Etymologically, ‘trust’ – a covenant with ‘the true’ – is in the same category as faith –
loyalty to ‘the true’ – and both are aligned with ‘belief’: etymologically, ‘belief’ means fervently wishing to be true.
Whilst the word ‘certainty’ and ‘certitude’ are very close in meaning, in common usage ‘certainty’
stresses the existence of objective proof; (e.g.: ‘that which can be confirmed with scientific certainty’), while ‘certitude’
emphasises a faith in something not capable of proof (for example: to believe with certitude in an afterlife). (Merriam-Webster).
Peter: To believe means ‘fervently wish to be true’. The action of
believing is to emotionally imagine, or fervently wish, something to be real that is not actual – actual, as in tangible, corporeal,
material, definitive, present, obvious, evident, current, substantial, physical and palpable. A belief is an assumption, a notion, a
proposition, an idea that requires faith, trust or hope to sustain in the face of doubt, uncertainty and lack of factual evidence. Whereas a
fact is a fact, demonstratively evident to all that it is actual and/or that it works.
Many beliefs are masqueraded as ‘truths’ or are merely accepted as facts in
lieu of any serious scrutiny, or are protected by the blatant and stubborn refusal to question the facticity of that which is ‘dearly held’
to be true. Simply because everybody believes something to be true doesn’t make it a fact. At some stage in history everybody believed the
sun went around the earth and that the earth was flat, but both notions, believed and accepted as ‘true’ at the time, have turned out to be
mere beliefs.
Indeed, what is esteemed as ‘Ancient Wisdom’ is a literal plethora of beliefs,
‘truths’, superstitions, myths, opinions, assumptions, theories and misconceptions that require active scrutiny and intelligent
investigation by anyone who sincerely wants to become free of the Human Condition. After all, the very charter of the Human Condition is firmly
based on, and rooted in, this same ‘Ancient Wisdom’. It does take immense courage to stand on one’s own two feet, to stop believing what
others tell you are facts, ‘truths’ or the ‘Truth’ and start investigating for yourself – to ascertain and distinguish between fact
and belief.
A belief is an emotion-backed thought – made to appear real or true only by ‘my’
emotional support for the belief, by ‘my’ passionate feelings, intuition and imagination. As such, ‘I’ fervently wish many beliefs to
be true, none more so than the belief in a metaphysical world with its implied promise of an after-life for ‘me’.
It is no wonder that all sorts of meta-physical beliefs permeate every corner of
human thinking and wisdom, and that these beliefs are so passionately defended. People actually kill each other and sacrifice their lives for
their beliefs. People kill and die for their God and their Country. We are instinctually programmed to sacrifice ourselves for what we perceive
to be the ‘good’ of the particular tribe we are in. One tribe’s God becomes another tribe’s Devil and, as such, horrendous religious
wars, conflicts, persecutions, repressions and tortures are fought over the spreading or defending of particular beliefs.
Who ‘I’ think I am as a social being is nothing more than the opinions, values
and beliefs of others – my parents and those of my parent’s generation, which in turn came from their parents, and so on and so-on, back
into the dim dark ages of the cave-men and cave-women. These very beliefs are what ‘I’ am made of – they form the very substance of ‘my’
social identity. The reluctance, fear and stubborn refusal to question and investigate beliefs can be sheeted home to this crucial fact – to
question one’s beliefs is to question one’s very ‘self’. To replace a belief with a fact is to eliminate a piece of one’s ‘self’.
The very act of believing supports and sustains ‘my’ very existence for ‘I’
have no existence in actuality. ‘I’ am an impostor, an alien, a usurper and an illusion. However, the effects of this psychological and
psychic entity are very real in that it results in feelings of sadness, loneliness and despair, not to mention anger, resentment and hate. Only
by challenging the very act of believing itself, can one actively dismantle and eliminate all of the beliefs that ‘I’ hold so dearly. It
needs a full-blooded commitment to eliminate belief and acknowledge fact in order to free oneself from malice and sorrow.
The physical universe simply is perfect, pristine, pure, infinite, and happening this very moment –
it requires no belief, faith, hope or trust that this is the case. Human beings have just been programmed into believing that this is not so.
This programming consists of the instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that we are born with, overlaid with the beliefs we have
been indoctrinated with since birth – in total called the Human Condition. Further the advice of parents, teachers, priests, gurus,
philosophers – indeed all of the human Wisdom – is founded on the belief that you can’t change Human Nature. Not only is life on earth a
sick joke, but there is no cure possible – the Mother of all beliefs!
