Questionable beliefs without any knowledge can be stressful, psychologically burdensome and misleading. Beliefs and faith
Faith and belief are mental locks that can restrict your ability to think and imagine realistically. Blind faith and beliefs are psychological sedatives that can help you to bear suffering but never cure it.
Belief and faith in ideas and philosophies which cannot be known correctly through experience and reason should be deconstructed because they can narrow down the experience of your one and only life. Life is too precious to spend according to belief and faith in unknown imaginary ideas.
Belief and faith can make you psychologically rigid and dependent. Due to belief and faith, you cannot think on your own for yourself. Permanently held belief and faith is mental slavery for life making you dependent and mentally enslaved.
Beliefs and faith without knowledge can keep you off guard rather than aware of reality. Beliefs and faith are more likely to bring disappointment when reality strikes while you are off guard.
Societies based on belief and faith in wrong or untrue ideas and philosophies become unstable and dysfunctional. Hence belief and faith should always be personal and should not supersede experience and reason.
Deconstructing blind faith and orthodox belief is possible by living through seamless clarity of detached awareness, knowing correctly in the right context as it is without associating or identifying yourself with the known and unknown.
Knowing personally, validation and verification is done through faculties of knowing. You know and understand your experiences through your natural or artificial faculties of knowing. Faith or belief in ideas is not knowledge because there is no personal knowledge, validation and verification involved.
You do not need faculties of knowing for faith and blind belief. For example, you do not need microscope to blindly believe in the idea that supreme creator creates epidemics. You need no personal experience in order to have faith or belief in ideas.
Experience should give rise to knowledge and understanding. Knowledge and understanding should arise from experience. Experience first, then know to understand.
To know and understand your experiences correctly, you need a detached seamlessly clear awareness, the matured phenomenon of knowing correctly in the right context.
Difference Between Faith, Belief and Knowledge
Faith is living and acting according to philosophy based on set of ideas. Faith is always blind because it is not like trust established after knowing personally. You have to have faith because you do not know personally.
Faith is to rely on the unknown, for example God, or faith in astrologers or faith in owns destiny. You trust your parents because you know them personally; however, you have faith in politicians because you do not know them correctly.
Due to faith, you remain ignorant of the reality of cause and conditions that constitute life and the world. As a result, faith can eventually disappoint you if it does not fulfill your expectations.
Belief is to live and act upon an idea assuming that it is true. Belief is blind because it is not based on personal knowledge. You may believe in the ancient orthodox ideas of supreme creator or eternal soul and spend resources to please the imagined “supreme creator” for happiness in the fantastic afterlife rather than focus to improve the cause and conditions for your happiness in the present real life.
Knowledge is something that you know personally through experience, validation and verification through various means including but not limited to your physical sense organs, psychological sense organs like mind, memories, emotions or through science and technology. Knowledge is established to be true through evidence, application, demonstration or at least personal experience.
Right Knowledge Deconstructs Blind Faith and Orthodox Beliefs
Ideas are artificially created by humans for some practical reason. Ideas are psychological point of views in some context and they do not represent the complete reality. Ideas can eventually become outdated, irrelevant or useless.
You have faith and belief in the ideas and philosophies even if they are ancient, unproven or impractical. Faith and belief are not knowledge or experience of reality like knowledge and experience of pain, disease, old age and death which are true whether you believe them or not. To have blind faith and orthodox belief in ideas without knowledge and experiences is to deceive yourself knowingly.
You have faith and belief does not necessarily mean that you know, or you have the experience. Having faith or believing is not equivalent to knowing the truth or reality.
Knowledge on the other hand is to know the truth established through personal experience, experimentation, validation, verification, application or demonstration.
When you know, you need not believe. However, the knowledge has to be correct in the right context. Faith and belief established through knowing miracle without knowing the constituent cause and conditions of miracle is not correct knowledge. In order to know correctly, you need seamless clarity of awareness without associating with the know through faith or beliefs.
Rigidity and Burden Due to Blind Faith and Orthodox Beliefs
Faith and Beliefs are ideas or assumptions accepted to be true or untrue. Faith and belief can create unconscious bias affecting your decisions and actions.
Rigid Life and Actions Due to Blind Faith and Orthodox Belief
Due to faith and beliefs, you may live and act in a very rigid manner in order to confirm with your blind faith and orthodox belief rather than live and act harmoniously with the reality of cause and conditions.
