You Choose

We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.

John Newman
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Hello Lily
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A belief is like a body of water. Naturally we should keep an eye on our beliefs because they tend to affect our behavior and our points of view about many things. For some a belief is allied to a religious faith. To others they may correspond to social and ethical matters and some beliefs are coordinate with natural laws. Almost all beliefs are found tied to opinions, which are usually the product of ideas. But whatever the origins and structures of one's beliefs they should be held up for review regularly.

Naturally we should look at our beliefs to see what they are made of but we should also determine how deeply and seriously held those beliefs are. Is your belief a bird bath, a pond, a lake and ocean? The deeper the belief the more changes it can go through, and that's a good thing. Opinions change and beliefs change along with them. If they don't things get muddy and dangerous. William Blake wrote "A man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind. "

Some people suffer from the ornery ego inflated problem of being possessive about their beliefs, holding on to some threadbare idea because they don't want to challenge or be challenged for it. That man's belief is a swamp unless he runs it past his reason a few times and cleans it up.

It is permissible and quite natural to have beliefs you can't prove as long as they remain beliefs, subject to review and change, and are not stated as truth.

To choose what to believe is our right as humans. Being told what to believe by someone else is not.

DB - Vagabond
Happy birthday JSB, wherever you are.
Never give up.
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Change Your Mind

While persevering with a belief may be an epistemic virtue in some contexts, stubbornness is not and its presence does not render knowledge better.

Paul Faulkner
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The tide comes in, the tide goes out. The only thing constant in life is change. But why is it that when we go to sleep we often wake up, and when we wake up in the morning we just go to sleep? People have been known to have dreams which reveal important truths. Why do they come in dreams and not in the light of daily thought?

A person who does not have a regular pattern of thought would probably qualify for being insane. And in that pattern is woven a system of thinking that includes what we know, what we believe and what we question. The daily routines of life keep us sane, I guess, or at least they keep our insanity under control.

Philosophers are those who think very deeply about things. They usually begin by doing something else. They are writers or scientists. They study mathematics, linguistics, psychology or some other field, and gradually work their minds into the rarified world of metaphysics. But along the road of trying to understand and define existence they arrive at points of contact where there has to be an idea expressed which formulates their thinking, a theorem, a touchstone to further thought and enquiry. But a true philosopher, like a true scientist, is gifted with the humility to be able to prove himself wrong.

Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician and philosopher, (1848 - 1925) thought that all cardinal numbers are extensions into the concepts of logical thought. After many years and further study he abandoned the theory. (Part of the reason for his change of mind had to do with Russell's Paradox (maybe I'll write about that some day if I have the nerve).) Frege was and still is an important philosopher.

The great lesson here is that a person who had worked for years to develop a system of thought that would explain things was ready and willing to give it up. I try not to think about the wrong opinions I held tenaciously to in my life. It wasn't hard to change my mind when I learned better. What was hard was being willing to change it. I feared that if I admitted I was wrong, even just to myself, I was also admitting my stupidity. Quite the opposite, in some cases the very thing I believed and was so certain of, even to the point of being called stubborn, was, in fact, superior to the so-called facts I was being given. While, at the same time, other ideas had to fall from the mental cart because they were wrong. I learned to let them go gracefully because I realized I wasn't stupid and that a mark of intelligence was being able to change one's mind.

There are people who stubbornly hold on to a belief even in the face of undeniable truth, or who insist on their own way of thinking and will not consider any evidence right or wrong to the contrary. Those people add little or nothing to the world. Theories of existence, anthropology, psychology, history, cosmology must come under scrutiny at all times and any thinker in those fields must be ready to change his mind if necessary. When an idea is challenged the result may be a better idea, or it may be a fist fight.

DB - The Vagabond
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WEEKEND PUZZLE

Below are some familiar phrases. Only one of them is legitimate. Which one is it and what is wrong with the others? That is your chore.

EXTRA: You get bonus point if you can think of other illegitimate ones.
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CLOSE PROXIMITY
CRIMINAL INTENT
FALSE PRETENCE
FREE GIFT
OPENING GAMBIT
PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
PIN NUMBER
SPOTLESSLY CLEAN
UNEXPECTED SURPRISE

dbdacoba@aol.com

Good luck
DB
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Inevitable Illumination 4/13/09

All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.

Indian proverb
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Overtures of friendship to you
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It is a remarkable but often frightening thing to realize that all thoughts, ideas and beliefs will blossom someday in one way or another depending on where they are planted and how they are tended. These mental seeds are all around, looking for a place to land and take root. What am I growing in my field, something useful like roses, tulips, corn, potatoes, or stink weed, skunk cabbage, deadly nightshade?

If I wake up one morning and look out the window at my life and see weeds I know I've let the wrong seeds into my head. I have some uprooting to do. I have some replanting. It's strange, because the seed I hold in my hand knows what it is going to become, even though I don't. So I have to be very careful. Is it a seed of hope, beauty, truth, happiness or one of fear, hate and ugliness?

I also have to be careful where I put the seed. I have to make sure I have the right mental condition, the right attitude, the right soil, to inspire its proper growth. The same idea in one mind can make a genius while in another might make a mad man. One soil grows an Einstein another grows a Frankenstein. It's not enough just to have a good idea, you have to know what to do with it.

Then there's the matter of cultivating, nourishing and protecting it while it grows. Patience is required. The butterfly can't leave his cocoon until he's fully grown. A grand idea needs its own fulfillment time. An artist or a scientist may give a large portion of his life to bring a grand idea to maturity.

In my neighborhood there are a lot of children. Some of them are quite small and I sometimes wonder what that little one is capable of. Will he grow up to be a master musician? Will she become an astronaut and step on another planet one day? It's amazing to think that whatever they can do or become is already inside them waiting to be nourished, cultivated and illuminated. It's so vitally important to make sure that the thoughts they are encouraged to hold in their hands and plant in their lives are good ones.

And that is equally important for all of us, no matter how young we are.

What's in your garden?
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DB - Vagabond Journeys
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May there be nice newness in your life today.
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