{"id":3141,"date":"2019-12-16T19:35:49","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T18:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/awareness-now.org\/?p=3141"},"modified":"2019-12-16T20:01:00","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T19:01:00","slug":"what-is-a-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/?p=3141","title":{"rendered":"What is a belief?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our world seems to be built on beliefs and assumptions. You may for instance believe something about yourself; that you are a good person, or that you have negative qualities. You may believe that you belong to a certain nation, to a certain religion. You may believe that in the future things will be better, or worse.<\/p>\n<p>What actually IS a belief?<\/p>\n<p>Simply said; a belief is a <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">thought<\/span>. It resides\/arises in your mind, not anywhere else. The essential difference with practical thoughts like &#8220;Let&#8217;s not forget to do shopping today&#8221;, is that a belief-thought is taken very seriously and always is &#8220;personal&#8221;, it refers back to &#8220;me&#8221; and &#8220;mine&#8221;. &#8220;I believe in this or that&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Any statement like; &#8220;I am a republican\/democrat&#8221; or &#8220;I am an American\/Asian\/European&#8221; are examples of such thoughts. Nobody knows exactly what it means to be an &#8220;European&#8221; or an &#8220;Asian&#8221;, yet these words are used everyday, as if they are important and meaningful, as if they point to something which is &#8220;real&#8221;. Something like &#8220;Asia&#8221; does not exist in reality. It is just a type of labeling that we have applied when we drew a map of the world. We have drawn some imaginary lines on a piece of paper. That&#8217;s all.<\/p>\n<p>When belief-thoughts are repeated, often and by many people, those thoughts are taken even more seriously by even more people. This is true for all political, religious and other belief systems. A person who strongly believes in a certain thought, like &#8220;I am a proud Republican\/Democrat&#8221; will often repeat this thought and will want this belief to be confirmed. Actually no one knows exactly what it means to be a proud &#8220;this or that&#8221;, but by making such statements, we feel that we belong, that we have a position, that we know something!<\/p>\n<p>The consequence however of any position, any belief, is that it excludes or opposes other belief-thoughts. When someone identifies with being &#8220;pro-Brexit&#8221; and believes that a &#8220;Brexit&#8221; will solve their problems, information which apparently contradicts their conclusion, is now no longer welcome or interesting. We want our beliefs to be confirmed, not challenged.<\/p>\n<p>The core of this article is not that any particular belief is better or worse than another. That&#8217;s not the point. The point is seeing the <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">mechanism<\/span> underneath.<\/p>\n<p>Unless we begin to see the belief mechanism for what it is (just thoughts) we will take beliefs very seriously and always be ready to fight, hurt and kill others.<\/p>\n<p>We fight, hurt and kill others, just on the basis of assumptions, beliefs, myths. That&#8217;s a significant part of human history isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>So the question that remains then is; are YOU willing to see the illusion of this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our world seems to be built on beliefs and assumptions. You may for instance believe something about yourself; that you are a good person, or that you have negative qualities. You may believe that you belong to a certain nation, to a certain religion. You may believe that in the future things will be better, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3141"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3144,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141\/revisions\/3144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awareness-now.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}