If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake (1793)
INTRODUCTION
Daniel Kaminsky? You likely didn’t lament the death of Daniel Kaminsky (April 2021), yet we owe him plenty. What did Kaminsky do to deserve our gratitude and even our adulation? He was an internet security researcher who in 2008 single-handedly discovered a fundamental flaw in the basic architecture of the internet, a flaw that would have given hackers fairly easy access to the backdoor of every website on the net. Yes, direct access to financial institutions, government departments, e-commerce sites, and social media platforms—in short: EVERYTHING!
Talk about being king of the world! What would you do with that kind of power? Erase your mortgage and credit card balances? Line your bank accounts? Spy on the CIA and FBI? Rule the stock market? Crash the stock market? Get even with an ex? Flood the internet with classified information? Start World War III? Establish the biggest ransomware scheme of all time and become the richest person in the Milky Way Galaxy, a tad behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos?
What Kaminsky did was interesting, though rather staid and matter of fact: He contacted the people in charge of the overall security and integrity of the internet, and he worked with them to create a fix. Yes, an honorable fellow who looked after the welfare of all by getting down to the brass tacks of a quick solution. For Kaminsky, helping others was a way of life.
So why am I talking about Kaminsky?
My Unlikely Discovery Like Daniel Kaminsky, I also made a startling discovery. As surprising as this sounds, I uncovered a fatal flaw secreted within the basic psychosocial architecture of human civilization. To wrap your head around the magnitude of this discovery, consider a seemingly radical idea: the idea that all of the negative side-effects of civilization – for example, chronic inequality, racism, sexism, fascism, speciesism, murder, mass shootings, religion, politics, war, the destruction of the Natural World, and even negative feelings such as fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, pride, shame, blame, anxiety, worry, depression and alienation – are not the result of ‘Human Nature’ per se (as we have been taught to believe) but are the direct result of this hidden flaw.
Psychologically, this flaw is so incredibly consequential because it generates an imaginary world characterized by anxiety, negative emotions, over-thinking, endless judgment, and ceaseless action. In this heightened state of stress and tension and dizzying action, it is no wonder that we lack the presence of mind to make commonsensical, cooperative decisions that would best serve our species and the Natural World. Ergo, we bestride the Earth as a colossus of asses, at once putting men on the moon, while wreaking havoc on a planetary scale, fighting each other all the way.
What exactly is this fatal flaw, and where is it hiding? Given the significance of this fundamental flaw, why isn’t it common knowledge? For example, why hasn’t this mammoth error in the central script of civilization been well documented and widely shared down through the ages, or in current times, projected across every social media platform as a dire warning to all:
BEWARE THE FATAL FLAW OF CIVILIZATION FOR IT WILL MESS YOU UP!!!
Civilization’s inherent flaw has remained on the spectral edges of our Waking Mind because it is by and large invisible. Existing everywhere and seemingly nowhere, it hides itself like a shape-shifting chameleon baked right into the layered fabric of civilization.
Far removed from our conscious awareness, this mindbending flaw hides in plain sight, secreted within the common denominator of all complex, stratified civilizations: it lives within the very center of our beliefs – and the stronger the belief, the more powerful the side-effects. A ghost in the machine, this highly destructive flaw wreaks havoc with impunity, and it does so with our unwavering, aggressive support.
All of which begs a fundamental question: Is it possible to navigate our lives with an alternate system of guidance, one that reigns in the pitfalls of beliefs, while at the same time allowing full access to the vast computing power of our multi-layered intelligence?
Beyond Beliefs The answer to the question for the ages is a resounding YES! There is an entirely natural way of navigating our lives. I call this new framework for understanding human experience and for accessing our full intelligence as a life-guidance system, the Art & Science of Belief. The grand purpose of The Secret Life of Beliefs is the attainment of what I call Natural Empowerment – a calm, wise, compassionate, and indomitable state of awareness.
