I wrote about beliefs a few days ago. This is crucial if you are looking for peace, so I’m going to elaborate just a bit. The truth is true whether you or I know it or not. That’s just a simple fact. So I have absolutely no loyalty to my beliefs. If I start to think they’re not true, then I move to what I think is more true at that given time. But I’m just living my life on a day-t0-day basis anyway, using my intuition as well as my thinking mind, and doing my best, so is it really a big deal anyway?
Let’s be very specific and pick a certain subject. Say I’ve grown up with the belief that hell is real. So I think that when I die, I’ll be judged and either I’ll make the cut into Heaven or I’ll burn in hell forever. Or maybe I’ll push a rock up a hill forever or something like that. Either would suck pretty bad, so why split hairs? This belief messes a lot of people up, especially in the South where I’m from, so it’s a great example. So this is my belief. And then I start to look around. Maybe I read books about people who have had near death experiences (NDEs), or maybe I meet people who have had these (as I have). Or maybe people I’ve known, trusted, and respected for years have finally told me that they’ve experienced this (that’s happened, too) and that it definitely was not a hallucination due to lack of oxygen in the brain (which I think has been pretty well debunked by now). And maybe based on what I’ve heard, I start to feel and think (intuition and intellect, both so important) that maybe this whole hell thing isn’t true after all?
Let me be clear now. If the scales are tipped so that “no hell” beats “hell” by even just a 51-49 margin, then I ditch the “hell” belief right away and go to the “no hell” belief. And that’s where I stand at that point. Now “hell” has to provide enough evidence to unseat “no hell” again, by at least a 51-49 margin. And if at some point “hell” takes the edge, then I go with that. I’m leading with my intuition, and it’s balanced by my intellect. But I’m relaxed about the whole thing. Because as I said above, I’m still living my life on a daily basis and doing the best I can. So it doesn’t have to be a crisis. If it seems like that for you with one or more beliefs, then you might want to talk to someone (I know someone who might be able to help).
And by the way, I think the concept of hell is ridiculous, but I used to believe in it. It’s been a long, long time though. It used to be a big deal for me. The evidence in my view is beyond overwhelming for “no hell,” though, and I’ve studied the hell out of it. That was totally on purpose, by the way. We’ll talk more about the details of this later, but today I really just wanted to show you that we can be relaxed about our beliefs. We don’t need to grip them with white knuckles. Let go. The truth is still true, after all. When you relax about it, the truth can find you. You don’t have to find it (I’m pretty sure it’s inside of you right now at this very moment, anyway). And if you really get out of the way and look, you might see that even if you’ve believed something for many, many years, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether it’s true or not. In other words, “time spent with a certain belief” has no place in whether or not it gets unseated by another belief. We tend to think it does, though. If the scales are tipped to even just 51-49, go for it. You might even wonder why the hell you didn’t do that earlier.