Have you ever experimented on your psyche, your worldview or your beliefs?
I suspect this is something the majority of people wouldn’t even consider and that most who do would be a little scared to try. After all, you are playing with the things that make you you. If something goes wrong (or sometimes if something goes right) the you that exists now will cease to exist.
For some reason this doesn’t scare me as much as it seems to scare most people. Now I think I realize that the core of the self is something energetic that cannot be tampered with and is perfect as it is, and that every story on top of it is just a story, a program. But even before I came to such conclusions, this kind of experiment was always exciting to me. I guess I’ve always thrived off exploration, and exploration of consciousness is the ultimate form of exploration.
While some people use drugs, I prefer to use ideas, because they can be just as potent and often don’t get the credit they deserve. Our beliefs are just thoughts we keep thinking, so while it may not be easy, they can be changed. Why not test the waters?
I understand it may be scary to risk your entire personality on some kind of vague experiment, but it’s not as if you can’t anchor yourself. Remind yourself along the way of a specific thing you don’t want to lose and never let go of that. And then commit yourself to an idea.
I’ve challenged many of my beliefs like this, and some grew stronger as a result while others exposed themselves as counterproducted or rooted in some kind of trauma and so I dismantled them.
I’ve tried all kinds of things and commited myself as much as I could.
The idea that all people are fundamnetally good.
The idea that they are all fundamentally evil.
The idea that everything is a transaction.
The idea that everything is love.
The idea that life is a dream.
Different conceptions of karma.
Different interpretations of synchronicity.
The idea that everything is the fault of others.
The idea that everything is my own fault.
Different spiritual and intellectual frameworks to understand the world.
If something moves me more than a little, it deserves a bit of stress testing. What other explaination could there be? Even if I adopt the framework, I continue to test it and look for different explainations.
Trurh tends to be paradoxically quite complex and quite simple at the same time. It all depends on what level you take it to.
So personally, I have found, for example, that even if there is somethinf greater than ourselves, our concept of good and evil are subjective human concepts, but they are also extremely important and without them, we tend to create problems for ourselves and for others. Even if you believe that a text is direct from the divine, your intepretation or thr interpretation of those who have influenced you is at play.
So rooting in a concept of good and bad that seems to work for yourself and for others tends to be beneficial. This can be done through logical and moral frameworks other than those that are spiritual too, although those never interested me as much because the idea that this life itself isn’t magic never made much sense to me. From a logical perspective existence has no reason to exist.
I think one of the reason these experiments scare people is that subconsciously they must know they are full of bias. People have a deep desire to make sense of things and to find meaning and that can act as a trap and that leads to what we might consider delusional.
I think the best way to navigate is to be aware of our own bias and to test it as much as possible. If something feels good but requires us to ignore certain things, thats usually a warning sign. If it requires others to see things the same way that we do, that’s another warning sign. If we apply ideas conveniently to justify activity that is exploitative, it’s a warning sign.
The idea I am playing with is a bit hard to put into words but it has to do with intrinsic value and the idea that we deserve anything at all. Japanese doesn’t have a word for “deserve” although it does have a word for value.
I grew up hearing all kinds of ideas about what people deserve. “Everyone deserves decency”. There was always a sense of human rights and indiviudal freedoms and “god given rights”, always about what WE deserve as individuals.
I think Asian cultures tend to come from the other end and say “You must be decenct” because social harmony demands it. There isn’t much emphasis on what people deserve, only ideas of what is good and promotes harmony and what is bad and causes problems.
In many ways Japan takes this to the extreme, in wubtle ways that can be extreme even for the rest of Asia. So I am trying to understand by telling myself “you don’t deserve anything” every day.
I don’t think I will keep this belief without some kind of more positive or individualistic one to balance it out but I want to immerse myself in this idea for a while and see what I learn.
Let me know what you think…what do we deserve as individuals and why?
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I actually like how you treat beliefs as experiments rather than fixed truths, because the reality is that most of them are subjective and therefore need to be experimented on. This could actually reveal a lot about expectations and entitlement too
I think to a certain extent even what we think we deserve falls into the subjective realm that's somehow tied to one's preconceived ideas. Within my community, I may deserve a decent level of respect but when I'm out of that group, I could be treated otherwise. Familiarity or the lack of it, usually dictates how one responds/reacts to the other person.
Broadly, I do like the idea of not deserving anything, partly because it reduces much of the entitlement that comes as a byproduct of it. But having to keep earning one's position perpetually seems impractical and very burdensome on the individual.