Questioning Our Core Beliefs
Cassius Kamarampi | April 4, 2016The world is infinitely more complex than we can imagine: acceptance of this fact is an essential first step to humbling oneself, to dropping our preconceived notions and accepting the momentary pain of being incorrect, in favor of an entire future where we can strive to know the truth.
Those structural understandings that shape your perception of the world: do you really know those things? Do you have proof for those foundational beliefs, or did you believe what you were told? If you believed what you were told, it’s okay. I believed what I was told too, even though I intuitively felt that nothing was right from the earliest memory of my existence.
As many of us know, nothing is as it seems. Around every last corner, every twist and turn in the path of our lives, another deception is there. For example, the history of slavery in the US and elsewhere, the conquering of Native People in the Americas, is whitewashed and severely warped out of context in our education in American public school. We are told that if the FDA says it is so, it is so, and we can safely consume things that other studies and pieces of knowledge irrefutably prove to be toxic and harmful.
We are told that it’s okay to give 4 year old children amphetamines for ADD: yes, that’s real. Tens of thousands of children around the age of 4 are given Adderall every day.
Every governmental body does something different from what we are told: we are led to believe that forces of order and good are dominating factors in constructing our society, when in reality money, money and the shrewd, scheming, suit and tie wearing blandness of trickery dominates our society. Money bleeds us, sinks its tentacles into the alleged regulatory bodies that decorate this system and turn the blades of the machine against us, like the prison industrial complex.
This doesn’t have to be a grim, dark reality: this is a liberating, clarity bringing, profoundly beautiful and life altering change of mind.
The darkness of awakening should only be a first symptom in a process through which we find a path: an acquisition of clarity.
Clarity, peace of mind, deep acceptance of the state of the world is often the blessing at the end of the dark, and sometimes very bright, tunnel of the world we were born into.
As a person born in 1996 in the United States, certain questions pervaded every minute of my childhood:
-Why do I get the feeling my teachers are not right about what they tell us?
-Why does everyone seem clueless, making decisions that I can feel are not right?
-What is this food made of?
-Why are there so many unhealthy, sickly, ill people around?
-Where does our food come from?
-Where did we come from?
-Why do I have to get so many vaccines?
-Why is there so much crime?
-Who owns the buildings downtown?
-Why does everything look abandoned and decayed? (That’s how the Midwestern US looked in the late 90’s, and how it looks today, around Chicago, Detroit, Flint Michigan, South Bend Indiana, where I am from.)
My life has been nothing but a path to answering these questions.
My intuition, my gut instinct told me nothing was right in this society from the earliest moments of my memory. I could always tell that people were not as sure as they should be, about the things they insisted were true.
Having been born into the run-down midwestern US in the mid 90’s, from my perspective it has always been very obvious that we’re living in some end-result of a lot of bad decisions. I wasn’t born in Yemen, just into a very strange haze of “system.”
I’ve always known deep within myself that there is more truth to uncover: I’ve always intuitively known that there are more layers. Even deep into my awakening, I had the feeling there were more layers. Which layer will I stumble upon next? The compelling, fascinating intensity of that question keeps me going.
Just when we think we’ve seen everything, something else tells us that there are even deeper layers to this enigmatic onion that is the reality of our existence: the reality of the world’s social structures, power structures, the true history of where we came from and why everything is the way it is. Isn’t it the sweetest thing when you break into a layer of life that ends up being useful: when a new craft, a new skill or understanding comes into your life? When music hits you, possibly one of the most beautiful and unique components of our perception on Earth.
While we can marvel and the complexity of existence and appreciate life, do you think you have it figured out?
Well, where did that plastic come from in the water bottle you’re drinking out of? It’s plastic number 7. That plastic is probably sealed with Bisphenol S, even though it says BPA free. If you don’t pay attention now, one day you might wake up with prostate cancer.
Do you think you know everything you need to know to make the right decisions in life? Do you recognize what you need to do to have a future, or will you keep eating, keep running on the treadmill with the hope that the flow of food to your plate will not cease, and the gears that prop up your life will never stop?
I certainly get the feeling that there’s still more to learn. Just this month I had an awakening about plastic, poisons, and I began to understand that the taste I can detect when I drink my non-flouride water, contained in allegedly BPA-free plastic containers, is actually Bisphenol S. Plastic number 7 is often sealed with Bisphenol S, almost the exact same kind of endocrine disrupting, cancer causing chemical as BPA.
My sense of taste is more my friend than I ever thought it could be: I’ve become more aware of an odd taste in water that is supposed to be pure, a chemical odor in the air when it shouldn’t be there.
Where did that keyboard you’re typing on come from? What is it made of?
Who made the food you eat, what chemicals were used to preserve it, and what is the true cause of the debilitating health problems you may have seen your family members succumb to?
The reality of the world we live in, what everything is made of, where we came from, and how we were steered into this direction as a society, it’s an onion with infinite layers.
We live in an enigmatic onion with infinite layers: the sooner a person becomes humble enough to question their deepest and most firmly ingrained preconceived notions of the world, the sooner they can become wise and make the best decisions: come to the deepest peace with the clarity of understanding how things really are, even if reality can be dark.
Sometimes, our choice of what layers to uncover in life just has to be dark, out of necessity: where we are at now, what often motivates us to dig deeper is something kind of negative, maybe learning about what causes cancer when a family member gets it, or maybe we are compelled to learn about the Federal Reserve after years of drudgery going to college to be a lawyer.
If everything were well in the world, we could divert our energy to discovering more positive things: new crafts, skills, ways to improve the lives of us and those around us. We have to do both at once: we have to shape our culture with intent, every aspect of our lives, and completely disconnect from the systems and processes that have failed to serve us well up until this point.
We have to preserve our passion for life, our positive attitude, our endurance and undying fire of humanity, if we’re going to learn about the critically important to understand problems of our world, work to make them better, and work to ensure that our children have a future.
(http://www.eraofwisdom.org)
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