I see the Art & Science of Belief in five regards…
First, as a decoder ring for the human experience, that is, a powerful deciphering tool that sheds new light on the meaning and the purpose of life – it’s amazing how far we can see when the doors of perception are cleansed (that is, our beliefs neutralized),
Second, as a comprehensive stress-management program that can fundamentally assuage our generalized anxiety and help us resolve past trauma to the extent we can exchange our hyper-activity, hyper-reactivity and hyper-vigilance for a soothing bit of grace under fire,
Third, as a theory of social fusion, one capable of healing the rifts that beliefs have quite unwittingly written within us and between us,
Fourth, as a personal pathway to the most revered human emotions like Love, Awe, Bliss, Ecstasy, Wonderment, Joy, Compassion, Forgiveness – including a palpable sense of Oneness. Without doubt, life is One – it is only our beliefs that make us believe and act otherwise,
Fifth, as the basis of a new form of adult play (PsychoSocial Freefalling) that will challenge, titillate and ultimately empower us by returning our locus of power, control and sense of value from our beliefs and the Outside World, back into ourselves as we systematically neutralize the countless fears lurking within our strongest beliefs.
On a practical note, to gauge your personal journey toward Natural Empowerment, I include a pen and pencil test that measures what I call Standing Level of Personal Tension. It’s a good idea to complete the Personal Tension Inventory (PTI) at the very beginning to gauge your baseline of tension. Quantifying one’s progress toward Natural Empowerment is no small point (sort of like Weight Watchers, but instead of losing pounds, you lose tension points … so let’s call it, Belief Busters 😉
Welcome to my wild world of joy, clarity, empowerment and infinite possibility – together we are in for a lot of fun! I say fun because making a game of neutralizing our strongest beliefs is truly the high-side of fun, especially when Freefalling with a small group of like-minded souls (just remember to start slowly, otherwise your head might explode! 😉
That said, let’s start with the gist of it all…
THE GIST
Ever wonder why your mind is constantly racing and why you have a recurrent urge to be doing something? It’s a side-effect of beliefs. Beliefs are action-based; to satisfy a belief, you must actually do something to get the reward and avoid the punishment, even if that ‘something’ is just endlessly worrying and overthinking. It’s not anxiety you suffer from, it’s your beliefs.
Side-effects? My beliefs? Wtf!
When I finally unraveled the deep mystery of beliefs, I too was incredibly shocked that beliefs come with a raft of serious side-effects – I had never heard of such a thing. But after decades of painstaking research and experimentation, I finally determined something unbelievable: Beliefs work as an invisible Mental Software, a psychological operating system that generates an imaginary reality that is both dramatic and captivating, but also highly limiting and incredibly dangerous.[1] Understandably, I was blown away by my discoveries and thought of the science fiction movie The Matrix. Yet before pinpointing the many eye-popping facts about beliefs, I was like a fish who never asks if water exists, simply because for a fish, water is everywhere, and therefore nowhere. Given the dark and shrouded life of beliefs, cracking the code of beliefs was no small miracle.
We all love our beliefs in large part because systems of belief are the only strategy civilization has provided for navigating and making sense of our lives. It’s no wonder, then, that we see our beliefs as some kind of marvelous achievement; after all, beliefs are what make us human and so very different from animals (and by implication even superior to the Natural World – how’s that for power?) At a personal level, beliefs grant us the incalculable power to bolster our egos, infinitely. Like waving a magic wand, all I have to do is believe I am better than you, and suddenly I am, all I have to do is believe there is some irrational conspiracy, and suddenly there is, all I have to do is believe climate change is a hoax, and suddenly it is, all I have to do is believe the election was stolen, and of course it was (at least in my belief-stricken mind), all I have to do is believe I deserve hundreds of billions of dollars because of my inherent superiority – while everyone else struggles to make ends meet – and all at once as if by magic, my conscience is assuaged and I can proudly look myself in the mirror.
Complicating things even further, the beliefs we can name and hold so dearly (our visible beliefs) are themselves based upon even deeper layers of unexamined beliefs (our invisible beliefs), all of which renders us all as the puppets of a psychological operating system we can’t even begin to fathom, because to gain perspective, we would have to stand outside of the bastion of our beliefs.
