Belief

I have had a lot of cause to think about nature and nurture of late and their role in shaping the way that you look at the world. Genes and memes are both things that I am interested in. Genes transmit the genetic data that apparently shapes the person you are, drawing on the encoded information that is like an internalised version of each of your parents. Memes are an idea based along similar modes of transmission — they are units of behaviour, attitudes, certain foibles that we pick up on through exposure to the way our parents or close relatives, or even peers act, and are supposedly transmitted by means of memetic false consciousness, a construct in the mind purely for the transmission of memes.

Now the reason I am considering this at this precise moment is that I am sitting here while my fiancee is watching a video concerning a certain set of beliefs and I find myself instantly reacting to it in a negative way and this seems to be a pattern of behaviour that I constantly engage in. There is cynicism and there is an unwillingness to try out new ideas and I wonder whether or not I am guilty of having become too rigid in some aspects of my life. Now the place where nature and nurture comes into play in my thinking is — what if Iam incapable of belief because I was born into a household with parents who never seemed to strongly believe in anything? Do you need that kind of framework to make you able to accept new ideas? Does being narrow minded come from the programming that your parents unconsciously subject you to?

We should be able to escape that programming, but if it takes all those years to get you to a place where this behaviour seems ingrained how long will it take to rid yourself of it? I don\’t think that you can have an instantaneous purge even if you are blessed with some kind of epiphany, but it may open your eyes to the problem. The inability to believe often manifests itself in a negativity that closes off avenues of approach, meaning that you cannot deal with your life in a way that would be beneficial to you. If your first reaction to a negative situation is to  be negative then you are not going to get very far. The path of non-belief seems to affect every level of your life — meaning yourself; you cannot believe in yourself either. So, what is the key step towards remedying this situation? To find something you can believe in.

I know that my watershed moment came this year when I met someone who has faith in me; someone that finds me attractive; someone who supports me in all that I want to do. She discourages the negative behaviour that I am wont to indulge in and encourages the positive behaviour. Now I realise and I know that she realises that my self-esteem should not be entirely reliant upon what someone, even if they are you fiancee, thinks about you. You have to work to build the same sense of value up in yourself. You have to realise that you are worth something.

I know that not everyone is going to be blessed with a partner that validates them and gives them so much to workk with as far as rebuilding  themselves into a better person, but you can start just by looking at the good things in your life. Even if your blessings seem small they are still blessings and you can construct some kind of place within yourself that you can retreat to when you need to regroup.

As always I tend to stray from where I started originally but I think that what I am trying to  drive it is that it is ok to believe in something; it is good to be open to that possibility. No point in narrowing down the world to a single choice of disbelief.

—————-
Now playing: Sinéad O\’Connor – In This Heart
via FoxyTunes