Our beliefs matter. They determine our values, which define how we prioritize our limited attention.
As the saying goes, where our attention goes, our energy flows. Beliefs do not change the facts of our world as we find it. By guiding our attention, our beliefs determine what we see and how we react, and thus determine the state of the world as we leave it.
In this way, beliefs have a self-fulfilling nature. A belief in a universe controlled by gods destined our ancestor to live in ignorance of its governing principles, prohibiting the creation of knowledge needed to free humanity from servitude to physical necessities. A belief in a universe governed by orderly and knowable principles permits (but does not guarantee) creating knowledge of our world and living in an informed, easeful harmony.
The most fundamental belief we hold is “who we are.” Who are you? How does the “I” that you relate to relate to your physical body? How do you relate to everything “not you,” including me, everyone else, the world and the universe?
Our choice of who we believe ourselves to be affects everything else. Who we think we are affects how we feel, how people feel around us, how we experience the uncontrollable happenings of living, and how the world is affected by our short lives.
I believe a false and limiting belief about who we are is being fulfilled in false and limited lives. This false belief is at the root of the suffering we experience and create. As Sam Harris as summarized the point, “You are not who you think you are, but you are condemned to be who you think you are.”
Coming to know who we really are is the only path to ending suffering and to living out our potential as life’s most creative creation. The two essays to follow will unravel the following argument, condensed and summarized as best possible for the TL/DR-ers:
- Life is going somewhere, and needs something of us. Who we think we are prevents us from fulfilling the potential of the lives we are born to live.
- Life is the force of creativity in an otherwise dead universe, a sort of cosmic self-curiosity. Life creates knowledge of the universe by evolving beings whose existence is proof of the way a world works.
- Knowledge created of how to exist in harmony with the world is encoded in our genes, a library of contributions by survivors stretching back to the foundry of life on our planet. Life accumulates knowledge in the genetic repository of living beings through a linear process of trial and error, advancing mutation by mutation over generational windows.
- The evolution of life slowly, circuitously, and indirectly creates knowledge of the universal principles that govern our world, permitting life to exist in informed harmony with a better understood universe.
- This process eventually created our brains, with our capacities for logical thought, communication, and subjective experiences — the feeling of being a subject engaging with a world of objects.
- Our self-awareness gives us the feeling of being the “experiencer” of our lived experiences, detaching “who I am” as the observer from the observed world. Feelings ourselves to be subjects separated from a world of objects, we use our reasoning and communicating capabilities to seek out the reason for our existence.
- In pursuit of personal purpose, humans have created knowledge of our world through a collaborative network in which curious minds create, share, iterate and contribute to the evolution of more accurate ideas of how the world works. The creative power of this network is a step-change in the knowledge creating capability of life, evolving with us from a linear and generational process to an exponential and instantaneous one.
- Without our detachment from the raw experiences of awareness we would experience the world without thinking, judgment, reflection and prediction. This separation is critical for enabling our creation of knowledge. It also encourages the understanding that “who we are” is outside of the observed world, leading us to identify as a continuous someone who thinks thoughts, feels feelings, and witnesses the contents of consciousness.
- The ego, the “I” that I believe myself to be, is an illusion. It arises from how we think and is reinforced by how we talk and interact. It is not an enemy so much as an imaginary friend, a sign of our immaturity on a developmental journey toward knowing who we really are.
- We know this, somewhere. It is the reason we feel at odds with the disharmonious way that we are living. The destruction and suffering we create are the result of dysregulated behavior by an adolescent version of who we are becoming.
- Our desire for attachment with something “more” than raw awareness has been channeled into self-importance. Personal significance has driven our pursuit of purpose and enabled the creation of knowledge that powers a collaborative creating network with far greater power than life has ever known. We can be grateful for what we have gained at its bidding, while recognizing we must no longer serve it.
- Life needs us to leave behind the belief of being separate selves. It needs us to understand ourselves to be part of the whole process of the universe learning about itself through life’s creation of knowledge. It needs us to understand each of us as capable of contributing uniquely to this process, and to invest our current knowledge and resources to unlocking the full utility of the humanity-spanning knowledge creating network.
- Life needs us to understand the world to a degree unavailable to beings who have thought themselves out of the world, and to use this understanding to inform life’s pursuit of existing harmoniously with a better known universe. Knowing ourselves as part of life’s pursuit of informed harmony with the universe and investing in unleashing the potential of humanity’s decentralized intelligence, we maximize our potential to overcome otherwise fatal blows to the evolution of life on our planet and contribute to the perpetuation of the universe itself.
- Through us, and unknown experiments with life playing out beyond our reach, the universe is seeking to understand itself to avoid its own, otherwise unavoidable, demise. We must outgrow our belief of being individuals, separated from one another and all of life, to realize life’s potential to spread far beyond it and participate in the universe’s desire for survival. (Oh, and relieve suffering created by our egocentric home-planet activity, too.)
- The egotistical belief of personal significance leads to a false humility of cosmic insignificance. When we come to believe that “who we are” is nothing less than “all that there is,” we realize the individual purpose of contributing to the collective creation of knowledge enabling the harmonious perpetuation of all that there is.
- When we come to know who we really are, we fulfill our potential as life’s most creative creation.
For more detail, see parts two and three —
“Who Do You Think You Are: Who You Are Not” for:
- Digging into the idea of being a “self”;
- How the idea of selfhood emerges from how we think and interact; and
- The consequences of believing ourselves to be separate selves.
“Who Do You Think You Are: Who You Are” for:
- How to see through the illusion of being separate selves;
- The experience of reunion with who you really are; and
- What we can achieve with a foundational belief of inseparability.
xo,
Adam
