Quotes About Belief

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

I avoid making sentences with "is" or its relatives in them because all such sentences have definite semantic defects, the first of which consists in the fact that they make it appear as if one has reached the unreachable 1/1 of proven truth, when in fact one usually only has strong maybe, and (especially in politics and Ideology) sometimes only a weak maybe.

5. Did you ever really give a good trial to our exercize, "I can now exceed all of my previous hopes and ambitions?" Try it; and at the same time, try, "I can be healthier than I have ever been before.

This is why physicists, following Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, no longer believe in either the wave model or the particle model but say both models are equally useful. (Which is more useful at a time depends on the context.)

as Bucky Fuller said, "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events". NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY. The universe consists of NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY apprehended events. Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you've got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously.

We begin to realize that, once these issues are raised, it doesn't really matter whether a man believes in God or not. God, after all, is just a short-hand symbol for our attitude toward the nature of the universe.

A field that depends on what people believe is unthinkable to a Fundamentalist Materialist, but social studies seems to need such fields.

Like most other experimenters he found only and always what he looked for.

I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

Christian Science — or any other religion that dogmatically insists that God" wants us to he happy and successful — can cure such conditions "miraculously." What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. Absolute faith that "God" is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do. — Aleister Crowley, Magick

It was mass hallucination. It was not mass hallucination. It was both mass hallucination and not mass hallucination. It was neither mass hallucination nor not mass hallucination.

Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.

The trouble with being an agnostic is that you are always wondering, a bit. That's what a-gnosis means: you lack the Inner Certainty of those Fully Enlightened Beings like the Pope or the Ayatollah or some Marxists we have all encountered.

Dr. John Lilly says, "In the province of the mind what is believed true is true or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves . . . whether you are living in a Christian reality-tunnel, a Mansonoid reality-tunnel, an Immortalist reality-tunnel, a vegetarian reality-tunnel, a Rationalist reality-tunnel . . .

But whatever the source of this worldwide legend, the psychological fact to which it attests is obvious: people can imagine an ideal condition of happiness, but are usually not capable of imagining that they, personally, are able to achieve that ideal. There is everywhere a consciousness of some gate, or door, or barrier, between desire and reality. Men and women everywhere tend to feel partially impotent and incapable of achieving what they want to achieve.

Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.

Or maybe the universe has wobbles and weirdness indeed. Maybe belief in any system is maintained by forgetting all data that does not fit the system?

If you believe in it, you can almost see it. Or, at least, you can convince yourself that anything else is mere appearance or hallucination.

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract Truth but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits . . .

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein.