Habits and Beliefs

Habits take months or years to change, but beliefs can change in a moment.

In defense of Mitt Romney and the Republican candidates. Wait. What?

If there is someone who does not accept Evolution, it is not because they have not been taught it. Evolution has been taught for over one hundred years. There must be other reasons that a person struggles to accept Evolution. The obvious, and common, explanation is religion. But could there be other reasons?

There do exist some rationale obstacles. All of which are removed by science, but that is another obstacle, as we will see.

One obstacle is that we do not observe cross-species evolution taking place. We do witness biological evolution when it is forced. We humans intentionally make new breeds of dogs or new types of flowers. But even in our best labs, we never see cross-species evolution.

In all living things we see natural adaptation and hybridization, but for as long as we’ve kept records, and for as much technology as we’ve acquired, we have never witnessed one species becoming another species. (Simply because our life-span is not long enough and for evolutionary reasons cannot be long enough. An organism can only be a small part of complex change.)

Which is the second obstacle: time. If we were to be honest, billions of years sounds like science-fiction no matter how much hard science is behind it. The complexity of organisms and the complexity within each part of each organism is a problem for Evolution, no matter how many past years one gives it.

The world, and universe, is entirely self-propagating. That much is obvious and true. We do get to witness that. Obstacles arise with the two time-related questions: “How did it all start?” and “How did we get to this point?” And those are the two questions people ask. The first is typically asked out of closed defensiveness. The second is typically asked out of healthy curiosity.

Which brings us (back) to the obstacle of science.

The percentage of people reading, studying, or keeping up with the hard science is quite small. A person has likely been taught Evolution, but how much and how long ago? And without knowing the hard (and often newest) science, Evolution requires almost as much faith as religious, mythical explanations.

The greatest things ever spoken.

Here they are.

The three greatest things ever spoken (and subsequently written). I identified these three after searching for them for most of my 42 years, particularly the last seven. I am comfortable saying these are the greatest. This is the order I put them in:

1. “Follow your bliss.” Joseph Campbell (1940)
2. Accept the “isness” of things. Lao Tzu (~550 BC)
3. Be fully present. Buddha (~500 BC)

Does Education have it wrong?

Does education have it all wrong?

Education, from grade school to university, is obsessed with data and research (I’m sorry: “inquiry”). Data, data, data. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Like a child with a new toy, it seems education cannot see anything else or dare not look anywhere else. “Everyone else is coo-coo for numbers, I had better be too.” There is little being pushed and preached right now other than “inquiry” and data.

But.

Poring over data doesn’t feel like educating students to me. At all. It feels like making widgets at a factory. It feels like an accounting game. It feels like playing along with education’s latest magic bullet. It feels like something you do to make yourself feel like you’re doing something… while you are missing what matters most.

So.

Let’s glide through history and recap the lists of what people should learn:

The Perennial Philosophy (all time)

• Abandon Self
• The Unity of all things

The Upanishads (~700 BC)

• Know nothing, want nothing, pass beyond suffering

Lao Tzu (550 BC)

• The Tao: the flow if the universe; action without effort.

Socrates (400 BC)

• Know Thyself

Aristotle (350 BC)

• “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Seng Ts’an (550 AD)

• Let go–of longing, aversion, distinction, assertion, denial, thinking, your opinions.

Kûkai (800)

• All things change when we do.

Wu-Men (1200)

• There is only the now

Rumi (1250)

• Wash yourself of yourself
• Open your loving to God’s love

West Point (est. 1802)

• Ethics
• Leadership

Robert Frost (1900)

• “You are educated when you have the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence.”

Harvard (1900)

• The ability to define problems without a guide.
• The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
• The ability to work in teams without guidance.
• The ability to work absolutely alone.
• The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
• The ability to discuss issues and techniques in public with an eye to reaching decisions about policy.
• The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.
• The ability to pull what you need quickly from masses of irrelevant data.
• The ability to think inductively, deductively, and dialectically.
• The ability to attack problems heuristically (which means “exploratory, self-educating problem-solving techniques which improve performance”)

Abraham Maslow (1940)

• Yourself: What a man can be, he must be. When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, then and only then are the needs for self-actualization activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person’s need to be and do that which the person was “born to do.” “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write.” These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization—the motive to realize all of one’s potentialities. In his view, it is the master motive—indeed, the only real motive a person has, all others being merely manifestations of it.

Joseph Campbell (1940)

• Follow your bliss. Following one’s bliss isn’t merely a matter of doing whatever you like, and certainly not doing simply as you are told. It is a matter of identifying that pursuit which you are truly passionate about and attempting to give yourself absolutely to it. In so doing, you will find your fullest potential and serve your community to the greatest possible extent. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Herman Hesse (1950)
Siddartha

• Words do not express thoughts very well.
• Unity

Piotr Wozniak (1990)
How to become a genius.

