Why Do We Believe the Things We Do and Do They Matter? - Thoughts on Beliefs

The following is about how we create beliefs, what they help us achieve, and how to reflect and rewire our beliefs.

Personal Story

When I lived in London, I think I was around 22 at the time. I joined a Lithuanian Hare Krishna community. I wasn’t in it hardcore, but I would attend monthly meetings with a teacher that flew in from Lithuania.

Now I don’t know how much you know about that belief system, but what I learned boiled down to this:

• We’re in a bad stage of human evolution (called Kali Yuga), and it’s all because of how bad people we are.
• Drinking, smoking, and drugs attract bad spirits that attach to us and then take our energy (fun fact, I quit drinking partially due to this when I was 22, and I still don’t drink (yes, ever) to this day 😂. Not because I fear the spirits but not consuming alcohol feels GREAT)
• Women and men are different, and all the wrongdoings that men exhibit in a relationship are due to women not being energetically clean enough.
• Can’t eat meat (karma and you will be reborn an animal in the next life) and have to eat from metal plates because they don’t retain the bad karma.
• Everything that’s not working in your life is karma from past lives, and you better pray hard and ask for forgiveness (I remember an example that shook me was that if a woman is in a toxic relationship with a violent alcoholic, it’s her bad karma from the past and she needs to clear it).
• No premarital sex, of course.

There was other crazy 💩 too, and I have to say, even though some beliefs didn’t sit well with me, I LOVED the certainty of it.

Why I Believed The Things I Did

Someone was sitting there, telling us the right time to eat/pray/love, what’s good, what’s bad, and as long as we keep praying, everything will be all right. If we pray and it doesn’t get solved, it’s because of karma/we didn’t love God hard enough.

I mean, the world was so clear, so black and white, and there was no thinking or nuance required on my part; I just did what I had to do. I went for it, of course, judging everyone in sight and feeling self-righteous about my view of the World. These other ones would burn in hell, and I had a chance to see heaven!

I eventually started questioning it and stopped attending the lectures because it didn’t feel right. I used to be quite a rigid person, and I must have started to grow out of it at that point.

Reflecting on this now, I get why people follow a religious tradition. The moral and ethical guidelines are clear, you’ve got a community of like-minded people, and the World is an ordered place to operate in. This, of course, goes beyond religion. We all hold beliefs about the way the World is to survive.

Why Beliefs Form

A little kid needs to adopt the beliefs of his environment because his parents and immediate family are what he depends on for survival. We build our view of Self, others, and the World based on the other-installed belief system and continue stacking up evidence to support it. The problem is that if we live from the beliefs we formed when we were little, they’re not our beliefs; they’re someone else’s. It’s not like beliefs are good or bad anyway. It’s more about whether they work for you.

Your Beliefs

Do your beliefs help you get what you want? What are the things you want but feel you can’t have/are not for you? Have you ever examined why you believe what you believe?

It’s hard for most of us because it doesn’t feel like we even have beliefs. They feel ingrained in what we think we are, our thoughts, language, and the Self.

Have you ever seen someone else acting a certain way and were like: “Boy, they’re acting like their parent?” But when you try to talk to them about it, they think you’re being ridiculous.

That’s how ingrained the belief is. Belief = I.

So now, what to do? Examine your belief system (Source).

We think that we form beliefs this way:

Hear something —> think about it/vet it —> determine if it’s true/false —> form the belief.

But actually, we:

Hear something —> believe it to be true/false depending on our preexisting beliefs —> and only sometimes, later, we think about it more to determine if it’s true/false.

Questions To Reflect

Now, onto the good part 👇

Pick an area of your life you want to explore. It could be beliefs about yourself/others/the World or a specific area such as career/business/money/relationships/friendships etc.

Open up your notes app or take a piece of paper and answer the following 👇 (Source)

• What do I believe about this?
• Why do I believe that?
• Who or what put that idea in my head?
• Does this belief help me or hurt me?
• Does it limit me or set me free?
• Who taught me that?
• Why did they teach me that? What was their agenda?
• What was their interest in making me believe that?

This isn’t a 10-min journalling process. You will need to come back again and again.

Final points

No beliefs are good or bad. NONE. They either work or don’t work when it comes to our life and inner experience. So we could say that beliefs matter in as much as they help us get what we want. If something isn’t working, it might be worth considering what the underlying belief is. If you prefer to be more destabilized, go through all of your beliefs, and you’ll find out that almost nothing you believe you consciously chose to. But an unexamined belief system is like living with Windows 1.0 on an Apple product.

Have fun!

Also published here.