Your association with faith and beliefs gives rise to self-ignorance in form of the Self and inner self which can eclipses seamless clarity of awareness, the phenomenon of knowing correctly in the right context. Faith and beliefs are artificial, giving rise to artificial self in form of self-ideation, self-identification, self-conception, self-image, inner self etc.
Due to association with self, you live and act in a rigid manner according to self rather than live and act harmoniously with the reality of cause and conditions.
Psychological Burden of Faith and Belief
Consciously you may have faith and belief but deep inside you may remain ignorant. Faith and Beliefs contribute to your subliminal stress of ignorance rather than the wisdom of not knowing. Faith and belief add to psychological burden that is unnecessary while keeping you off-guard about truth and reality.
Faith and beliefs can wrongly influence the process of life and actions without your knowledge. For example, due to early life belief in god and his judgement, you may continue to live in fear and anxiety but not know the source of it. Such early life beliefs can influence the processes of life and growth at young age and impact physical and mental health in later life just like a poorly developed lamb due to forgotten fear of a tiger.
Early life beliefs can be forgotten but continue to stress the involuntary process of life. It is like accidently believing rope to be a snake and getting stressed over it or accidently believing rope and snake and remain gullible only to meet an accident unknowingly.
You are carrying many such forgotten faiths and beliefs that stress the process of your life by adding to your psychological burden. Reality of eternal immortal inner Self or inner Being is one of such beliefs affecting the process of your life and your actions.
Such beliefs can create unconscious bias due to which you may devalue present life. “Supreme Creator and Controller” as “God” or “Super-soul” is one of your faiths. Such faith can create unconscious bias which can negatively affect your sense of accountability, transparency, responsibility and social justice.
Why Do You Believe or Have Faith?
Many of your faiths and beliefs are not your conscious choice. You have faiths passed down to you in the early life before you knew to question. You may believe in ideas due to desires or lack of options.
In early life, since childhood, you get ideas and you believe in them through hypnosis, without your knowledge or expressed consent. For example, religious and cultural beliefs.
Most of the time you dwell in mind, living in a trance, neither fully asleep nor fully awake, neither fully relaxed nor fully alert.
In such a trans, especially during childhood before maturity and psychological independence, you are highly suggestible and vulnerable to hypnosis, you are also highly impressionable and vulnerable to conditioning due to delicate nervous system.
The foundation of your life is laid on your habits, beliefs and attitudes formed during early life through your experiences and upbringing. Belief in wrong ideas can set your mind and intelligence on wrong foundation affecting priority of your values and choice of principles.
Early-life beliefs become part of your physiological and psychological conditioning. Your life gets controlled by your early life beliefs. Due to early life belief, you suffer from “bottle gives milk” syndrome.
You believe in the ideas if you like, depend, or trust the source of those ideas, for example parents, friends, teachers, charismatic personalities etc. You believe because everyone believes and not because you know.
You also adopt beliefs based on your experiences if you are too lazy to examine their truth and reality. For example, if you never saw cow giving milk, you may believe that dairy gives milk if you are too lazy to investigate the truth of this beliefs.
Belief is due to lack of knowledge and experience. You may believe without knowing. You may believe without empirical evidence obtained through right means and methods including experimentation, validation and verification based on understanding of empirical evidence.
Beliefs are not the universal reality or absolute truth. Nothing should be accepted as true without investigating into it by yourself on basis of experimentation, application, demonstration or empirical evidence or experience.
Rather than belief or leap of faith, have trust and leap of confidence based on experience, knowledge and understanding.
Deconstructing Faith Through Seamless Clarity of Awareness
Faith can be deconstructed by experiencing, knowing, validating and verifying the reality through your sense organs including mind. Reality should be known and validated and verified for it’s constituent cause and conditions at all levels in order to know it correctly in the right context as it is. You need seamless clarity of detached awareness dissociated from the known and unknown to know, validate and verify reality at all levels.
By being aware you know correctly in the right context as it is without associating with the known or unknow and without giving rise to the Self through association. Through seamless clarity of detached awareness, you are self-aware without the Self and you live life with a beginner’s mind like an original explorer without any crutches of faith or beliefs in ideas.
By being aware without associating with the known, you know and understand your experiences correctly in the right context through all the natural and artificial means. Such seamless clarity of awareness, the phenomenon of knowing as it is without activities in the mind or reacting to the known is necessary to deconstruct faith and learn to live without faiths or beliefs.
Right practice of meditation, that is not based on faith or belief, can help you to cultivate that seamless clarity of awareness necessary to deconstruct faith and live life authentically with a beginner’s mind like an original explorer.