terren wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: >> That reminds me an argument of Bruno in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and >> Bruno", >> about Spinach. If I remember well. >> Something like: '---don't make me *love* spinach because thats really >> the >> worst possible which can happen for someone who *hates* spinach.' >> >> >> Bruno > > Yes, ideas in opposition to one another are necessarily defined by, > and draw energy from, their opposite. So people attached to those > ideas, ironically enough, need their enemies as much as they need > their own beliefs. Emotional attachment to belief is the real culprit. > But we are hard-wired for that and have to train ourselves with > discipline to avoid it. What makes it harder is that identifying with > a particular belief system is anxiety-reducing, a source of comfort in > an uncertain world. > That's true, but at some point it stops to work, namely if you realize your beliefs aren't true, as I slowly do. Yet I still believe them again and again.
Belief is quite a trap. I think it is more healthy to not believe anything, including your own beliefs (that is, just treat them as thoughts that come up now and again, and not as anything worth holding on to). I am not sure discipline will help there, to the contrary, a lot of our emotional attachments show themselves in the way that we "discipline" us to do something we don't really want. The only thing that really helps is mindfulness, unfortunately you can't make that happen, and it often takes a long time to realize your bad habits and their root, and see the path to avoiding them (this includes not minding them, in my experience). I mean we tried discipline for a long time (think of schools a few decades ago), but mostly we became less disciplined and more wealthy (and bit more happy, maybe). benjayk -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/COMP-is-empty%28-%29-tp32569717p32640682.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
