Friday, January 22, 2010

Convictions Make Convicts


There are three kinds of belief.

There is belief that we insist is fact that becomes opinion/conviction.

There is belief that we assume dispassionately, to try it out (the spirit in which Lucid View was written, and which my alternate creation theory of tulpas was presented).

A conviction is a belief that we insist is a fact, while to believe something without insisting it is fact can be effective as a thought experiment.

The third kind of belief is one that is sourced in what we know.

To believe what you know means to turn a knowing into a feeling and a way of being or action. In the coarsest way this comes out as principles, but of course principles usually fit squarely in the first class: beliefs that are convictions. Sometimes a warrior dies for what he believes without being a fanatic, i.e., warmly and tenderly. Then he is dying for what he knows.

A belief that stems from a knowing is warm and open and doesn't ever need to be defended, or even communicated. The only reason to share it at all would be out of enjoyment, as when we wish to communicate to a beloved our belief in our knowing that we are in love with them. Or as when a prophet walks the earth and spreads the gospel.

To the intellect, it's an absolute that we cannot know anything. Yet we know, if we are honest, that it is only the intellect that cannot have an absolute knowing about anything, including this statement!

Anyone who has ever been in what they know, even for a moment, knows this.

When we know something, no one can tell us that we only "think we know." All they will succeed in communicating is that they don't know, and perhaps that they feel threatened by our knowing, or by our knowing something they do not.

Put differently: we may not know "what Truth is"; but we do know it when we see it, provided we are being honest.



If we try to persuade another of our POV, we must come out of what we know, close and harden and cease to really communicate; we then oblige the other person to oppose or dismiss our arguments, in order to hold fast to their belief. They match our own closing and hardening.

The mistaken assumption is that two POVs cannot co-exist in harmony, even while being opposed.

Yet this is precisely how the Universe functions: as a polarity of male and female, yin & yang, black to white.

It is only when the moral criteria of good and evil, right and wrong are superimposed over this natural, cosmic polarity, that war supplants love as the ruling principal of existence.

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