Quotes About Belief

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

This existentialist-humanist psychology thus comes around to the same conclusion as the majority of quantum physicists: whatever we are talking about, our mind has been its principle architect. Nothing is real and everything is real as Gribbin says. That is, in this model, nothing is absolutely real in the philosophical sense, and everything is experienced reality to those who believe in it and select it in their perception-gambles.

As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

I feel great and I send fraternal greetings to Dr. Andrei Sakharov in Russia," said Dr. Leary on emerging from prison, registering the fact that the mechanisms of the police state are the same everywhere, as are the myths that protect them. "Good Russians" believed Dr. Sakharov was a half-crazed alcoholic, just as "Good Americans" believed Dr. Leary was a half-crazed dope-fiend.

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

If the Thinker thinks "holy water" from Lourdes will cure its lumbago, the Prover will skillfully orchestrate all signals from the glands, muscles, organs etc. until they have organized themselves into good health again

Remember: I am not asking you to believe these yarns at all. We know how much nonsense gets published these days, do we not? I am merely asking that you observe in yourself the strength and immediacy of the impulse to deny at once. Does this impulse vary according to the weight of the circumstantial evidence (such as it is) or according to how much your own imprinted and conditioned reality-tunnel is challenged?

Time magazine, with their usual dummheit, once did a cover story entitled, "The Occult: A Substitute Faith." If this was all that could be found in occultism, I would not touch the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The world already has enough "faith" to guarantee that the Idiots are always, as Ambrose Bierce said, the largest and most influential political party in any society. Occultism interests me, not as a substitute faith, but as a substitute for faith.

In the short run, Orr's law always holds: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.*

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all:

The belief that the human umwelt reveals reality or deep reality seems, in this perspective, as naive as the notion that a yardstick shows more reality than a voltmeter, or that my religion 'is' better than your religion. Neurogenetic chauvinism has no more scientific justification than national or sexual chauvinisms.

The New Fundamentalists are not as far separated from the Old Fundamentalists as they like to think they are.

NO "EXTERNAL" SITUATION MAKES A MENTAL STATE "INEVITABLE

Worse yet, scientific models, like people and cattle and insect species and mountains and all things known, have a lifespan. Mountains may survive geological eras, but scientific maps, like people and birds, have short lives. None has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, at present. To believe in any such mask with the fervor of Gross and Levitt contradicts all known facts of scientific history. Every theory they worship will someday get junked.

Yeah. I don't believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

2) for the reasons sketched above, and developed more fully in the text to follow, I do not think pessimism is the only possible outlook on the universe, but merely the one that is currently ubiquitous;

These thingamajigs act like waves part of the time and like particles part of the time. This basic paradox has remained all through the 94 years of development of quantum mechanics and gives great comfort to those of us who believe no one model or perspective ever shows all the truth or the only truth about anything. For further details see my book, Quantum Psychology.

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.

Some of this literature deserves at least a brief note. Madame Helena P. Blavatsky believed in a hollow Earth, and so did Lewis Spence. She formed the Theosophical Society and he, the AMORC Rosicrucians in San Jose, California (as distinguished from all the other Rosicrucians.) These two groups have so heavily influenced modem occultism that no amount of scientific evidence, now, can ever dislodge the hollow Earth from the Belief System (B.S.) of millions of Seekers of Higher Wisdom.

In sum, I don't believe the people who say that the world is controlled by one vile group of conspirators who are running everything, but I believe there are actually a multitude of conspiracies contending in the night.