The Power of Belief and Why You Should Care
I am fascinated by the power of belief.
Not only can you affect your physical body via the placebo affect, the entire way you experience life is dependent on what you believe and variant based on the belief in question.
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Holding a belief that credits a higher power for your existance results in a life that more or or less values every experience against the judgement of this higher power.
For example, someone who believes that their life should be credited to Jesus or God for reasons they hold to be true would see every act as either an ode or discredit to their creator, valuing every day against how they ‘should’ live depending on what rules they believe they should be following.
Someone who believes their life is meaningless, accidental or stupid may behave in a reckless manor, with little to no care for how they affect others. This person may uphold a carefree or careless lifestyle, depending on how they care about what they believe.
The irony of these belief systems is that both people from both examples would frown upon or laugh at each other for their lifestyles!
We tend to see how others approach life and immediately value it against our own.
‘Value’ is a kinder word, what we are really doing is judging.
We all trust that our perspective, our belief system and our way of viewing life is the absolute best, most truthful and only way to see life.
This blind trust welcomes the idea that anyone who believes different than us either doesn’t have enough knowledge, is completely brainwashed or flat out dumb.
Belief systems affect how we interpret and experience our lives and how we view ourselves, behave towards others and adapt morals.
I do not understand how normalized it is to dismiss others’ beliefs in all aspects of life.
There is so much room for understanding, shifting perspective, widening perception and growth through expansion of knowledge, and yet we use all of that opportune space to judge, dismiss and gossip about others viewpoints that don’t perfectly align with our own!
If you were to surround yourself with people who only believed exactly what you believed, conversations would be simple, agreeable and circular. Life would lack growth, entertainment and adaptation.
It is easy to find yourself in a deep hole of perception with an external environment that confirms everything you think, especially by trustworthy peers, adults or individuals in power.
Why do you think children often adapt their parents beliefs? Whether it be religion, politics, finances or worldviews, it is easy to accept a ‘definite truth’ when it is consistently confirmed by people you trust.
The internet proposes an interesting conundrum for confirmation bias.
If confirmation bias through a group of trusted individuals can easily shape world views, political opinions and countless other types of belief systems, think of the internet as the group, and publishers as the trusted individuals.
Similarly to how Sally confides in her principal and would trust anything she says while Thomas takes everything she says as a complete lie (because he got sent to her office for throwing hot dogs at a girl once), Aunt Claire reads Huffington Post like the Bible and Uncle Brad trusts the headlines of TMZ over his own coworkers.
The vast ocean of information that resides on the internet gives opportunity for ‘reliable’ confirmation on any belief, any fact, any statement, any quirry that one could ever fathem.
I have reliable in quotation marks for the sole reason that one persons reliable source is another persons nonsense. One persons belief is another persons burst of laughter. One persons sin is another persons daily activity, one persons defining quality is another persons downfall.
If difference was met with acceptance rather than judgement, our world would be brighter, our systems would be smoother and our lives more joyful.
I challenge anyone reading this to study their own belief systems, ask yourself where they came from, why you hold them to be true, and if they currently add value to your life.
Our minds are incredibly powerful and the power they hold affects how we see ourselves and our lives. It is time to regularly pull a ‘Descartes’ and dump out the apples of belief from the basket, inspect each one for expiration, plausibility and alignment, and only take back the beliefs that serve us today.
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xx
AES