At their worst, beliefs divide us from ourselves and each other by trading paranoia and anger for the common ground of commonsense which would otherwise bind us together as a cohesive, cooperative whole. Without doubt, the greatest stain upon the human soul is the irrational belief that we can believe whatever we wish to believe – commonsense and consequences be damned. But what other choice do we have? Sadly, the ‘choice’ forced upon us from the long, dark halls of civilization (defined largely by religion and politics) is to believe or believe – it’s just a matter of what falsity to believe and how far removed it is from rationality and the interconnected Natural Reality in which we all live.
What adds to the addictive nature of beliefs is their sheer practicality. Beliefs not only tell us what we should value and what we should avoid, they also store the raw energy to achieve what we want and likewise avoid what we don’t. Whenever we succeed, beliefs seal the deal with a rush of ‘feel-good’ energy; empires have been built on such a simple strategy especially because beliefs have the power to bind us together in a collective cause. Thus, the moment we make a strong statement of belief, such as I am going to climb that mountain, the tension stored within that strong belief (and all of the layered, associated beliefs) serves us well by powering us up that mountain, whatever that ‘mountain’ may be; in turn, we are rewarded with that special blast of ‘happy’, much to our ego’s delight as we take selfies at the summit.
Because beliefs provide direction, agency, and a profound neurochemical reward, we can set whatever goals we wish to achieve and then achieve them, and in turn, feel great about our accomplishments – no matter how irrational or detrimental are the short and long-term consequences of our actions. All of which increases the strength of our beliefs and the strength of our love for our beliefs, but also the strength of our egos and the strength of our rationalizations for our actions… and likewise, the magnitude of the side-effects of our beliefs. War is the perfect example of beliefs getting the best of us by sending us into a belief-induced madness wherein we commit unimaginable atrocities which we then justify with our beliefs. Without doubt, there is nothing on Earth more dangerous than strong beliefs, largely because wisdom and our capacity to think in broad and connected terms comes only from a state of calm. Thus, instead of ratcheting up our tension with fear and anger, we should be cultivating our calm, daily.
To date, there has been no escape from our beliefs and their many side-effects. And so, in the angst generated by our beliefs, we fight for our beliefs. We vote with our beliefs. We plan all of the intimate details of our personal and business lives using our beliefs. We socialize with people who share the same beliefs. We fight against those who have different beliefs. We even kill those who do not share our beliefs. At our most basic level of personhood, we define our individual sense of self with the battery of our beliefs. In fact, we have become nothing more than our beliefs: the Homo Domesticus, the overly socialized, disempowered, highly reactive, easily manipulated human being. We therefore move through life defending who we believe ourselves to be with the sword and shield of our bastion of beliefs, all the while believing that our beliefs are the very best of all. Never do we suspect, even for a moment, that beliefs are chockful of side-effects, and furthermore, that there is a much more sophisticated, natural and satisfying method of engaging and navigating life – a method that avoids the many pitfalls of beliefs, while at the same time provides access to the best of emotions.
But why oh why are beliefs so incredibly limiting? Why have I become such a basher of beliefs?
The confounding and detrimental side-effects of beliefs comes of their staggeringly low computing power: Beliefs can only process two bits of information, like for example, being good or bad, being a winner or a loser, being rich or poor, having more or having less. In short, beliefs are little more than a simplistic directive to keep two things as far apart as possible: for example, the thing you have been taught to intensely value versus the thing you have been taught to intensely abhor. Yet, the polarities upon which all beliefs stand are nothing more than subjective value judgments that can easily be disproved with but a stitch of logic.
Who, for example, can rationally declare that ‘more’ is better than ‘less’, especially given that we live in an artificial reality of consumerism and economic competition wherein more money and more things is never enough, especially for the super-rich who gorge themselves like starving, maniacal swine at the expense of everyone else, and more so at the expense Earth itself. Similarly, who can rationally declare that human life is more valuable than animal life and more valuable than the environment; such declarations are little more than human entitlement, and merely one of the countless delusional side-effect of strong beliefs. Thus, by artificially transforming the world into a false sense of black-and-white, do-or-die scenario, belief jack us up on tension and are therefore the perfect tool to dumb us down, even the cleverest among us. In fact, the most dangerous and least human of all people are invariably the cleverest individuals who are blinded by the strongest beliefs (for example, the architects of Nazi Germany, and currently, the billionaire class that owns and controls the world).
