September 14, 2005

• Love, and Fear, and Something Else

  At earlier times in this life, I had many beliefs.  I was
  frequently changing my beliefs, switching from one belief system (BS)
  to another as I would find flaws in one and be introduced to the
  next.  They were all, of course, other people’s ideas, things I’d
  read or heard about.  I’m sure I didn’t exhaust the available
  supply of BS, but I think I came close to using up every bit of believable BS with which I came into contact.

  Gradually, I tired of the mental shifts involved in changing my beliefs
  and started questioning the wisdom of belief per se.  Ten years or
  so ago, when we received a copy of How to Believe in Nothing and Set Yourself Free
  for review in the Shaman Papers, already it was preaching to the
  choir.  I was more than ready to do that, but have found that
  transcending BS isn’t as easy as it might sound.  I had to start
  thinking of everything, every idea I had about anything, as a possible
  model for reality, a working hypothesis, something to try out and
  examine.

  One little bit of progress came when I realized that “believable” is a
  concept completely conditioned by one’s pre-existing conceptual
  framework (BS for short), and that believing something to be
  unbelievable is just as much a belief as any other.  To transcend
  beliefs I had to stop not
  believing in things, too.  Suddenly, a lot of the beliefs I had
  once abandoned as part of rejected BS (the baby-with-the-bathwater
  effect) had to be reexamined.  While I was at it, I figured I’d
  better reexamine some of those incredible ideas that had made me reject
  the BS in the first place.

  Close to that same time, another preaching-to-the-choir book came in for review:  Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God. 
  Neale had rejected a lot of the same dogma I had, and his metaphysical
  studies had apparently taken him down some of the same paths I’d
  traveled.  Consequently, for a while I accepted one of the tenets
  of his work rather uncritically.  That was the belief that every
  act proceeds from one of two “sponsoring thoughts,” either love or fear.

  Now I’m not so sure that’s how it is, really.  It occured to me
  that this is a very dualistic belief, as absolutistic as any belief in
  black versus white, right versus wrong, masculine versus feminine, and
  so forth.  In school, I was taught that matter comes in three
  states:  solid, liquid and gas.  Later on, the schools got
  around to teaching about plasmas, and I thought, “Aha!”  That’s
  the right number to correspond with the classical four elements: 
  earth, air, fire, and water. 

  Then, we moved into the New Age and some thoughtful being added The
  Void into the classical tetrad to make it the now-mystically-trendy
  five and I was more or less metaphysically disoriented until I heard
  about Bose-Einstein condensate.  From that, it hasn’t been to
  great a stretch of the imagination for me to think that there might be
  some third “sponsoring thought” other than love and fear, just as there
  are intersexed beings and other shades of gray.

  I’m not talking about fear disguised as love, such as the case in which
  someone commits suicide for “love” when he is left with his fears of
  abandonment and rejection, or when someone commits murder or mayhem in
  defense of someone he or she loves.  That’s fear, not love. 
  What I mean is some motivating something 
  that is neither fear nor love.  I was thinking about calling it
  absent-mindedness or chaos, and then I thought that each of them might
  actually be a separate case in itself.  So that leaves  me
  with four motivating forces, and to keep up with the times I suppose I
  must come up with a fifth.  If my drug of choice were not
  amphetamine, at this point I’d probably be ready to make it a fifth of
  gin.

  See, all that metaphysical transcendence and personal development stuff can be fun.
  

  • 4:44 pm
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