I've been thinking a lot about where belief comes from, not the least because what I believe about the world happens to be a mishmash of many things. One of the things I think I believe is that you can choose what you believe. I don't think you necessarily have to choose, because there's a number of ways belief can come to you, but I do think choice is one of them. How? To be honest I'm less convinced of how but I do think I have a strong argument for why.

To believe something is to have conviction that it's true. One way you could develop this conviction is by seeking evidence, but you might not find it. People believe all sorts of things that are not supported by evidence or cannot be supported by evidence. For example, the existence of God, who may be considered to transcend physical reality, cannot be supported by wholly physical evidence (in my humble non-theologian opinion). The other obvious way is that some people have simply believed their whole lives; they were introduced to it as children and have never been given the chance, the space, to believe something else.

I don't consider myself a Christian but there was never a moment in my life where someone sufficiently debunked the existence of God. I've always found attempts to debunk the existence of God exhausting because they all seem to miss the point. The moment I stopped being a believer was the day my parents stopped forcing me to go to church. I stopped having the lived experience of Christianity, and so my belief was all downhill from there.

For those children, belief isn't a thing to be cultivated so much as a reality they are living in, willingly or otherwise.

Here's another thing I believe—maybe one of the weirder ones: I believe that spirits, concepts, and will are three expressions of the same underlying phenomenon. I'm not entirely sure where this notion comes from though it might have somehow been inspired by Lacan's three orders (the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real). I have no way of proving that it's true; it's merely something I accept to be true because I think it's an interesting and useful way of thinking about experience. It supports the notion in which something can "take on a life of its own", and how things that we don't usually think of as "people" can have experiences in some sense.

Ageless, sexless, omnipresent

I think it's something I believe because I live as though it were true. I voluntarily choose to let it frame the way I think about experience. There are other stories about what the spirit is but this one's mine.

There was a while where I thought I was just fooling myself about it. I don't really believe this, do I? But I just ignored the doubt and continued to live as though it were true, and after a while, it became true to me.

I do know where this belief about beliefs comes from. A few years ago I got really into chaos magick. Chaos magick is a spiritual practice that accepts there is no objective reality, and that our capacity to transform our own subjective worldview can be used to our benefit. It's not something I follow as closely anymore, but that fundamental idea has clearly stuck with me.

Respond to this article

If you have thoughts you'd like to share, send me an email!
See here for ways to reach out