An ancient story goes…
A king instructs a group of blind men to describe an elephant. Each man feels one part of the elephant’s body–the tusk, the leg, the trunk, the tail. Each gives a detailed–and very different–report about the elephant. Then they come to blows about who is right. Each man is describing his honest, real experience about the elephant, yet each misses the big picture, the whole truth.
How do you view the world? How do you view yourself? Other people?
It feels good to stand in our worldviews, doesn’t it? It gives us kind of a power rush to have a sure feeling of reality, to feel like we’ve learned from our experiences and that now we’re all the wiser and better for it. And we’re all walking around with our very real, but perhaps narrow, experiences of what’s true. But none of us possess a bird’s eye view of the full picture.
So let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. If you were to ask yourself: Where are my strongest fears and my aversions coming from? Which parts of my beliefs feed them? And could it be that these beliefs represent my very real experience, but maybe omit a fuller reality that I can’t see? And if yes, what does this mean?
Are you still with me? If these questions repel, anger or irritate you, why? Really why? Deep down. Does it feel a little scary to examine the possibility that maybe the conclusions we draw about life could be real, but incomplete? Maybe created from some of our earliest, oldest fears? The human brain is wired to remember and internalize the negative things that happen to us much more deeply than the positive things. So ten successes may not negate one prior failure for us. That’s why our fears can be so strong, and the reality filtered through them seems so real. It is real–for you. But is it real from a birds-eye view?
Sure, our fear can protect us.
It can be useful, but only if it teaches us something. It’s not useful if it’s not true, and it’s certainly not useful if we only recognize the symptoms of our fear–things like anger, hate, bitterness, distrust, envy, avoidance, etc.–rather than address the fear itself.
Consider the symptoms as suffering. Unnecessary suffering caused by beliefs that hold enough power to make us partially blind to the big picture. Symptoms that deceive us into believing we’re alone on an island, and that we must scratch and claw–alone–to get ahead. Beliefs that take enough deceptive hold on us to cut us off from the love that can bind us together. The opposite of fear, I believe, is not courage, but love. A love that is more vast than all of us put together, because we’re connected to it and born of it. If we allow it to shine through us, maybe we can gain a glimpse into that birds-eye view.
The pull and lure of “us verses them” is irresistible.
It’s an identity and it’s security. It’s permission to fully identify with our beliefs, our stories and our conflicts, and to “other” those who don’t identify with them. It fills our craving to belong to something. And belonging to “this” group and not “that” one becomes more important than entering another’s person’s experience, listening to her without distorted filters of what we fear, want, or are familiar with, and finding and understanding her underneath all the layers.
Someone, I don’t know who, once observed that “The world is divided into those who think they’re right.” Perhaps the stronger the feeling of “rightness,” the stronger the belief that the “others” must be evil. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote in one of his books that we’re not born with evil inside us, but that evil arises out of our willingness to believe lies. And lies are plenty for the taking. Just get online or turn on the “news.”
And while we’re on the topic, consider this question: Do you watch the news for information, or affirmation of your beliefs?
If you haven’t noticed already, questions make up the bulk of this writing.
The truth only reveals itself through examination–An honest look at our thoughts and an honest attempt to sit with the deep emotions that cause them. So let me end with a few more questions now that I’m on a role. When you find yourself miserable, angry, and in a place of suffering from a very real, but perhaps not-true belief, try asking yourself:
- What am I believing?
- Is this belief really true? Open yourself up to the possibility that it isn’t.
- How is this belief affecting me? Connect with the emotion you’re feeling.
- Why don’t I want to let go of this belief? And how true is it, really?
- Who would I be if I no longer believed this? How would I feel? What would change?
Wherever in our lives we feel alone, cut off from the world, believing it’s us vs. everything else out there, that’s a place where we can shine a light on our beliefs. As uncomfortable as it is, it’s how we allow the truth to shine through us. On the other side of that discomfort, we create space to breathe. We create freedom.
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