint. Belief is often perceived as the forerunner to knowledge; knowledge being classified as proven, true belief. Though the concept of criteria for truth seems vaguely preposterous to me. Belief is a propositional idea, a suggestion, a work of conjecture. It is at best a working model. Though this does not dilute the potency of belief in any way. On the contrary, belief is a blade that sculpts wood as readily as it cuts throats. Is the wielder of a belief as responsible for its use as the originator of the belief?Challenging Beliefs
Certain belief systems are so important and deep seated, that those with heavily vested interests in their preservation will go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.
An historical blink of an eye ago (375 years), Galileo was forced to stand trial for heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. The sentence meted out to him saw all his published works banned, required him to renounce his heretical notions, and worse, the 69 year old physicist and astronomer was ordered imprisoned. The sentence was later commuted to house arrest, under which he spent the last 9 years of his life, eventually going blind.
In 1947 psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was pursued by the American authorities because they didn’t like his concept of orgone energy (a cosmic electro-magnetic energy) and the machines he built to harness its health promoting benefits. Reich posited that all illness originated from the depletion or blockage of orgone flow within the body. His machines accumulated atmospheric orgone flow and focussed it on an individual who would sit inside a phone booth style box. Reich claimed the orgone accumulators could help cure many common and more serious ailments including cancer. Someone somewhere didn’t want this research to continue.
A letter to the FDA from the director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission, triggered the beginning of the end for Reich. The FDA pursued Reich until finally in May 1956, he was arrested for violating an earlier injunction when an associate transported some orgone-therapy equipment across a state line. Reich got two years in jail. Meanwhile FDA officials went to Reich’s place in Maine, destroyed the accumulators and burnt his books. Later on that Autumn, the remaining six tons of his journals and scientific papers were burned in an incinerator in New York's Lower East Side. Reich died of heart failure in November 1957 in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Not a single psychiatric or established scientific journal carried an obituary. The establishment had already buried him.
Synchronistically, in 1974, cult writer William Burroughs sited his own self-built orgone accumulator at his New York pad, The Bunker, in the same Lower East Side location that had previously seen Reich’s works destroyed. In the cool depths of The Bunker (a former YMCA gym), various well known artists, writers and musicians would try out the effects of Reich’s machine. Burroughs was a convert. He felt that the machine helped alleviate his own heroin addiction. He said, “When I went into the accumulator and sat down I noticed a special silence that you sometimes feel in deep woods, sometimes on a city street, a hum that is more rhythmic vibration than a sound. My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal. I began to eat and could not sleep more than eight hours. I was out of the post cure drag.”
Absence Of Proof
It is easy to overlook how certain seemingly unshakable and universally held truths, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than memes. Within this context, the prominence of scientific evangelists and technocratic materialists is an illustration of what can happen when belief backfires. Good intellects (processors), yet lacking the necessary spiritual humility and subtle perception to fully connect with the universe and hence gain real transcendent knowing. They are captives of the ego; psychic antennas naturally atrophied with disuse. The third eye calcified. Anyone who wears the “I am an atheist” t-shirt is treading on thin ice. Better to wear the one that states “I know nothing… but I know I don’t”.
Nevertheless, we cannot and should not claim that agnosticism is in itself any sort of destination. The agnostic viewpoint that ‘the truth value of claims relating to God, the afterlife and the nature of existence cannot be known’ is operationally useful and yet offers no prospect of transcendence or salvation. The philosophy of I don’t know so I won’t bother has limited functional scope. Can the human mind truly be content to lay aside the deepest and most profound questions of existence in favour of a life of frivolity and distraction? Only the fearful and disturbed find consolation in such extended periods of psychic coma.
The Ultra Soup
There is comfort in knowing that a thing will be the same today as it was yesterday. It is easier to orient oneself in a world with defined parameters, comfort zones and standard templates to work to. We believe that the chair exists; we can see it and touch it. It was there yesterday and it will be there tomorrow. It is a defined experience, well evidenced and self apparent. Yet this thinking is wholly erroneous.
In actuality, all things are in a constant state of flux at all times. Forms arise, shift and dissolve in each moment. Energy perpetually transforms itself from one state to another. In Buddhism, this is called Annica (impermanence) and is one of the ‘three marks of existence’ that characterizes the illusory world (the others being Dukkha; unsatisfactoriness and Anatta; non-Self). Annica teaches that as all formations are impermanent, spiritual growth begins with the careful observance and experience of the present moment. Creation occurs only in the instant of now.
In the Zen tradition, this impermanence is called mujō; indicating the transience and mutability of all compound objects. It is a vital principle in understanding the flow of the unreal. The Zen student begins to understand that nothing lasts – but nothing is lost. From the ultra soup of infinite energy arise all forms and patterns, and back they go to tell their story, before once more separating out for the next voyage.
