THE DISABILITY OF BELIEF

Overcommitment in the Moment, throws us out of the Moment, due to the ‘holding’ that this commitment creates. Holding on and attaching to some idea, longer than the Moment allows, gives penalty to the player. We undermine the game of chance (uncertainty) when we try to fix the game by pushing our agenda unfairly. When we try to undermine the game by controlling the game’s dynamic, that is, uncertainty, with a faux certainty, we invariably have to push. This ‘pushing’ always has consequences, to wit, unnecessary suffering.

We push against uncertainty to try to create certainty so that we may get the result we want. This means we are more focused on the result than the game. When that happens, we betray the quality of the game and subsequently have a compromised experience, e.g. struggle. We lose the Moment because we left it before the game started. We are seeking outside of “What Is” and clearly outside of Presence. That is not playing the game per the rules. We sacrifice flow. To ‘think’ we can have an impermanent object, even an impermanent idea or belief, made permanent, is unskillful.

Core beliefs, often unrecognized, are drivers of our realities. We ‘push’ because we ‘believe’ that is how life is to be approached. The necessity of ‘pushing’ or ‘not pushing’, are beliefs. Why we believe we have to do anything, or not do anything, is a question that must be asked to reveal the basis of a belief. In regards to ‘pushing’ and creating struggle, it is a core belief that underlies and undermines a great deal of our contemporary life.

A key constituent of attachment to results rather than Moments, has a lot to do with where we place our identity, individually and collectively. We do not trust the changing nature of the Moment as it is and therefore the idea of identify is justified and falsely created outside of the Moment. We derive our identity from these staid belief systems in false timezones that do not flex with reality. We ask reality to stand still to fit our corrupt conceptual framework and need for predictable results. How odd! And the results do not ever bring any lasting happiness or contentment, do they?

A direct experience with God (insert preferable limited idea for the limitless) is certainly not belief-based. Moreover, Nature itself does not ask the flora of life to sign-up for a religious test and testament. There is no mandate to believe anything except when we invent the belief to do so. Belief is inconsequential to “What Is”. Belief is forcing ‘thinking’ over Being. It is the push that pushes us out of harmony with Self.

Roger Bannister is remembered by Track and Field today for the fact that he set the unthinkable time of an under a 4 minute mile. Informed observers on and before the May 6th date in 1954, created the myth that a sub-4 minute mile was not humanly possible. This was part of the collective belief system and of course impacted an individual athlete’s belief system. Roger Bannister’s time was 3 minutes and 59.3 seconds that day. 46 days later, the record was again broken. The ‘new’ impossible standard was now uncertain.

The current mile run record is 3:43.13 held by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999. Records for the mile run have been kept since 1865 in England when Richard Webster ran a 4:36.5.

Another example of belief systems creating stops in consciousness and performance, was Rhonda Rousey, MMA Women’s champion for the UFC. Her performance in the caged fighting arena was so stoked, that Joe Rogan, play-by-play announcer, had opined that Rhonda was a legend among all female athletes, let alone Mixed Martial Arts. Giving that she finished all of her opponents convincingly and some in under 60 seconds, made that idea, that belief, pretty viable. That is, until Holly Holmes stepped into the picture and KTF’oed her in the 2nd round.

Beliefs change. They are not permanent because they are fixed ideas. Fixed ideas are form and all forms have limitations. They come, they morph, and they go.

“No religion is greater than TRUTH. No faith is greater than FACT.”
-Malcolm X

The death of a belief is a death to the clinging to an idea. Our identification with the idea or belief, is identification with ‘no change’. This becomes a state where the heaviness of the mind binds us to separateness. Separateness is artificially created and contracted from the Great Space that Is. We then are caught up in ‘thinking’ as the acme of our existence. We lost the Limitless when we succumbed to the false stability of ‘no change’ of belief.
However, the Universe is always changing and evolving.

Core beliefs are an anathema to personal growth. They are an attempt to say to ourselves that ‘things’ have to be ‘this’ way with a direct slap to the face of “What Is”. Beliefs, especially historically, have been known to change radically from Luddite weavers to contemporary presidential candidates.

Identity becomes fixed in self when residing and abiding in a belief system. Inflexibility is then embraced because of characteristic stasis. We become limited giving up our greater potential to Be the Limitless and to evolve with the vastness of Universe. Stasis makes our lives predictable and desperate for more. Is it ever enough?

“I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.”
-G.I. Gurdjieff

Resolving the disability of identity embedded in thoughts and beliefs begins with addressing our specious core beliefs. Are these beliefs really true when we confront them, not casually but deeply, with spaciousness and objectivity? Can we unhook Awareness from thinking thoughts and beliefs? Awareness is always there, silently in the backdrop, to everything, to include thoughts.

“You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.” -G.I. Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff points to the most essential assumption we can make and still not see. If we are in prison and do not realize it, why would we even try to break out? We must first realize this sad truth about ourselves. We must see the mind as the jailer and beliefs as keys to imprison or liberate our souls. Freeing identity from thinking to Awareness, is to spurn the continued collective worship of identity in ideas/beliefs/thoughts. The Awareness is the eternal space and backdrop to everything, internally and externally. Experience ‘that’ in the Moment. “That’ undefinable, timeless, unbounded field is Us.

This Iz Daddy’O