Belief

There is a difference between believing something, and believing in something. Even a cursory glance at a dictionary reveals these two indepedent aspects of the definition of this word. The former it says “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.” The latter says “trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.” I think people underestimate the real difference between these definitions. It’s not just that the words are in a different order, it’s the words require a different order of being. Let me be clear: believing something, as a religious function, is child’s play, but believing in something is a very tall order.

You can get someone to believe something simply by repeating it, or threatening them, or withholding other information. If I don’t tell you about the key I have in pocket, I could get you to believe that we’re locked out of the house. If no information is available, then believing something is just silly.

But you can’t get someone to believe in something just by repeating it or threatening them, or withholding information. Belief 1 is “accepting” but belief 2 actually requires an experience of truth, or faith. It gives power to that which you trust in, or have faith in. It gives power to you for having that relationship.

So, when someone says they “Believe in God,” does that mean they take as true and accept that this indeed exists, or does it mean, like you might say, “I believe in you Jimmy,” that God’s existence is taken as a given and there is an experience of trust.

For many then, the full picture is “I believe that God exists (an acceptance that this thing exists) and I believe in God (meaning I have faith in his power, and trust that he will serve me in the ways outlined in the contract passed down in my religion)”

For many others, there is no belief that God exists, and therefore no one to believe in. For others, God is another word for life, and so while they do not believe that a God exists, but they believe in life (they have faith in life to be ok in some grand sense, even if it is painful in a relative sense).

What’s my system for this sort of thing?

The system is this: Focus more on believing in yourself and the natural process of life than on trying to believe some fact about the universe. Adopting some belief about the world is really easy (and if a religion is incessantly stuffing down your throat, and you’re vulnerable to that sort of that, it’s way easier), and therefore less important in taking charge of your salvation (you like that word lilah!?). What is difficult is observing yourself and your life to a degree where you can actually notice patterns and begin to develop a real trust or faith in life itself. Believing in life (like “You can do it Life, I believe in you!”) is infinitely more productive, not to mention verifiable and solid, than having a belief about life.

So, when life has got you down, or if you subscribe to some belief system, see if you let that go and focus more on believing in life pure and simple. Believing something that doesn’t exist (God) exists will only serve to weaken your resolve. Where a lot of fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist religious people neglect to recognize is that cultivating belief deeply and strongly in the life process itself (in other words, building a relationship with life) and admitting to yourself how that is a spiritual endeavor is immensely more powerful than trying so hard to adhere so strongly to a belief or deny so adamantly that life has meaning or purpose. Why don’t you investigate the life process deeply (working on believing in God/life) while letting go of beliefs about God/life.

This system has many advantages. Your belief about watermelon is different than the taste of watermelon. If you want to taste the watermelon, and you’re focused on understanding where the watermelon came from you may miss that yummy taste. And you still may get it wrong and end up at the wrong farm. Why not sit and enjoy the watermelon first (believe in God), and if you have any spare time go figure out where it came from (possibly discover belief that God exists)?

Liturgy and Prayer

Liturgy is Dead

The only way that the dead God can ever be brought back to life is if we instead slay the terrible beast of liturgy. Mumbling and chanting are appropriate for crazy people and performers, not humans intent upon seeing the living God. Any religious form is limited and potentially misleading, but none is more potentially damaging than scripted dialogue with Divinity. Spontaneous prayer, expressed in words, is a liberating force. Spontaneous open-hearted moans and groans let us hear the sound of our minds. Scripted prayer is dead from the moment we have to look on it. A script is all about expectation and conniving. Scripted prayer is a mockery of real prayer and it has no place in our houses of worship, and it certainly has no place in your spiritual life if you actually desire a true experience of the unknown.

Liturgy should be read like a history book. Liturgy is a record of how people may have prayed in the past. In that sense, it can be an inspiration for us. But at no time should one consider reading or memorizing a prayer prayer. If the goal of the spiritual aspirant is to pray, the prayer book needs to be put down and the petitioner or meditator has to inquire directly into their current state of mind and attempt to work out their disharmony with the living God in the moment. This is not possible through a rote memorization of prayer, and in fact becomes more difficult as one’s mind becomes filled with approximations and sketches of other peoples’ prayers. In other words, the more you are clogged with ideas about prayer, the less prayer can actually take place.

