BELIEFS

Here's something on the Mind, the North of the Medicine Wheel, a place that the counter-culture is wary of. It's gut instinct that we trust, not the head. But that's just a reaction to the one-sidedness of the mainstream culture. It's just as imbalanced.

The mind is a wonderful thing, for it can help reveal whether our gut instinct is genuine intuition, or prejudice, or maybe a mixture of both. The great strength of the mind is its ability to be detached, its lack of personal investment, so that it can weigh things up. This is something most of us find very hard, which is why you find it in the North, the place of the Elder. It is something that takes most of our lives to be able to do.

What matters is not what we think, but how attached we are to our ideas. What matters is not whether you think 2+2=4, but whether you can live with other people not agreeing with you about it. In this case, you know they're wrong, but can you leave them with that? It is something I struggle with. It is a good learning for me.

The chances are that the people who say that 2+2 is something other than 4 will be very attached to 5, or whatever they think the answer is. Reason isn't going to make any difference. As William Blake said, "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinon still." The last couple of Covid years have seen an intensification of strongly held collective opinions about what is 'really' going on in the public sphere. As if there can be that kind of certainty.

 

 

This rigidity - which is emotionally-based - results in no-go areas with friends. This is something I also find difficult. Once you've known someone for a while, you may well find there are subjects that you can't go near with them. It is too loaded. It is a limitation on the friendship. But it also seems quite normal. An example might be someone who was a QAnon follower, convinced that the US election was stolen. You would end up in a fight if you pushed it, because that belief is part of who they are. They would have all sorts of self-serving 'evidence' that it was in fact stolen.

Beliefs. We all have them. It takes courage to examine them disinterestedly. It is the capacity to do that that matters, rather than what you may end up thinking as a result. Strongly held opinions are a barrier to thinking. They set who we are in stone, and of course the whole idea of this Shamanic thing is to be able to stand out of the way so Spirit can do its thing, or so I'm told :)