What Do You Believe?

Everyone at some time in their life, if they cannot travel widely around the world, should study anthropology. Or at least, read a book or two on the subject. I recommend Edward T Hall’s many wise and readable works.

Since humankind traded instinct for intellect, every society in the world has wrangled with the same questions about life and purpose, about how and why things are as we find them, and how, if at all, we can do anything about any of it. The only actual difference between how ancient humans thought and imagined and conceived of the problems and the solutions, and how we currently modern humans do the same is that we have generations more experience of Reality, of trial-and-error to consult.

But even as the concerns are the same, so are many of our other human limitations. One of the biggest is our belief systems.

We can’t actually know very much about anything. We all say we know, but the truth is, we believe. We’ve become convinced that one belief or another is true, is right and absolute, but as E.T. Hall explains over and over, the things we think of as absolute are actually just cultural beliefs, true only for and in our own culture. Just as individuals center our sense of knowing something around core beliefs so deeply held that we don’t even remember when or why we began to believe them, so it is with cultural core beliefs.

The thing is, it is possible to recall those beginnings of belief. A single person can explore their own depths, and we can also look back at when and why a culture grabbed onto a belief and clung to it as a central truth of existence. For a person or a society, finding those origins is the opportunity to reassess with what we know now about the world, about others, about ourselves, and update obsolete ‘truths’ that in fact we no longer believe.

When we free ourselves of ancient fears and causes, we are empowered to choose the knowledge and values we hold today as the basis for our decisions about where we’ll place our energy.