I would concede that perhaps there are numbers of people who are simply not able to envision what a prayer would feel like. In these cases, I would have no problem encouraging people to read prayers from others as long as there was the understanding that this was to be read as an inspirational piece of writing, not as a script to be delivered at the moment of encounter with the Divine. God actually will not respond if you are approaching his Holy chamber through the words of another. He really does not respond to incessant mumbling of words that even you yourself do not understand because they are written in a foreign language. Do not underestimate God’s standards in this regard. He only cares about the sincerity of your hearts wisdom. He cares for scripted words only to the degree that they happen to match up with yours. Given that that overlap may only happen once every few months, it seems like a waste of time attempting a God approach in such a rigid manner.

Liturgy needs to stay where it belongs…in the canon of the tradition. It records the vision of masters. Literature is just that, however. Never mistake liturgy for prayer, or you are destined for a life reduced simply to a mimic or actor on a stage. Real prayer can look a lot like any of the number of prayers you have read, but it’s mostly silent and pithy in actual practice. I have never prayed to god in more than one sentence. In fact, many times it is no more than one word: God. Most of the time, prayer is a chaotic rumble of thoughts resolving themselves, and tensions self-liberating themselves through a gentle awareness. If prayer were about getting all the words right, then how can the illiterate man pray, how could the woman left alone with no prayer book call out for help? We all know that prayer is possible at any time, in any situation, for everyone, so why are we so obsessed in institutional settings with this liturgy nonsense? It is because so few religious leaders actually know how to pray they have to entertain people’s inquiries with other peoples’ prayers. Because if people realized that prayer was a natural act that was happening constantly, there would be no incentive to attend church or temple or mosque, and religion would crumble. Great!

Do yourself a favor and try and forget all but the simplest prayers you have read. Try and recreate the environment of the liturgy rather than the actual script. Put yourself there and let the process of prayer unfold naturally. Only then will you be able to compose your own liturgy which may then act as an inspiration for someone else.

Following-Up When Afraid (By Request)

My system for following up is pretty straightforward. Do it! But what happens when you’re a little anxious or afraid of following-up? Let’s break this down.

Fear is a difficult thing to work with, and perhaps in another post, I’ll speak more directly to that, but in this case I think some clear things can be identified to help one follow-up even though afraid.

First, what are you following-up on? If it’s a job or a relationship situation, then there’s always the fear of rejection, or having to speak a truth that may be particularly hard for the other person to hear. This is a normal fear, and I think part of our responsibility to ourselves is to work (over the course of many years possibly) to be comfortable speaking our truth, even when it means rejection for us, or possible hurt for another. My system is simple, but not easy: Work over time to be more communicative with your truths, your needs, and your own power. This is not a Tony Robbins pep talk blog, this is a system blog, and I think that is the best system for overcoming fear in these situations: Train yourself to honor your needs and communicate your truth. How you work on that individually is laid out in many types of self-help books, and working with a therapist or learning meditation is probably a good place to start this kind of growth work.

If you’re having a hard time following-up in other situations (responding to a casual email, meeting someone for dinner) it seems to me like this would be more an issue of overcoming flakiness than overcoming fear. Maybe being flakey is one way of exercising fear (of becoming your best self?, of having people begin to expect too much of you?, of connection, intimacy?), in which case, I would also say that training over time to work out these kinks in your system is the best system. But if being flaky, is just flakiness, then I enthusiastically recommend embracing the simplicity of System Sally’s injunction: Just follow-up…it’s a great system for having people trust you, and for creating a strong foundation for other systems to work efficiently.

Please let me know in the comments if this was helpful, or if there’s some other angle I’m missing.

Following Up

It is important to follow up on many things. Applying for jobs requires following up. Responding to blog comments requires follow up. Having plans with a person requires a certain amount of follow up.

I owe someone a huge follow up. I let her know in a short direct email, and in person. These types of temporary follow-ups serve to let the person know how deeply you care about whatever is needing follow up, but the current circumstances aren’t allowing the follow up to meet up.

Also, follow up is very similar to responsibility. All my dedicated readers have probably been wanting more insight and systems from System Sally, but I haven’t been able to respond to that need in the way I would have liked. So, the need to maintain and update a blog, for example, is more a responsibility, which is really a constant follow up. A follow up is a short term responsibility.

