Looking for security

In these articles, we often focus on aspects of the mind-body-spirit continuum, for example psychological and emotional behaviour so that unhelpful patterns can be brought to light and, hopefully, released. When it comes to the body, the basics, as we all know, are suitable food, exercise, sufficient sleep and pleasant thoughts. For spirituality, we offer dozens of classes, some of which are entire systems of spiritual development, while others are specific classes that do one thing very well, such as the opening of the pineal gland. These three aspects, mind body and spirit are the core of our work.

So why do we write about the mind so much? Our physical brains and mental processes have been programmed since birth with information and ways to behave. Apart from the information often not being useful, the very act of programming has predisposed our minds to patterns of acceptance since this was the behaviour established in early childhood. Even if we did not like what we were being told, we learned to accept a lot of it as we felt we had no choice since we were small and weak. This means that we are predisposed to believing what we are told, what we read and what we see on television, and try to adapt new information to fit our existing patterns if we can. If we cannot fit information to the predetermined pathways, we refuse to believe the information. This is what we have been talking about in the articles on filters and biases.

But what is the psychological reason we want to believe? How do we benefit from having beliefs, rather than from observing what is happening? Simply, the answer is security. As children, belief in or adopting what we were told gave us a sense of security -again, even if we did not like what we were told- in a world that we did not understand and were too weak to make our own way. As adults, we still do not understand many things about the world, so we adopt beliefs to make sense of it. An additional reason we want to believe is that we equate belief with love, in other words we equate ‘believing’ someone (our parents, for example) with loving them, and disbelief with betrayal.

Religion is a prime example of how we adopt and hold onto beliefs that even a cursory glance reveal to be inconsistent at best. In order to hold onto our beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, we adjust our beliefs with sometimes extraordinary feats of logic instead of applying Occam’s razor – the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.

When we hold onto beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence (not opposing beliefs) we are living in denial. And denial, according to the Kubler-Ross model of the "grief cycle," is the first stage of death. Here, this is ‘death of the ego’ and can be very scary (lack of security) so people often would rather literally die than give up their beliefs. Hence, the many conflicts among different religious groups.

The only true security is trust in life, and that life will always find a way to go on, maybe not in the style to which you would like to become accustomed (wealth, fame, comfort, etc.) but in a way that will allow you to grow, because growth is life itself.

Please do not believe the above, but think about it and see if it makes sense to you.