Episode 002: Belief

What do you believe in? When was the last time you asked yourself that question? The last time I think any of us has had a chance to really ask that question was when we were kids. Even then we never actually asked ourselves what we believed, we just believed. There is an interesting force at work underneath the surface of our ever day reality and that is fueled by our perceptions. We have all heard the expression before but what does it really mean? How do you understand this creed and live by it? These are excellent questions so let’s dive straight in.

It is fair to say that our current society is splitting apart. We see it every day on the news. ‘The culture wars!’ pick a side! A war heightened to extremes when our society adopted social media. Our society has always been a sick one with our persistent loneliness and need for approval from our peers. This has always been in the human psyche, but it was not until social media that this has become a much larger and fundamental problem. It may have started with blogging back in the late 90s with the need to express your ideas and views out into the world for others to read. Or it may have started on YouTube and the comment sections. I don’t know enough about the history of how social media occurred, but one thing is for certain we have shifted as a society to expressing our internal ideas from within to the outer society.

For a moment, let’s visualize a time in history without the technology we have now. Take a moment to visualize this historical period you are in. Now, you are struggling with something in your life, you have been having a lot of anxiety over some issue in your life in this time and you wanted to work through it. How could you have done this during this time? I personally visualize myself in a court as a woman from a well-off family, and the first place I want to share these feelings is with my diary. Humans for the longest time use to keep a journal or diary to keep track of their ideas, feelings, and thoughts or their daily comings and goings. The primary differences between now and then were firstly, there is a great many more of us that are literate. Secondly, in the past it would have been a great breach of trust and profound offense to have read someone’s diary or journal, for the simple fact that those words are not meant for others to see. They are for your eyes only. So why do we feel its acceptable suddenly to post our deepest thoughts, feelings, and life with billions of people online?

We do this because our society has shifted in the direction of requiring a third party to validate our own existence. We have placed all the power of who we are and are fully vulnerable to the prospect of someone reading our inner soul and then attacking it. In a simplification we are putting ourselves into a vulnerable position to be attacked and if you feel it or not, part of you clicks post in hoping that your thought is validated by another person and when that does not happen your reality changes. Social media is a place for you to validate your own existence through other people, and what happens when no one likes your post? You quickly and surely become depressed, because since you are not gaining enough likes then your validation is not being met.

Compounded, we are sharing our thoughts, feelings, and life with a silent third party and that is corporate capitalism. We willing spill our guts online and we wonder why we get advertising that is exactly what we were just thinking about. You contributing to an algorithm and machine learning that is slowly making a copy of you and finding out how you tick. With this information governments, employers and companies can manipulate us to do things because they understand us better than we think, because tech companies are selling your information to the highest bidder to sell you something or to get you to vote for them.

Imagine, if you will, a digital matrix created by human beings through no fault of their own an online diary of people’s thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams, moments, and status all in one place with everyone forcing each other to be apart of because they would be left out otherwise. You will quickly begin to realize just how our current society is in a place that feels so existential. There is a digital version of ourselves out there that we are trying to defend as if it is the very soul and fiber of our being. We go to great lengths to please others on these platforms only to feel dissatisfied with what we have and our own life. When we live in a society where everyone is working, living and playing in the cyber we forget that we are not our thoughts, we are not our emotions, and we are not what we post on the internet. We are profoundly deep beings that shift from reality to the next through our beliefs.

We must also realize that our ancestors did not have it any better just because they wrote their feelings in a book. Our ancestors had many more issues to deal with in their day-to-day life, many trying to just make it to the age of 30. I don’t know about you, but I am extremely grateful to be in the time we are in now, because we have lifted enough people to a point where our biggest problem in life is not getting enough likes and I think that is an exceptionally good thing. That does not mean its not a problem and it is something that we can solve together as a species.

Why does any of this matter? I set up this argument this way because I wanted you the viewer to take away something very specific. We are all being forced at home by external factors beyond our control so we have a lot of time on our own. Most of us in the western world cannot stand even 10 minutes alone with ourselves and we quickly spiral down the forever swiping of our phones. We spend a great deal of our time on that matrix I describe earlier and when most of your reality is a place of existentialism and death to your beliefs and your digital self, you can see why we are all lonely, anxious, and angry. It is that anger that causes us to lash out at each other and that is what the media is referring to as the culture war.

I, however, would not frame it as a culture war, I would say it is a war on ourselves. Our own beliefs and ideas are the very targets of attack and since these words and feelings are not meant to be seen by others it exacerbates everything causing increased panic, anxiety, fear and anger. Families are splitting up because their beliefs are so strong that they would rather disown their own brother or sister then to sacrifice our own beliefs. The irony in this is that your brother or sister that you just disowned are you.

