IS IT IRREVERENT TO NOT BELIEVE?

OOOHHH!? Really? Who said so? Who ‘told’ us this? And we subsequently ‘believed’ them too, yes?

What would happen if we did this unthinkable act? We would turn back to dust? Would our offspring be condemned too? Would we revert back to some animal nature and start baa-ing like a lamb? What kind of hell would we expose ourselves to? It sounds pretty medieval, the fury of the consequence.

That would be fear-based believing and thinking. That would be unskillful because we arbitrarily refuse to research past a point that we agreed to for unknown reasons, or at best specious reasons.

The point most salient, is the one that perhaps we have put ourselves in a mental prison that will bind us to a vocation of reaction and blind faith, void of personal expansiveness. Do we even chance to utter the blasphemy of asking ourselves in the quietest of Moments, the question i.e. is belief binding me in some way that I’m missing a bigger picture?

To conclude automatically, that we already know, is to regain and reaffirm the delusion and operate in a very perfunctory way. What does it mean to ‘believe’? What do we get out of it and what do we lose?

“Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.
What we perceive depends upon what we look for.
What we look for depends upon what we think.
What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.”
~ Gary Zukav ~

At this point in our conversation, no religion has been mentioned. Not that religion is even the concern. Religion though, has done a lot to cement us into a little box, not allowing movement, with veiled threats of heresy and worse, assignment of godlessness to our character. Spoiler alert. The threats are medieval garbage. Feudalism is dead. Lords of the Temporal and Lords of the Spiritual now have new names but essentially the same positions. And when the powers of those in power, to include our own ego, are questioned, that is when the resistance to movement away from this fixed position, over-boils into irrationality and unskillfulness in action.

The power, though, is based on fraud and deception using belief and separateness to idolize ideas and create dominion over others and particularly over Self. Self loses because distortion prevails.

What do we lose when we believe we are what we think? Do we believe that thinking is an activity, that if stopped or not honored on a continuous basis, will lead to our moral corruption? If we stopped honoring the 24/7 of thinking, will we implode? Or will our mind go to mush? What beliefs do we have in regards to not vaunting ‘thinking’ over every effing thing? Most of us for most of our lives have not gone past losing ‘thinking’ let alone ‘believing’, because of assumed catastrophic consequences. How sad.

Believing and attaching ourselves to ideas about whom we think we are, is idolatry of the most limited kind. Placing our identity in ideas and beliefs and attaching ourselves to that contracted bundle of illusion, is par for the course, unfortunately. Identification with the body of illusion called the ego, starts with the belief that we can be that amorphous tension of contraction from Awareness. Awareness is there before and after the illusion of belief and ideas have come and gone. However, the obfuscation and displacement of Awareness, is concerning. Belief just digs us in further.

We cannot think our way back to Awareness when thinking is the problem, not the solution. Removing dependence on thinking/belief, liberates the tightness of the contraction so the Awareness has a better chance of not being pushed further out of our consciousness.

Belief is like taking a pledge to look no further because all the looking is done without really any inquiry taking place. Can we see that? Stopping to believe is stopping movement because we ‘think’ we know everything we would ever need to know. Where is the end of knowledge? Does it have an end point? Short-circuiting inquiry is hanging on to the contraction in a needy way. It is faux strength because superficial needs have been assuaged at the expense of the completion of our internal/external development.

“We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
and to know the place for the first time.”
~ T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Being open to ideas and questioning the icons of our existence is not weakness. Resistance to change and resisting inquiry is ‘stickiness’ and would conclude a practice that smacks of a lack of transparency (by and to self). Ideas are things that are not godly nor can ever be godly. Their limitations need to be seen with clarity and challenged in the crucible of the Moment. The Moment can only be real with the plague of the foreign residue of conclusion and finality removed, so the manifesting unbounded and timeless Presence can be known Now.

This Iz Daddy’O