• You must clarify your goals,
• gain knowledge through spaced repetition,
• preserve health,
• work steadily,
• minimize stress,
• refuse interruption,
• and never resist sleep when tired

Don Miguel Ruiz (1990)
The Four Agreements

1. Be Impeccable with your Word
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
4. Always Do Your Best

Kurt Wright (2000)
Breaking the Rules

• Value-Finding

Dr. Marvin Marshall (2000)
Discipline Without Stress, Punishments, or Rewards

• Choice-Response Thinking

Carol Dweck (2000)
Mindset

• View challenges as a way to learn and not as a performance at which you can fail.

David Foster Wallace (2008)
This is Water

• How to exercise some control over how and what you think

Seth Godin (2010)
Linchpin

1. Solve interesting problems.
2. Lead.

What God has done

What have I asked for that you have not given?

Jesus emptied himself for me. Which must be my goal. God, the unitive force, is in everyone. “You have to want it more for everyone else than you do for yourself.”

OK. But what’s next? What’s more? Understanding OM? Mastering self?

Finish reading “The Perennial Philosophy”. And everything else on the list: “The Great Divorce”, “The Screwtape Letters”,

Listen to inner voice. Intuition, heart-voice.

Motives before ministry. Heart before hands.

Posturing
Exclusivity

If you want to be great, you have to be last. What you do in secret will be proclaimed from the rooftops: what is in you will come out.

It’s not so much what you have to, but how you’re gonna grow in the process.

God who is nothing and everything.

The Ultimate Act of Free Will.

Faith requires… uh, faith. That is, faith does not require evidence. You don’t have to believe in gravity, or colors, or the elements. But some things do require faith precisely because they cannot be proven. This is difficult. Why would anyone want to believe in something that can’t be proven? Why not believe in Santa Claus as well? That is kind of the point. Almost. You don’t have to believe. But you can choose to believe. Which is infinitely more difficult.

What if the ultimate act of free will is to willfully surrender my will? How difficult! My intellect and ego, indeed my body, resist so firmly that it becomes an impossible task. The ultimate act.

What if faith is good, even necessary?

Necessary? For what? Well, for everything. But mainly for relationship with God. And yourself. And others.

But this is not a treatise on faith. This is about the ultimate act of free will. What would happen if I surrendered by intellect to God? What would that look like?

What if I surrendered my will to God? What would that look like? How would I live and talk and move?

Worship.

We worship having only circumstantial evidence. Which might say something about the strength of our faith, but it might say more.

We choose to begin worship, we find things to worship God about, we create the means of our worship, and we emote during worship–the emotions we feel during worship we conjure up ourselves. 

It is entirely “user-generated”. Like everything. We alone are responsible for everything we do.

So what’s the point of worship? To find the point, we can look at the product. What worship does is make us feel different. Physically, that is the only result of our worship. Perhaps there are mental results; perhaps we alter our thinking, re-centering it on God and confirming our beliefs. Perhaps there are spiritual results, but these are impossible to identify and measure and therefore are merely hypothetical.

I keep waiting for God to show himself.

The Bible says:

Sighing deeply in His spirit, He said, “Why does this generation seek for a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.”

and,

“An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah.” And He left them and went away.

I’m not sure why asking for proof is “evil”. Sounds a lot like religiousness which tells people they dare not question what they’ve been told. I thought Jesus was dead-set against religion. What gives?

Jesus also said,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.”

And,

But as it is written, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love him.”

Problem: neither of these things have happened. Did he mean, “…in heaven.”? He should be more clear. Obfuscation is the primary tool of… religion. I want to know God, but I don’t want to be (won’t be) religious. It is beginning to look like I can’t have both.

Faith is for the…

There is an idea among thinking people that faith is for the weak.

And that is certainly what we see most often: the “opium for the masses”, the religiousness of the simple.

But that is not all there is to faith.

There is also faith-by-weighed-decision, faith-with-questions, faith-forged-from-fire.

And there is child-like faith. Which is so different from blind religiousness that it is beautiful. The innocence and purity are immediately recognizable and cherished by even the harshest critic of religion. Curiously, child-like faith, sweet and light, feels foundational. Part of our heart envies the child for his faith.

And it is not just for children or beginning belief. Apparently, it should be our standard; our goal. How can that be? Can you be enlightened and have child-like faith? Should you be?

The anvil. The threshing floor.

The anvil and the threshing floor are as painful as they sound.

Yet we pray: “God, take me to the anvil. Don’t leave me unrefined. Finish threshing out my weakness, immaturity, ignorance, imperfection.”

Usually, we cry for this. We plead with Him to not give up on us.

Ray Kurzweil. Oh, man.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1