Many of us are deeply influenced by all sorts of beliefs, like culture, traditions, communities, profession, family, and friends. These beliefs influence our thoughts and behaviour in subtle ways, often without our awareness. They become an invisible core part of who we are.
Blindly believing other people’s opinions is risky. You must discover truth and knowledge for yourself or it will not be your truth or your knowledge. Your own truths and knowledge lives profoundly within your being, while someone else’s truth and knowledge can penetrate no deeper than your intellect.
Keep an open mind and a healthy dose of skepticism at all times so that you avoid go down on blind alleys. It is those who abandon the open minded skepticism and curiosity, in pursuit of easy and quick answers, who end up stepping into belief traps.
This doesn’t mean you must navigate everything alone. It is a good idea to include wisely selected people in your journey. Engaging with others can help you develop a broader perspective and provide much needed encouragement as well as guidance and direction. But others cannot learn and grow for you — you must do that for yourself. Wisdom, intuition, and the capacity to love are all inherent qualities that you possess within the core of your being.
Some people associate belief primarily with religion and are unaware of the pervasive and significant role that belief plays outside the typical religious context. Culture, traditions, communities, profession, family, and friends can be as powerful as religion belief. Somebody told Voltaire (the famous French writer and philosopher) “Monsieur, je suis athée (Sir, I am an atheist)” at which Voltaire replied “Alors l’athéisme ç’est votre religion (So atheism is your religion)”.
Everyone understands the term religious belief, but few realise that scientific belief is as powerful as religious belief. Scientific belief is the belief that the larger reality and all truth must be solely defined by, and limited to, objective, repeatable, consistent, hard-science measurements.
This scientific viewpoint severely constrains our evolution. Consider the advancements in physics over the past three centuries. Initially, we believed the world to be flat, only to later realise it is round. We once thought Earth was at the center of the universe, then we thought that the sun is the center of universe. Eventually, we acknowledged that we still don’t know where the center of the universe is or if there is a center after all.
According to Isaac Newton’s proof published in 1687, our world is part of a block universe with absolute and uniform time. This view was so fundamental that many scientists believed this was the last discovery to be made in physics. Albert Michelson, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, made a significant announcement in 1894: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote . . . Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”
This turned out to be not only an overconfident assertion, but a prediction that couldn’t have been more wrong. Within twenty years, Albert Einstein again fundamentally altered our worldview by demonstrating that our world is part of a space-time continuum universe with relative time. As if that weren’t transformative enough, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger developed quantum physics, revealing a probabilistic digital universe where each matter and particles, literally everything, exists as both mass (what we see) and field (unquantifiable form in a separate dimension).
So fundamentally different was the quantum science view of reality, that Niels Bohr summed it up in the following words: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
Clearly, scientific belief and scientific progress is undoubtedly very useful in making our lives more comfortable. However, it does not bring us closer to the truth, and can keep us ingrained in a closed circle.
Do not get stuck in patterns, habits, or rituals. Do not rely on organisations or groups to tell you what to do. Do not fall into belief traps. Have confidence in yourself. You not only can do it yourself, but you must do it yourself eventually, quickly or slowly, easily or with great struggle. We are all constantly evolving our consciousness. Evolution forces choice and change. Remaining the same by choosing the no action option is not possible. Change cannot be avoided. Change can take place as either positive growth or negative deterioration; the individual choices you make ultimately determine the direction (positive or negative) of your growth.