This is less a system than an explanation of things. But the system is “Be responsible, and follow up where necessary. Do temporary follow-ups where necessary.” The advantages of this are many and include having people trust you, and creating a reliable system-wide system for other systems to work better.

Four Noble Truths: A System?

The four noble truths are the Buddha’s foundational teachings on suffering and the end of suffering. But, decide for yourself whether this is a system or not. Is a framework for understanding how to cope with reality a system? It’s not clear to me yet.

The four noble truths (for those of you unfamiliar) are:

1. There exists suffering in our lives

2. Our identification with resistance to pain and clinging to pleasure is the cause

3. Letting of our clinging and grasping to pain and pleasure will bring about that suffering’s cessation

4. There is a way that leads to this letting go which involves cultivating a certain view, conduct, and mental posture centered mostly around non-judgmental awareness

Given that there are no specifics provided beyond that (at least for the sake of this presentation), it would be perfectly acceptable to discuss what lifestyle may be most conducive towards ending suffering. Of course, one might even have a problem accepting that life is about “ending suffering.” I would maintain that a lot of this ends up being a semantic argument more than anything. If a child is crying, there is a sense that you want that crying to stop, but if you approach it that way, it’ll probably just continue. Instead, if you go try and take care of the crying child, the crying may stop instantly. So ending suffering may be the result, but not necessarily the right way of having an intent. Again, the semantic circles you can get caught in are less important than the practical debates about peoples’ actual experience. If someone embraces suffering, and it makes them feel good, you could either say they embraced their suffering, or you could say they ended their suffering through embracing it.

So, here’s a rephrase of the four noble truth system from a more tantric approach

1. There is suffering in life

2. It’s there no matter what, so you might as well enjoy it

3. So stop fearing your suffering and embrace it

4. Through adopting that view, loosening up your rigid conduct, and putting your heart and soul into things, you will eventually not be afraid of life anymore, and you’ll be able to enjoy the entirety of your life, pain and all.

Really, it’s a linguistic trick, but it does have real implications for the way people try to traverse these paths. They are both effective “orientations,” (not systems!) depending on the temperament of the person.

There is, of course, the real beautiful Heart Sutra, which basically says…”Hey, there’s actually no suffering.” This is the extreme version of my second version above.

Never give up

Really, just never give up.

Partying and Taking Care

System Sally is all for a nice time. That being said, do not do anything that is likely to cause unnecessary harm. There are many activities that can provide genuine fun where injury is common or at least unpreventable, so there is no reason whatsoever to add any potential for injury or harm.

Loud music is already harmful to your hearing, why make it intentionally louder?

Large gatherings of people can be uncontrollable so why add more things to the mix that make it more uncontrollable?

The body is a sensitive breakable organism, why introduce more chemicals, fits of violence (even the “loving” variety), or general disregard into the system?

It is important not to take what I am saying and think I am suggesting to lock one’s self up and never do anything. Quite the contrary, life should be explored, and the body should be pushed to its limits. It is the intention that matters, and it is important that life and fun is never lived as a mere result of not caring about the fate or future of body and mind.

The System for Not Engaging Systems

When you are not actively using your systems (i.e. thinking of them consciously) usually a default system kicks in. This is different for everybody but here are some of the default systems built into the human being:

1. Try not to die

2. Stay generally responsible

3. Stay generally clean

4. Let most systems slide (this usually means sliding back to basic systems from childhood. for example, still using soap in the shower but not caring what kind of soap, or what your overall procedure is)

5. Let people notice your systems have slid and being okay with it.

6. Wondering why you ever needed systems in the first place

Catching Mice

The first thing to consider in dealing with mice is to keep your household clean and keep food in the kitchen, and stored away. Having a home where the smell of food is in constant supply in all of the rooms of the house will only serve to attract mice and insects to your pad.

Once it’s discovered you have mice, there are a few approaches to take. Regular mouse traps work, but they kill. Sticky traps don’t kill, but they torture. There are friendly mouse traps that work and don’t kill, but you have to take your mouse friend outside, and who knows, if you don’t go far enough away they may work their way right back to your house. There are friendly mouse traps you can make yourself. Here are some instructions for making your own humane mouse trap.

From a systems standpoint, you first have to define your values (is killing a mouse a big problem for you?) and then proceed from there.

Eating

Do not eat these foods:

1. Pig

2. Shellfish

Do not combine:

1. Meat and Milk

2. Fruit and Regular food