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Beware of Your Beliefs

- by Michael Phelan - August 2000

Most religions claim that we must believe in something, usually something unseen or something that religions cannot put into words in a satisfying way. This belief is supposed to be the foundation of our relationship with the universe and with God. We are told to believe that Jesus, Buddha, and others performed these miraculous deeds that the rest of us cant quite get a handle on yet. There are religions built around these people just because they seem to have done things that others could not, and it is suggested that we should worship these people for this very fact, while insisting that we could do the same if we only truly believed. Life in general and society in particular builds our belief systems by many forms of feedback, reward and punishment, and outright misinformation. It is much too obvious there is no truth in advertising or politics. Unfortunately all religions are political organizations, thus giving rise to the New Age preference for spirituality over religion. But is our good intentioned spirituality just another not so perfect belief system. Even if we were able to withdraw from the distorted inuences that bombard our senses from all these outer sources, would we be free from the dangers of misguided belief systems. Could we objectively observe our own inner beliefs and ferret out the distortions and misperceptions, to arrive at a clear view of ourselves, the universe, and God. Perhaps we would still only be wearing the cleanest dirty shirt, and would still fall short of clear perception. Perhaps beliefs themselves are the problem. Belief systems are the lters through which we view the world. They are also the lters with which we color, taint, and distort our perceptions. They are the vehicles that carry us through our limited experiences. But if we insist on riding horse, it surly means that we can only go where a horse can take us. If we believe something is less or different than it is in reality we limit our perception and experience of that something. Do you believe in God? Does that belief contain a denition of what it is that you do or do not believe in? Does that denition limit your experience of and relationship to God? Would it be possible to approach our life experience without these beliefs and denitions that carry us to our limited experience? Is it possible that religions are wrong about needing to believe in order to perform miracles? Perhaps our belief creates that separation between us and something we must believe in, and the very thing that obscures the miraculous and perpetuates our insistence that we are separate from others, the universe and God. Is it possible to look by simply looking, without pre-belief (memory), judgment (belief in good and bad) or attachment (belief in separation)? What might we see if we looked in this way, just observing? Well, lets have a look; lets go into this. We are looking, observing, experiencing. We seem to see that all is different now, all is new rather than the usual rerun of our memory patterns. Everything is now alive and changing, so we continue to look without memory or beliefs as to how these things should be or used to be, or we may miss the next change and the newness of life around us. Today everything is different from how it was yesterday, and will be different again tomorrow. Each thing is born anew in each moment, blossoming from the void in this very moment as we witness creation. Do you now see the hand of God bringing forth these miracles and living within creation? Only if we are reminded, do we remember the past separation we once felt. Now we are more pleased to realize that in the act of observing we have participated in creation. This new and true observation has become Creation itself, as the distance between the observed and the observer disappears. As separation melts into ancient memory, we begin to see the Christ Self in the eyes of each person who arrives on our path, and nod to the Buddhas who walk our streets. Disclaimer Statement