Don't believe everything you think
In these special times, it is sometimes difficult to know what to believe and what not to believe now. What you should and should not trust now. What you can and cannot trust now.
Everything suddenly seems very uncertain again. Do the vaccines work or not? Do the lockdowns work? Will everything ever return to normal. Can you trust your fellow man?
Back in the day when you were little, basically everything was uncertain and yet you felt safe. Yet you trusted the world.
How can they?
As you get older, you learn more and more about how the world works. At least you start to see and interpret things. You start to believe in something and what you see and interpret starts to confirm it.
This is how we like our thinking to be confirmed, and this is often what we see.
So what determines that you believe in something?
You often believe what you see or what you think you see. It's very interesting because your brain makes a certain interpretation of frequencies that come into your eyes. Light frequencies in this case.
You always have a picture in your mind of where you are and what is behind you.
What you see determines much of what you believe about your environment. This becomes very clear when you put on virtual reality (VR) glasses. When you put those on and then look over your shoulder for a moment in the virtual world, it does something to that unconscious image in you of where you are.
That's when VR suddenly seems much more real. That's when your brain knows it's real.
Then suddenly the story of the VR game seems much more real, too.
But what about in the real world, why do you start believing in something. Why do you start believing that vaccines are good or, on the contrary, why do you get all conspiracy theories?
In both cases, you believe something because you think you know something. Knowing what you believe causes you to perform certain actions that are in line with what you believe[1].
For example, this is why you just take the vaccine and the booster if you believe it all works, because then it makes sense to do so.
This is also why you just don't take the vaccine and want to warn people about it if you don't believe in it and if you think you know it might be dangerous to people in the future, because then it makes sense to do so.
Bringing something new into society in this way actually automatically polarizes you, because you may or may not believe in it.
In both cases, you’ll hear a story from certain sources explaining why you’re right.
Descartes, a philosopher, did say something interesting about reality. For how can you be completely sure about that reality if you have no one around you?[2] So, as you can see, you need other people telling you something to believe in something.
Above all, science is relatively certain of reality. Something is true until the next scientist discovers something else. The earth is flat, until someone discovers it is round and enough people start believing it.
In 2000, there were people who said we knew how the entire DNA of human beings is constructed, and since then new discoveries have already been made about our DNA[3]. This is all still quite recent.
Believing science actually means being very flexible with what you believe. Because the people who tell something about science can change the story with each new discovery.
To go along in a story or not
According to Kant, another philosopher, there is more than just your brain in a vessel to determine what reality is, namely your transcendent ego and it was later replaced by something else namely: society. A social group of people with "the same values". Who are actually all brains in vessels looking at the outside world together.
Only these then have no connection to another society that interprets reality very differently.
That society has brought something new, which is the fear of ochlocracy[4]. The mob that rules. The fear of being judged by others.
Does what you believe align with what everyone else believes? Is your reality the same as the group of people you live in?
Do you actually believe the story? The story told by one group or another? The answer to your question about whether something is real and whether you can believe what you think?
What we like to do is go along with the story that aligns with our beliefs whether it is true or not. Someone who doesn't go along with that, that actually tears down your sense of reality and that's not fun. So that person is a wimp or a sheep. By putting that other person away in such a way, you are again safe with your beliefs about what you believe and that you don't have to believe anything else.
Isn’t it more humane to simply let go of both stories? To find certainty in uncertainty. To offer no resistance and let go.
Surely who turns out to be telling the truth will only be revealed in the future, and by letting go, at least everyone is no longer a wappie or a sheep, but just a human being.
You too have a story about yourself and all the stories you have ever heard around you, you have picked up bits and pieces of that that now determine what you believe and how you act.
Talking about the story reinforces the story
Do you let yourself get carried away by your own story? The story you’re in right now—the story of distrust, fear, or perhaps happiness (in which case, keep doing what you’re doing). Jan from Norway doesn’t have that story.
Or Bert who lives on a mountain in a villa with no news. He may not even have a clue that a pandemic is happening. There are people who don't know anything about anything. They don't know that there is a virus, that there is vaccination and all those things. For people who have no idea about the virus and vaccinations, that story is also true.
Then you may wonder which story is finer now? For myself, I do know, no story is more palatable.
There is no story you can tell yourself that is better than what you are yourself. You may be trying all kinds of stories right now. In all those stories you die and lose people and there is misery.
This is to help you realize that it is no better than who you really are, which is light and love.
I tell this mostly to myself. Edwin is a form that struggles with being light and love. By expressing this each time and talking about it, I know that the more I share and give this, the more I get this back.
The more you talk about a story, the more people experience the light-in my case, the more you get it back. So the more you talk about the vaccine, the virus, your problems, the more you get that back.
So I like to share the story that you are light and love that everyone is.
As more and more people experience something, it is easier to experience it. So as more and more people experience light and love correctly, the easier it is to experience it yourself.
In sports, you see it too. That often for years a mile is not run under four minutes and then once it succeeds, suddenly a lot of people succeed.
When someone paves the way, suddenly other people can too.
As more people remember that we are light and love, the easier it becomes.
It’s only your own story—that’s where you feel you derive your reason for being. The temptation in that story of yourself is that your “I” likes it. You want to hold onto that “I” in the story of suffering, because otherwise that “I”— your ego—will dissolve into light and love.
Collectively, you see people remembering light and love and no longer wanting to be or be afraid of anything that threatens them. Of a virus or a bomb or something.
On the other hand, there’s anger—people who want to fight for freedom. That’s interesting, too. You’re already free, but you can still feel that way. That’s the dark side of the story of light and love.
Whether it's fear, anger, lust, dopamine shots, outside recognition and appreciation, pride in things, these are all weapons of the story to keep you in the story.
Imagine you've had and seen through all the negative, then the next ones come and they are pride, recognition, appreciation. Look how good I am, how clever of me. Again, those are sneaky ways of your own I, your ego, to reinforce it.
Of course, it's a better story.
But I want to invite you to start thinking cage-free. And to remember that however much you acknowledge yourself and give love and empower your I, being yourself doesn't have to empower you. You just have to follow your own storyline and then you will see that you are not doing everything, you are getting everything.
If you are open to everything, you will get everything you want.
This is not the path of least resistance, but rather of no resistance.
I seek no resistance in my relationship, with my children, my work, my life in general. I want to go where there is no resistance.
I want to invite you to join me on that journey.
Also listen to this podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2hz1JZHVdDPreVfE4VJxJs?si=FP3hst3xRBGVkqbIyRPtqg
Changing your story
Maybe it's still hard to let go of the story or what you're working on in your mind and not believe everything you think. Maybe it's hard to let go of thoughts that you feel are in line with society, even if they make you feel uncomfortable. In the end, society is also just a collection of people with all kinds of thoughts, none of which really knows how true that thought is.
In that case, you can get help. In particular, thoughts that make you feel worse, whether about yourself or society, are nice to be able to let go.
With hypnotherapy, you can find out why you have certain thoughts, how logical those thoughts are and how to release them.
Want to learn more about how this works?
Then come join the free online masterclass on hypnosis.
Or sign up for one of the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.