On Beliefs: Why We Believe the Things We Do and If They Matter

Why we believe the things we do and if they matter

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 learnt 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

• 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 (don’t remember why) 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 really 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 s3x 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

There was someone 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 is going to 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&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 SO self-righteous about my view of the World. These other ones were gonna 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 totally 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 in order 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.

And look, 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 so ingrained in what we think we are, our thoughts, language and Self.

Have you ever seen someone else acting a certain way and were like: “Boy, they’re acting exactly 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.

Questions To Reflect

So now, what to do?

Examine your belief system.

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, to 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:

• 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?

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!

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