Scarily, beliefs dumb us down to the degree they generate a global, psychological sickness, a debilitating Cultural Illness that puts all of our attention on exactly the wrong things, while at the same time dividing us from our deeper, connection-making wisdom and intelligence for which a state of calm is the prerequisite.
Yes, you heard me correctly: Cultural Illness….
I invented the term Cultural Illness when all of my research and experimentation forced me to acknowledge a simple fact: Everything we think, feel, say and do is governed almost entirely by the bug-infested Mental Software of our beliefs.[2] In fact, I further realized that civilization is really just a cult of strong beliefs (a cult-ure). The profound side-effects of our Mental Software – that is, our systems of belief – is precisely what makes our lives as individuals so dramatic, disconcerting and impossible to understand. It’s not that life is such a great mystery – we’ve been given this misleading line all of our lives – it’s just that when our experience is filtered through the polarizing lens of beliefs, nothing can ever make sense because we are staring at the world thro’ narrow chinks in our cavern. We are therefore left dazed and confused and consequently highly anxious, all of which reinforces our attachment to our beliefs, which are themselves, tension structures.
At the macro level, these pernicious side-effects cast our species in the rather bleak role of Jack the (Planet) Ripper. Not surprisingly, if plants, animals and birds had a vote, we would be straight off the planet, given that our beliefs make it next to impossible for our wayward species to blend sustainably with the Natural World. Make no mistake, it is our strongest beliefs that make us the undeclared enemy of Nature.
The Purpose of this Book
The Secret Life of Beliefs exposes the shrouded life of beliefs and their drama-inducing, planet destroying side-effects. Remarkably, The Secret Life of Beliefs provides an alternative to beliefs – a framework that allows us to dependably access a super-intelligent personal guidance, morality and analytical system that I discovered to be part and parcel of our genetic inheritance. Interestingly, this deeper, inner intelligence – this Common Natural Sense – has been obscured and almost completely supressed by the inherently disempowering nature of beliefs (which explains why commonsense is so frighteningly far from common). This decentralized Natural Intelligence has directed the Natural World swimmingly for the last 3.8 billion years, whereas our top-down systems of belief have brought everything to the brink in the sheer record time of 10,000 years, which in geological time is less than a bursting bubble.
In the simplest of terms, our predicament all boils down to information processing, or lack thereof. Ironically, we live in the Information Age, yet our ability to process information within ourselves (aka think holistically in critical and rational terms) has been hobbled by the psychological operating system of our beliefs which keeps us within a simplistic, black-and-white, us-versus-them unreality currently magnified exponentially by politics, religion and social media.
In the phraseology of the Art & Science of Belief, which is the name of this new field of understanding – I am proposing a massive, cultural shift from an external system of control that is blunt and destructive and unbecoming of our full humanity (our systems of belief), toward an internal system of guidance (what I call our Common Natural Sense). In this groundbreaking book, I offer an empowering framework that will assist you in reclaiming your locus of power and control that beliefs have torn from your bosom and cast out into the world. I call this aware and highly evolved state, Natural Empowerment. Natural Empowerment is so named because it lives within the majesty of our DNA, and likewise, within all of Nature. As I have learned from my own painful, snakes and ladders life, it is never too late for evolution, especially the evolution of the soul.
Let’s get into the nitty gritty of the Art & Science of Belief, starting with the single element out of which our civilized, day-to-day human experience is unwittingly generated: the Anatomy of a Belief…
[1] Note that beliefs are the building blocks of our personal and collective life stories. Because our life stories are rich and complex and compelling, we easily forget that they stand upon completely unexamined, irrational beliefs.
[2] While this may sound like an outlandish over-exaggeration, it most assuredly is not, especially when you understand the structure and function of beliefs.
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