Embracing Impermanence : A Personal Belief System
You are what you think - you've heard this a million times but have you ever let the idea truly sink in? Have you ever reflected on it?
Our thoughts shape our reality. Once we understand how we're causing ourselves a lot of frustration and anxiety - we must take a step to understand what we can do about them. Humans are the only creatures on this planet who are capable of fables. We tell ourselves a million stories each day - some true, some not. But they’re all just that - stories. Yet they all transform the lens through which we see the world and experience life.
In conversations with individuals battling depression, I noticed the stories they told themselves. Every experience was something to be doubted or be wary of. They had trouble dealing with positive emotions because those didn't align with the story they'd been telling themselves. They made up alternative stories to reject these positive emotions or reasoned with themselves that the bad times are just around the corner and considered it to be prudent to beware. This deep rooted melancholia is a hallmark of depression and it paints the whole world in its own light (or lack thereof). But there’s another side to this story.
Humans have evolved to reason with their thoughts. Just a few decades ago, religion served as a powerful system to reinforce self-belief by way of proxy but with that now losing hold over society - one is forced to find something else to latch on to, something to believe in. What is that going to be?
Let’s look at religion a little more closely for an answer. For the believers, religion serves as an affirmation that no matter what happens to us today - eventually, everything’s going to be alright. This has been the mainstay of every religion throughout the world and has provided comfort to mankind by eviscerating him from the outcomes since the ultimate outcome in undeniably favorable. It also provides an answer to the ultimate question about life - death. One simply returns to the creator and what follows is eternal bliss. It’s no coincidence that a decline in faith precisely corresponds to a rise in mental health issues among people of all ages. But over time, I’ve realized that people and communities who are still oblivious to a lot that goes on in the world of science and operate primarily from a place of faith and culturally tested lifestyles both outlive their more skeptical counterparts and show significantly higher levels of satisfaction and radically lower rates of mental health issues. Now, it isn’t a cakewalk to inject belief into a mind that has been wired for rationality and science and more importantly, forcing that isn’t the way to go. We need to understand the story that religion has to offer and create a semblance of it for ourselves - our own personal belief system.
Only beliefs can replace other beliefs - because no matter how far you push us, humans do not want to take responsibility for themselves. The popular consensus today is that one must believe in oneself but that carries a fundamental flaw - to believe in something one must know deep down that that thing is infallible. But we all know deep down how fallible we all truly are : this causes a deep rooted dissonance.
It all seems to work out when you’re rolling in the good times and a belief in the self takes you higher and higher but when one faces a setback, either out of sheer bad luck or an honest mistake - this belief in oneself is marred with doubt precisely because it is not unquestionable and absolute. We know how quick we are to go from euphoria to despair in a flash when circumstances are ripe for it. This is when the community comes in, at least for the ones lucky enough to have had a chance to develop it. It tries to reinforce your belief in yourself and lift you up from that dire place of doubt and uncertainty. Trouble is, if you’re skeptical and rational enough - you know deep down that it’s all an elaborate act to get you out. But knowledge and rationality isn’t a dangerous thing if one knows how to wield it. In fact, a carefully constructed belief system can be far more powerful than one which relies on religion. So how do we build that belief system?
You must start with the past. The past is the reason why your thoughts flow in the direction that they do. Think of it as the origins of our planet. What was once a mountain now has a river cutting through after years of erosion. Your thoughts are similar - the most resilient ones have carved themselves into your subconscious mind. When you reflect on the past, you bring this subconscious knowledge to the surface. Then, you can begin to examine it and peel the layers apart . What is your life story? Write it down. All of it - whatever you can remember. Identify clearly the times where you felt that nothing could be right and the times where you thought that nothing could go wrong. See how none of them lasted. Draw your own conclusions from that. Once you do that, you’ll probably come to another realisation - that nothing in life is permanent. Everything, good and bad, has passed. This moment too, shall pass. Our expectations of happiness and constant supply of dopamine has made us expect far greater from life than ever before in human history. But once we know and believe that deep down, everything eventually passes, we can start to build a system of belief around that. It will also reveal to you that the pursuit of one’s ideal life has always been the most fulfilling of times and that the attainment of a goal or objective has been short lived and forgettable. Yet, the root cause of your anxiety is the lack of belief that things will turn around. Which is why -
Your belief system needs to be outside your self. The elusive self is something that I’ll elaborate on in the next article but for sake of what we’re building here one needs to understand this concept of self that we’ve held since our early years of awareness. You are aware that you are an individual distinct from all other individuals - you have your own life, family, dreams and troubles. When you imbibe your belief system into this very self, it will eventually fail you. But what if you realise that there is no self? That this too is a figment of your past and all that you have made it out to be. Your belief has to reside outside of this self to be resilient to your circumstances. As a child, if you were lucky, you had a mother, father, or both to rely on. You believed in them. Perhaps they disappointed you at some point and your belief started to dwindle. But this was inevitable - for they too are human. Anything as mutable as a human has no lasting success as an object of your belief. Just see the faith healers and god-men of our world - they all ended up being fallible or dead. What I’m going to put across to you next will seem uncomfortable and for some, outlandish - but that’s only because it is true and infallible. It is also what I have built my personal belief system around and seen other people successfully do the same. That fact of life, is death.
You must believe in death. It sounds trivial, everyone dies. Everything dwindles, perishes and regenerates. We are only here for a short while and soon that time will be over. The same goes for everything and everyone we love. We all know this and yet we spend so much time energy to ignore this very simple fact. All depression is essentially a fear of life. All anxiety is essentially a fear of death. Anything that induces these two states in us does it from triggering us on a cellular level. Modern society has conditioned us to fight back against it and only leaves us paralysed - because at a primal level, we know that it is inevitable. But what happens when you make this the core of your very belief system? Your circumstances don’t magically change but they become infinitely easier to deal with when you accept this primal belief system. What happens after death? Nobody will ever know and nobody needs to - since once it happens, you won’t be here. But a life lived in awareness of the finiteness of time is bound to be a fulfilling one - regardless of the glory and the pain.
Philosophers and scientists have reached the same conclusion - all things in the universe move towards death and entropy. But perhaps by reflecting on our past, recognizing the impermanence of everything and embracing the inevitability of change and death, we can build a belief system that will give us the power to surf life's waves and have a hell of a time doing so.
