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Today's
Meditation:
Our beliefs
do make us stubborn sometimes, don't they? If I
believe that young people should act in certain ways, I'm
going to be pretty stubborn in demanding that they act
that way. If I believe that my idea of God is the
one and only version of God, then I'll stubbornly cling to
that belief no matter how much evidence may be presented
to me to the contrary. If I believe that certain
roles are appropriate for a certain gender, then often,
nothing that anyone says to me will make me think
differently.
Our
stubbornness is so often a result of beliefs that have
become deeply engrained in our psyches, and no matter what
others do to try to educate us to the contrary, those
beliefs keep us thinking in the same ways. Beliefs,
though, shouldn't be ideas and concepts that keep us
frozen in certain ways of seeing the world; rather, they
should be flexible and dynamic, ready to be changed as
soon as we learn something that contradicts them.
When a belief is contradicted in a way that is
irrefutable, it's time to change that belief, not hold on
to it come hell or high water.
Our
beliefs, though, give us a sense of safety. They
make us feel that we have a grasp on this world we're
living in, like we've made a bit of sense out of things
that don't always make sense to us. Unfortunately,
we tend to keep our beliefs even when evidence tells them
they're not accurate, simply because we're afraid to lose
something that gives us that feeling of security.
The truth is, though, that we're holding on to a feeling
of security, not true security itself-- what we think makes
sense really doesn't, and we're simply fooling ourselves
into thinking it does.
It's
very important, especially when things are going badly,
that we re-examine our beliefs and figure out whether they
might be the element of our lives that are actually
causing problems for us. We need to make sure that
our beliefs aren't old and worn-out and actually
damaging-- we don't want to make ourselves miserable simply
in order to hold on to thoughts that are no longer
relevant in our lives today. We function much better
in life when our behaviors are caused by the situations at
hand, and not by our beliefs that change the ways that we
see those situations.
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