You two together are part of the same system and you cannot have one without the other. For every person you meet that believes that the sky is purple there will be an equal amount of people who believe its green. Everything in our world is at the mercy of our own perceptive reality. Would you break up with your current partner if they started to like blue cheese on their pizza and you found it repulsive? I know there are many people out there that would draw the line right there, but that is not what life is about. We are here to resolve and overcome our adversity and not block it out of existence.

Let’s tackle a more relevant issue and I know it’s a risky topic but hey you made it this far. Let’s talk about Anti-maskers. Yes, roll your eyes now and get it out of your system. Now, if you have not already stopped the podcast good for you! You made it past a hurdle into something outside your comfort zone. Now, there is a group of people that are so terrified by government control over our civil rights and liberties that they have made the mask a symbol of the government. These people may not know where the fear comes from and they may not even understand that their reason for not wearing it sounds insane to others, but to these people they believe. They believe. I want to really pause on that one more time. They full heartedly and without any doubt believe that wearing a mask is a symbol of becoming a programed drone of the government. They are worried that their entire identity will be washed away by a powerful force. No different than a monster hiding under your bed or in your closet when you were 5 years old. They believe what they are saying, and most of societies response is to crack down harder on these people. They punish them for their beliefs which just happens to prove the reality they are living.

You can scoff at these people you can say that they are idiots or that they should know better, but you (the collective you) are just as much to blame. What these people need is to be heard, loved and respected for the beliefs just as much as they need to hear, love and respect your fears that they are going to literally kill you if they do not wear a mask. To them you are killing their soul and for you they are killing your body. So is the solution to this to pass stricter anti protest laws? And strip even more freedoms from everyone? That should be an easy one to answer. NO! The more we believe to see our society and world as existential we are not living life in a state of consciousness we are living in a state of fight, flight and freeze. This is the primitive centers of who we are and we really do not understand just how bad social media or the media in general have created a world tailored to hate, despair and loneliness. They sadly make a profit off of this and have every interest to keep society going down this direction.

Okay, have I killed all your hope yet? Good because there is light at the end of the tunnel and its within you. Human beings are very amazing creatures capable of amazing things and one of those things is shifting your reality. You have the power to change your world to be what ever you want it to be through the shifting of your own perception of how you see, taste, smell, hear, touch, or feel that world. This is not some hocus-pocus nonsense, and I am not asking you to suddenly start becoming a monk. Its simply becoming more inquisitive of who you are and how you perceive the world and your beliefs.

I know you have heard this before in your life, because we have all heard this advice. All those self help books and all those successful people who seem so damn happy and have figured out everything, and we wonder, damn why can’t I be that happy. So, you fall into another cycle of depression and despair because you again are seeing yourself through a third party. The only way to break the cycle is to find the power within yourself and stop relying on others for your validation. How do you do this?

Let’s start with a moment for you to sit with yourself in silence with your phone away from you and begin to ask yourself. Why can’t you? Go through all of the reasons of why you can’t and say them out loud to yourself. Do you notice something? Their pretty ridiculous, aren’t they? So ask yourself next why do you believe these things? Was it your parents? Was it a trauma that happened to you in the past? The answers themselves are not important just as long as they make sense to you and if they don’t that is okay. Can you forgive yourself for having these feelings? Can you forgive yourself for believing these things about yourself or your world? Do you love yourself enough to let go of those beliefs? Now this is where things can get fun. You are going to create a ritual for yourself. Nothing is right or wrong and you do not need a book or to search endlessly online for how to do it, you’re going to make it up as you go.

Take the old belief you wish to let go, ensure that you have forgiven yourself fully and provide yourself the love necessary to feel that forgiveness and let it go through a ceremony of your choice. Be a kid in this moment and just do something silly.

I will invent a ritual with you right now, this does not mean you must follow this but try to understand what I am trying to show you. Okay. I have taken the old belief, “I am not good enough to be rich” I forgive myself for having such a thought and I am going to write it down on a scrap piece of paper with all the power and intention as if that this paper is now the literal manifestation of that belief. It has left my brain now and is now the piece of paper. Now I am going to burn it! There is something so satisfying to watching something burn. We are now transforming that thought that was once inside you manifested onto that paper and now being vaporized into heat, light, and smoke. You just watched a belief or perception disappear from your life and created energy in its place. An energy of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. The fundamental irony in all of this is you must believe that it worked. You must have faith in yourself to believe that it worked.

What you are doing here is incepting your own subconscious mind to believe something about your own reality. Instead of wasting your energy waiting for others to validate your own existence on social media. Take back that energy and learn how to incept yourself with positive perceptions and subliminal messages until one day you wake up to a shifted reality.

Our task on this planet isn’t to demonize others for how they feel and think, we are here to save ourselves from our own thoughts and feelings through love and respect through belief and faith to bring your own heaven on earth. You do not need a third party to shift your reality. All you need is yourself and the willingness to believe in something. So, I ask again, what do you believe?

This is the explorer signing off.