Arthur Conan Doyle's famous character, Sherlock Holmes, said it another way: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
This is powerful, and difficult for many to integrate because it's not how we've been conditioned to view our lives. We very often won't accept the "improbable" event if it does not jive with our beliefs or opinions or inner dogma. We will often choose, in other words, our beliefs rather than an uncomfortable or surprising truth.
This passage by Jane Roberts, channeling the "Seth Material" is from her book, "The Nature of Personal Reality:
"Beliefs are our intensely strong ideas about the nature of reality, and we form the fabric of our experiences through our beliefs and expectations. We take our beliefs about reality as truth, and often do not question them. They are not recognized as beliefs about reality, but are instead considered characteristics of reality itself. These personal ideas about yourself and the nature of reality will affect your emotions and thoughts. Ideas generate emotion. Strongly contradictory beliefs can cause great power blocks, impeding the flow of inner energy outward. Unassimilated beliefs, unexamined ideas, can seem to adopt a life of their own.
Some beliefs originated in childhood, but you are not at their mercy unless you believe you are. Because your imagination follows your beliefs, you can find yourself in a vicious circle in which you constantly paint pictures in your mind that reinforce “negative” aspects of your life. The imaginative events generate appropriate emotions, which automatically bring about hormonal changes in your body or affect your behavior with others, or cause you to interpret events always in the light of your beliefs. And so, daily experience will seem to justify what you believe more and more. But beliefs about reality are not necessarily attributes of reality. There are no accidents in cosmic terms, or in terms of the world as you know it.
The conscious mind is basically curious, open, but human beings have taught it to accept only data coming from the outside world, and to set up barriers against inner knowledge. False beliefs will seem to be justified in terms of physical data, since your experience in the outside world is a materialization of those beliefs. Once the conscious mind has accepted a collection of conflicting beliefs, however, a definite attempt is made to sort these out. So, you must work with the raw material of your ideas, even while your sense data may tell you that a given belief is obviously a truth. False beliefs can result in a rigid ego that insists upon using the conscious mind in one direction only, further distorting its perceptions. Many quite limiting ideas will pass without scrutiny under the guise of goodness. You may feel quite virtuous, for example, in hating evil; but if you find yourself concentrating upon either hatred or evil you are creating it. If you think the world is evil, you will meet the events that you think are evil. Hatred of war will not bring peace; only love of peace will bring about those conditions. Likewise, if you dwell upon limitations, you will meet them.
Core beliefs are strong ideas about your own existence. Many subsidiary beliefs that seem separate from each other are offshoots of core beliefs. It is the core belief that is strong enough to so focus your perception that you perceive from the physical world only those events that correlate with it. It is also the strength of the core belief that draws up from the vast bank of inner knowledge only those events that seem to fit in within its organization. A core belief is invisible only when you think of it as a fact of life, and not as a belief about life. Like attracts like, so similar ideas group about each other and you accept those that fit in with your particular “system” of ideas. Bridge beliefs seem to unify two contradictory beliefs, holding a similarity to each of the others.
Hypnosis clearly shows in concentrated form the way in which your beliefs affect your behavior in normal life. Your beliefs act like a hypnotist. As long as the particular directions are given, so will your automatic experiences conform. The one suggestion that can break through this is: “I create my reality, and the present is my point of power.”
There are two ways to get at your own conscious beliefs: one is to examine them, write them down, talk about them; the other is to work backwards from the emotions to the beliefs."
I always find this discussion fascinating in what ever context it is in.
ReplyDeleteThe Dogma of religion, of course is always at the forefront of this discussion for obvious reasons. Beliefs are based on what other people tell you. Of course that is, has been and always will be such a destructive force in this world and fodder for constant debate about Reality versus Beliefs.
But here's the more interesting philosophical question that I always think about when pondering this idea of Reality versus Beliefs:
Before humans had the tools to figure out that the earth revolved around the sun, were the people living in that time actually not "living in reality" because they believed that the sun revolved around the earth? The fact of the matter is the only observation they could make is that the sun came up on one side of the earth and went down on the other side. Without telescopes and other tools to figure out this enormous blunder could they really be held accountable for being ignorant to reality? Then again the facts remain that their entire "reality" was completely wrong.
So is reality completely relative to what we can actually observe? Or are we always just going to be ignorant to the one true reality of it all?
Obviously science is continuously discovering new realities every day, so perhaps all of us are doomed to constantly live in a world where the sun revolves around the earth.