Puking on the control panel of the Universe

 "All that is, is metaphor"
"We don't got to show you no steeenking reality" - Dr Nick Herbert, physicist, (via RAW)

Belief, faith, knowledge. Not synonyms.

For want of an angel, for all the blood that you turned into ink, you find yourself still searching...

Only trusting in gurus who have no desire to be gurus, who tell you time and time again to not believe
anything they say to you, as well as what all the other gurus say to you.
One of the greatest ideas to hit my young head, at the time, was from RAW...

The notion of neurological model agnosticism. General agnosticism about everything.
Take every idea, opinion & theory as only a model of reality and not reality itself (the map is not the territory),
hopefully based on the best data/evidence available to whomever thunk it up.

Unfortunately, most of us are content to only recycle models created by others. Which is fine and necessary, we have no choice in a lot of cases, if we don't want to spend all of our time testing them against our fallible sensory experience. Might be good for our brains to give them a bit of a workout sometimes and question our models, test them to whatever extent we're able.
If someone says something that we agree with, we tend to think of them as intelligent, and the converse seems to hold true, too. Other people have opinions which conflict with ours because they're stupid, ill-informed, uneducated. Or maybe they just had certain different inherent psychological proclivities and imprinted different reality models than we did.

Should we respect all opinions? I can respect someone as a person while finding their beliefs ridiculous.
Of course, I have the added armour of not having fixed, dogmatic beliefs, if any at all.
I guess the more fundamentalist types seem to think that everyone should respect their beliefs, because they represent the One True Reality. I've never had that certitude, and it doesn't exist in our best scientific models, either.
Okay, should I respect whatever you believe? Even if you're a racist paedophile who likes stamping on kittens?

Maybe we'd all get along a bit better if we looked at our own beliefs and learned to consider them from a cool distance, maybe laugh at them, pole them with a stick.




“I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)”

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”

"...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. " 

"We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself." 

"...reality is always plural and mutable." 

"I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions." 

"Is", "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment"

To the woods and the wilds, the pathless way...