One Day They

One day it’s just different. 

Change can be both bold and subtle, or perhaps it’s our attention to shifting degrees that is so distracted.  As a child I would wonder at the formation and dissipation of clouds.  But to witness them, you had to focus your attention; you had to be still.  Much like autumn's colorful transitions, it can go unnoticed until significant collection of change is indisputable.  Nature doesn't ask permission.

    So often, I've heard, when in discussion "That's what I believe" as the consummate respond to competing opinions.  I've spent some time dissembling the notion of belief, in order to see how it ticks.  When I was younger, on impulse of liken wondering, I took to the task of cracking the case and getting into the guts of our family telephone.  I was very proud of my ability to get it apart and down to its most primary components without having to resort to violent efforts; as in destroying the design in my quest.  My mother, on the other hand, was not amused, nor nearly as delighted as I.  She did not hesitate or candy coat threat in the least that suffering would be my lot if I did not get the phone put back together by the time my father got home from work.  With the exception of a few spare screws, all was reassembled by the time he arrived; lucky me.

    Back to belief:

As is commonly accepted, our thoughts are supported by emotions, and so are referred to as feelings.  Now, I'm not going to try and awe or beguile with some institutional study to curry ...um...belief.  But, what seems to be the case, in my opinion, is that we sort of do that internally with just about every living moment.  We have an experience, and at the core of it are collected facts.  The house burned, the horse jumped, the ice cream fell to the ground; the phone is apart.  Facts: Some of the time, they are undeniably 'true'  Yup, that the phone unit is now in its multitude of parts. Where we get ourselves off track from actual, is our irresistible, and mostly reflex, nature to conveyance from event to belief. 

  "You better believe there will be hell to pay when your dad gets home if it is NOT put back together" 

  That, is an assumption. A strong motivator if I am to agree with the premise, but still, nothing leads me to 'believe' that it is so but my own conviction from past experience, that the statement is a 'fact' and not an assumption; that is, pop will have a hormonal episode when called to attention of my antics.  When I believe the construction of facts and fiction to be the truth, then I have the beginnings of faith; a strong belief. 

  Obviously some belief's are harmless enough, such as the sun will come up, or that our job will be there tomorrow.  Well, that is until you walk into the company to be called to the office and be surprised with dismissal.  Then, that belief is challenged, and oft as not, an emotional response occurs,

   "I thought I was doing a good job" (but it was really a belief fashioned out of selective facts and cooked into a concept.)  Or as in the phone example, I believed that threat of beating was imminently predictable if I did not perform in a certain way. Why? Well, because we place our faith in our ability to predict the truth from our past.  Or another way of looking at it is, we assume the way we assemble our collection of facts to be true; which leads us to belief; then attach our faith into that conclusion.  Why do we do all of this? 

  In the survival of our species, it was necessary to develop a keen sense of predicting.  We were not as fast as our predators, nor did we have weapons adequate to provide survival once caught.  But we did have a brain that could reason, and possessed a good memory too boot. Over time we developed a method of discerning our environment with all of its implications; doing this revealed something amazing, something other animals could not, and that was projecting facts into possibilities.

   "If I walk out during the middle of the day, in the open to the water hole, I am vulnerable.  I wonder if I did that at night if my chances of surviving would increase?" 

  As eon's shaped and honed this ability, we discovered a trust in those skills to help us survive. As it is now, experience, personal knowledge, encourages what we refer to as trust.  As we continue to trust our experience, we create this belief that we 'know' and so have faith in our past.  Left unchecked or dismissing evidence to the contrary, we develop a predication, where we will continue to obtain the same results if we do things the same way.  That is the root of our traditions and rituals of most of our religions.  Obtaining the same results by following a script dictated not by response to current facts, but reliance on past results ~ denying if you will, the influence of present facts in order to obtain the desired same state, which of course was based on other facts; is wishful thinking.  Sages over the ages have warned us of such practice.  Claiming a superior state is to not become attached to our sensations.  There is a caution to not haphazardly assign experience as truth.  Mostly, we shape assumptions from our evidence, thereby by extension, go 'jumping to conclusions'.  This is a false reliance on our ability to collect, and process pertinent facts.  But like all things, do so really depends on attention to those details that are being revealed.  The summer sky, the autumn leaves, the telephone examples are varying degrees of applied attention to change, as well as the subtle application of assumptions. 

   Speculation is fine for problem solving, weighing options is healthy. But for a course of action its nothing more than creating a fanciful belief system.  It is a poor substitution to believe as 'truth' in place of facts in an ever changing world.  It is as if driving with eyes tightly shut muttering, "so far, so good....so far...so good"