Power of Stupid Beliefs

Oh, the power of stupid beliefs, especially ones that feel part of the very warp & woof of our being, but which seem to be without any apparent origin.  When we can pinpoint origin, we have a better starting point for stepping past the folly of whatever beliefs are driving our lives into the ground.  When there is none, it's harder to know where to start giving it the old heave ho.

I have now bought two laptops that I've never learned how to use.  The first turned out to have a disfunctional mother board; since I never attempted to use it, didn't know that in time to exchange it for one that worked.  All that money, down the drain.  Now, am coming up on the final payment on my current QVC-purchased laptop - a honey of an HP - and have managed to turn it on.  And go no further.  It's Windows 8.1, which intimidates me, but my reluctance to USE what I've spent good money to purchase goes way beyond that excuse.  Something deep inside me, a belief about something that keeps me from doing the most natural thing in the world, puts an icy hand on my heart & screams STOP!  

Weird.

There are a lot of things in my life that clamor to be changed in order to let life work more effectively.  Praise be, have addressed a lot of them & continuing to make fabulous strides in others.  But my computer still sits in the hallway closet, a big, expensive paper weight.  Because something imparted a belief that I can't identify that keeps me from doing something I invested good money in being able to do.  

Which led me to the thought, in the wee small hours of this morning, about racism & prejudice & other stupid beliefs, some of which seem part of the warp & woof of our national being, often without apparent origin.  If it is HARD to get rid of the ones that keep me from doing the very things that would clearly benefit my life beyond imagination, how impossibly harder is it for people who don't really want to be parted from those beliefs to really get past them?  Yet, we like to think we - as a nation - have.

Some people, the blessed few, are graced with parents & families and/or important others who went past teaching them the fundamentals of a healthy, whole life ~ the power of focus, of hard word, of inspiration & creativity, of knowing the outcomes you do & don't want to get, of sticking with something until it's completed OR setting it aside if you realize it's not a good use of your time & energies ~ to showing them, by word  & deed, how to make those fundamentals part of their everyday life.  Many of the rest of us were graced with parents & families and/or important others who taught about those things, but didn't take the vital step of helping us make them part of our life, in most cases because they weren't really part of theirs.  And a sorry number were either never taught that those fundamentals exist or were taught they weren't cut out - for lots of different reasons - to master them.

It takes focus, hard work, inspiration & creative thinking, knowing what outcomes we find acceptable & which we don't, sticking with our efforts to completion or setting them aside if we realize they aren't worth the effort to get past stupid beliefs.  I've been working on it for decades & it is still HARD.  

People talk about getting past inbred racism & prejudice - and I'm talking on all sides - as if it is as simple as realizing it's harmful & just stopping.  Look around the USA today - it is a boiling pot of fear & distrust, just a few degrees short of boiling over.  It didn't get that way from a cold start - the pot was simmering, simmering for decades.  But it was easier, is still easier, to just think that as reasonable people we can put our rational above our emotional.  Look around.  Rationality doesn't have a very big part in what is happening right now.  Just as the heart will always lead the head, the power of our emotions will overcome our ability to reason every time.  

Even our leaders glorify it.  When he wasn't able to come across facts to support his suspicions, Congressman Darrell Issa dismissed the lack of evidence (reason) by saying he knew in his gut that people were lying.  While liberals howled with derision & disbelief, conservatives nodded in agreement.  Emotion won the day.  When the leaders of our nation make it okay to lead with our gut rather than our head, what chance is there of convincing the rest of the importance of putting the rational ahead of the emotional?

Yesterday, I was part of a current events discussion at a local senior residence.  We got onto the topic of the recently released report on the CIA's use & abuse of "enhanced interrogation techniques" since 9/11.  A man whose intelligence I highly admire acknowledged that torture is morally unacceptable, but when his castle is attacked, his family is in jeopardy, he is permitted - called to - use any means possible to defend them  & make them safe.  His heart, his emotions, completely overruled his reason.  When the people I love are at risk, I am allowed to use any means possible, however reprehensible, to keep them safe.  Wow.  

When someone as smart & worldly-wise & reasonable as that man is reduced to such an argument because what he loves is threatened, what chance is there of someone who really doesn't want to give up generations-long prejudices or expectations put reason over emotion & walk away from them?

 
People have argued to me that there are times that prejudice is reasonable.  Usually, I can talk them around by just pointing out that the word means to pre judge - to judge before hearing the facts - and it's really hard to imagine a situation where that is reasonable.  Prejudice is never reasonable.  It is anti-reason, appealing solely to the emotions.  Reasoning might bring us to a place where we can see the right - that Americans have always regarded torture utterly contrary to our national character - but emotion will assure us it's okay to do whatever is necessary to defend our loved ones, whether it's dropping the atom bomb to spare a million American lives or using torture to get information that might spare US soldiers or civilians.


It's HARD work to move past stupid beliefs - even ones that hamper & harm us, like my fear of my laptop.  It's even hard for the older friend who spoke up yesterday at current events, whose heart tells him that defending his loved ones from harm gives him a green light to do things he otherwise would consider horrific - and HE seems to embody focus, hard work, inspiration & creative thinking, knowing what outcomes he wants & which he doesn't, determination direction persistence!!

When I look around at a country that seems to be whacked out, where so many of the physical civil spiritual ills we worked to cure are resurfacing in frightening ways, when emotions seethe under our daily lives like the river of evil in Ghostbusters 2, when the power of one person's stupid belief slams up against that one's ...   well, I'll remember my fear of a laptop, think about my friend's willingness to toss what he believes to be MORALLY inexcusable when if & how his heart is at risk, and realize anew that (in ways I never imagined) Pascal was totally spot on ~ ~  the heart truly knows reasons that Reason does not know.  

My heart & head join in saying, "That's scary."  

Now, about that laptop...