The Architecture of Belief

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A while back, I ran a contest on my website.  The theme was, “What Do You Believe, and Why Do you Believe It?”.  The primary purpose for the exercise was to try and make people examine their belief systems.  As well, I myself had gone through a very specific process to arrive where I am today and I was curious as to how others had come to their own understanding of truth.

The results mildly surprised me in some ways.  The essays were heavy with general beliefs; not so much in the department of specifics.  And they were pretty much void of the “why?” of the various belief systems.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with faith.  Whatever gives us comfort and serves us well is fine. As my clients and readers should know by now, a prime tenet I hold before me always is that “you get to decide what you believe.”  No one else can tell you what you must or must not buy into.  You can tell them whatever serves you best; but in your heart, you’re completely free.

But within my own framework, faith is based first upon the knowable.  Within the first few years of life, we lose the natural connection to (and knowledge of) Spirit because we’re occupied with (hopefully) learning how this Earth school works – how to operate our physical, mental and emotional bodies…how to work within the social structure and all that.  There’s a lot to learn, and by the time we’ve grown our “Earth legs”, the illusion of this reality is very dense and overtakes our third and fourth-dimensional consciousness so that we then need to begin our salmon-like swim back to Source and Spirit.

Because of this fact that we are now based (but not trapped) in this physical world, the way to build a belief system that will hold up to adversity and assault from the world around us is also based in this world.

In my case my spiritual path began, as they all do, with the intuitive feeling that things are not as they appear to be.  This impetus to seek does indeed originate in the spiritual part of us, but as noted above the work itself needs to be based here where we hold our most dense existence in order to be solid and virtually unassailable.

The most stable and economical geometric shape is the triangle.  Its broad base serves as a footing that prevents it sinking into any muck below it; and,  more importantly, does not allow the structure to be easily toppled .  Outside pressures might have an effect, but there is no vector of force that can make it fall over.

In building my own belief system, I laid my foundation by gathering what I considered to be unassailable facts.  I know what I saw with my eyes and experienced physically.  I took what others asserted and tested them.  I collected these things that I knew to be true through personal observation and figuratively laid them in a row, forming a firm base for my beliefs.

The steps that followed served to begin to build my pyramid of understanding.  Having built a solid footer, I could now add to it through extrapolation and interpolation – in other words, the next layers did not need to be quite so dense and provable in the physical world.  This was the point where intuition began to really come into play; but still, logic was also required to provide the right formula for the mortar between the layers.

For example, if I had proved to myself a given bit of wisdom from a particular teacher, and that same teacher introduced a new assertion, it was reasonable to believe that the new assertion was as true as the already-proved one.  However, just as one adjusts a rifle shot for windage, allowances were made for other factors and adjustments were applied.  For example, did the teacher stand to profit from my embracing the new belief?  Did the new concept harmonize with the ones preceding it?  Once I had satisfied myself in such regard, I was able to make a small leap and add the new, less dense level of understanding to my pyramid.  And so I have built my belief system, systematically adding less dense forms of information, but always verified by intuitive insight and, where possible, by physical observation.  Fortuitously, as this process progressed my brick-laying skills increased in that my intuitive and logical skills grew – it became easier to lay down the mortar between the bricks.

My pyramid is by no means complete, but it is proceeding brick by brick.  As it rises toward the heavens I feel secure working on it no matter how tall it becomes, because I was the one who built the foundation – not some outside contractor.  I know it won’t topple because I am intimately familiar with the basis for everything that lays atop it.

There are some who, like Agent Muldar in the tv series The X-Files , “want to believe” – and then they simply do.  They find a belief system that seems to serve them; makes them feel good; makes them feel special or fits what they want their physical world to look like.  Many of these people are highly intuitive and are indeed receiving good information from “higher” realms.  However, they cannot explain here in the world in which we live , why they have chosen to hold their particular belief system.

As noted, these people may indeed be accurate as to their beliefs.  They might be claircognitive (which is my own strength) and gain real knowledge directly from less-dense frequency planes.  Or, they may not be as well-connected as they think, and ideas generated by their physical, mental and emotional selves can enter the mix of what their concept of the spiritual realm will be.

In this case, they have built their pyramid upside-down.  It would seem a wonderful thing to be able to begin with a single point.  However, a single point simply does not exist in our three-dimensional world.  It is imaginary, having only one dimension – there is no width or depth associated with a single point.  Because of this, a pyramid based on one dimension of understanding alone is extremely unstable in the world in which we live. Obviously, unlike the structure of the broad-based system, it won’t take much to topple this construct.  A light force vector applied anywhere along this shape will either drive it into the ground below it or push it over so that it becomes something else entirely.

All this is to say that it does pay to examine the basis for our beliefs, and to see whether they will be able to withstand the outside pressures that will surely assail us as we live out our physical lives.  Do you really believe that your heartaches and troubles happen for a definite reason? (They do).  Or will you, when the wind begins to howl and you and others put the test to your faith, see your pyramid tumble to the ground.  Indeed, will you run outside and try to prop up your structure with braces –  hastily-gathered sticks that might last for some time but that will ultimately not be suitable for the most architecturally beautiful and structurally unassailable system?

We need both systems – the spiritual coming to us here on Earth, and our physical experiences reflecting up into the heavens.  I submit that one without the other is an incomplete picture of Reality.  But for those of us now working here in the physical world, it pays to first build the strong foundation that will support our further growth with no worries of outside influences overcoming all of our hard work.  With proper training and careful practice, we can all become Master Bricklayers.

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