In 1980 David Bohm published his book ‘Wholeness And The Implicate Order’, articulating the same ancient wisdom but in modern quantum language. His view of the enfolded implicate order and the unfolded explicate order was radically different to the prevailing mechanistic physics of the time. Today in 2008, his ideas are still deeply antithetical to the reductionist fetishes of mainstream science. In Bohm’s model, primacy is given to the undivided whole, and the enfolded implicate order within the whole, rather than particles, quantum states, and continua. The universe is not a vast machine made up of atomic building blocks and there is no sustainable distinction between reality and consciousness. For Bohm, the whole encompasses all things, entities, structures, abstractions and processes. Nothing is entirely separate or autonomous. Sound familiar?
Fear Empowers Unhelpful Memes
The impermanence of all things can be an unsettling notion for the human mind that values stability and consistency as foundations of a well ordered life. But there is nothing to worry about. We must understand that consciousness creates the objects around us and they have form for our usage, and at our convenience. Belief (a working model) plays an important part in either opening or closing the flow of potential energy from this core teaching. For example, a useful belief is “I know this chair doesn’t exist, but I am going to sustain its existence with my consciousness because I would like to sit on it.” An unhelpful belief is “I have been diagnosed with a horrible disease and I’m going to die”. Why sustain a working model that does not benefit you? Why believe what might be your undoing? It is because of the compelling gravitation of the abiding memeplex (groups of memes) surrounding the idea of the body as a machine, hospitals, palliative care and the authority of western medical practice. Such powerful and well established ideas, with overwhelming consensus, soon overcome any individual conception of the body’s innate capacity to heal any dysfunction. That is a wishful dream that promptly evaporates in the hard light of someone else’s manufactured reality. But who’s reality is it? Who manufactures and propagates such disempowering belief systems?
Illuminism may be thought of as the extreme stratification of knowledge and technology through hierarchical forms of distribution. It is characterized by an emphasis on solar symbolism, numerology and ancient Babylonian ritual. Illuminists specialize in the creation of micro level events which have resonance in the collective consciousness on a macro level. Spiritually and creatively restrictive memes are a major Illuminist tool. The dominant human predisposition to identify with the bio-suit of the body is one of their crowning achievements. It is the oldest trick in the book. Get the plebs thinking they are dumb and powerless and only live for 80 years. That’ll keep them quiet. And in the main, it does. This potent memeplex of helplessness has established itself as a core belief system, taught from birth, and most rigorously in the west. Though under the aegis of the capitalist paradigm, its tentacles have spread much farther afield. Fear is the frequency of control.
Fearfulness predicates a neurotic and materialist impulse to have everything organized and classified. A box for this and a box for that. Every mystery reduced to nothing more than a missing label. This goes here and that goes over there. When the fear juice kicks in, the compartmentalization mechanism goes into overdrive. Organizational madness. Displacement activities desperately filling the void of spiritual crisis. In this respect, reductionism reflects a fear-based belief system founded on the egoic survival response. Belief has become the blade that cuts one’s own throat.
Velocity Of Consciousness
Someone says “I saw a ghost walk through a wall yesterday.” Either end of a belief-based response may elicit an unnecessarily biased and self-inhibiting reaction. “Rubbish. There’s no such thing as ghosts. You must be seeing things”. Or “Wow. Yes ghosts are around us all the time. It was probably your uncle Albert”. The balanced response is more along the lines of “That’s interesting. What happened?” No belief required, no judgement necessary. Go with the information and follow the ideas. Hold what is useful and discard what is not. If ontological enquiry is always undertaken within a strict framework of belief, it will always be exceedingly narrow in both range and discernment.
The parallel highways of (a) unveiling the Control System and (b) engaging with the universal mystery are set to converge within the next four years. There are those who focus largely on conspiratorial research and disclosure; endless labyrinths of secret societies, alternate histories, psychological operations, alien treaties and black budget projects. There are those who choose the path of personal transcendence, the way of the spiritual warrior, consciousness evolution, gnosis. Depending on subtle psychological and spiritual qualities, the right path naturally presents itself. In the end, ‘unveiling’ and ‘engagement’ are merely dark and light aspects of the same transcendental configuration.
As the velocity of consciousness quickens, as more and more data is fired down the pipe, a new quantum processing methodology emerges to deal with the influx. I propose that knowing does not originate from the brain nor does it have need of proof or substantiation. On closer analysis, such concepts are illusory anyway. At best we can determine degrees of certainty and inference, but never an absolute empirical ruling. The scientific method quantifies, reproduces and classifies. Within its rule set, empirical statements can be made - but when extracted from the controlled environment and viewed from a broader plane of felt experience – we observe instant wave function collapse. There is simply no reference point for empirical judgment.
Knowing is an experiential phenomenon, not a philosophical or intellectual construct. Critical reason, judgement and intuition are valuable in their capacity to increase the resolution of incoming data. Belief is not required in the sacred practice of deepening and expanding one’s consciousness. The mystic is not seeking to persuade or convert, he is seeking simply to know. It is a useful experiment to jettison belief altogether (for a period) and see how its absence affects learning and growth. It can truly be a weight off your mind.
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