Sorcery Basics 1: Manipulating One’s Own Beliefs
Beliefs are filters. A belief is like an item of clothing, you can put it on and take it off. Put on a belief and that is how the world will look, take it off and the world will change. A sorcerer uses beliefs as tools, putting them on and taking them off at will, allowing them to see reality through different lenses, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Non-sorcerers think that because the belief makes the world look a certain way, it must therefore be true. This is a mistake. They are seeing reality filtered through the belief. For example, if you wear yellow-tinted glasses, everything is yellow.
At first you might fear that you need beliefs to operate, that without them you would be unable to navigate in the world. But it’s not true. It’s safe to take beliefs off and to put them on again. It’s safe to try on beliefs that you know are wrong, or make you look bad. Trying on a belief is not permanent, and believing something you don’t like doesn’t make it true.
It is very important to be able to see the world without filters, but as long as you understand that a belief is only a filter, the belief can add value. A belief is a model from which we can make predictions. For example, you can see an apple falling from a tree lands on the ground, and you can conclude that there is a force pulling the apple down, and predict it will happen to other objects. That’s useful. It helps you to understand. But the belief is not reality, it’s an idea — reality is not an idea, reality is shape and color, movement and feeling and smell.
A belief can never be true. Never. A belief is not even the same thing as a truth. To think that a belief is true is like thinking that a clock is time. To look for a true belief is like looking for tinted glasses without a tint. Or a t-shirt that makes you naked. It’s like thinking that the TV guide is the television program.
The reason a belief can never be true is that by it’s nature the belief is a heuristic that is meant to predict the future or infer a relationship, and to do so without using much energy. A belief that fully explained the entire universe would therefore be exactly as complicated as the entire universe, and in that sense the entire universe is the belief in the universe. A belief then is a manageably small set of rules, definitions, calculations etc. not unlike a computer program that takes your raw sensory input and outputs meanings and predictions for what might happen next or which action you might want to take.
Limiting beliefs have self-defense mechanisms
The false self enforces suppressive beliefs. Identity is essentially a belief about oneself. As long as an individual believes they are the false self, they will have extreme difficulty removing those beliefs. If they did so they would see the false self for what it really is.
Someone who identifies with their beliefs (with their false self) has great difficulty removing them. They cannot see the belief because they think they are it, like refusing to remove your glasses because you’re certain that it’s part of your face. Hence why it is usually necessary for someone else to destroy your beliefs for you.
Fear, shame and judgement are used as controlling mechanisms. You may notice resistance if you attempt to take off the beliefs. It is within your power to do so but most people are seemingly unable to do it because they are too scared of being judged or losing their identity.
Common defenses include:
Thinking that the belief is the only thing keeping one morally good. In this case one believes that they must control themselves (which is to accept the suppressive belief) because if the evil in them were not controlled, they would become a monster. This belief is often seen projected onto boys by damaged mothers, although it has many other forms too. To break this requires trusting oneself. This can be a leap of faith to some extent, because the part of the self that has been locked away for being potentially dangerous tends look more and more hideous the more it is mistreated and unfairly accused. Only by “kissing the frog”, i.e. love and acceptance of the entire self, does this part reintegrate.
Fear of judgement, mockery and ostracization for removing the belief is a standard. For example, there is a taboo against anyone who dares to not accept the dogma of the false reality: ‘Science’ as the authority and gatekeeper of truth, and the insignificance of Earth as a tiny rock orbiting one of trillions of suns in a mostly vast and empty (i.e. dead) universe. To suggest science and space should not be accepted is to become free game for mockery and harassment. It’s reputation suicide. These are the biggest taboos. To overcome this requires courage. It’s not courage to disbelieve — a belief is just a belief, it’s not serious. The courage is daring to feel the judgement and choose to believe in yourself above that which you’ve been taught to believe.
Another trick is a belief that sells some hidden advantage. These tend to be difficult to detect. One example is believing you are powerless because being a victim makes you feel righteous. Another example is believing you cannot change because you want to avoid the effort that comes from taking responsibility for your self. These suppressive beliefs are detected and defeated by daring trying on the opposing belief and being okay seeing yourself in a bad light.
To see the true reality, remove all belief
To see the truth one needs to remove all beliefs. Do not believe anything at all. Don’t fall into the trap of attempting to deny the belief or believing the opposite. Taking off a belief means putting it out of your mind, it does not mean challenging the belief with another belief.
All means all. All beliefs. All of them. No humans. No Earth. No science. No space. No politics. No morals. No judgements. No conspiracies. No identity. No Sorcery. No beliefs.
The true reality is what you see without any beliefs filtering your reality. It’s initially disconcerting because without any filter there is no interpretation and our analytical mind cannot actively classify what we are seeing. However, if you are willing to embrace the state of not-knowing, a deeper form of knowing emerges. I don’t mean to sound mystical, I mean quite literally that if you just accept that you don’t know anything and look without analyzing, you‘ll find you intuitively understand it and don’t need to interpret it.
However, seeing the true reality is only one side of the coin. By seeing the true reality in addition to viewing many different opposing beliefs, you can begin to get a feeling for how the many interpretations and perspectives all revolve around and point to a deeper truth. A perfect analogy is found in the parable of the blind men and the elephant.
A belief that neither serves you, nor stands up to comparison against the true reality, is both useless and a lie. It’s only use is to see how your enemy thinks.
Note that beliefs, being models, are necessary for communication. So everything learned from another is a belief, including everything that I am saying. You should learn to compare beliefs you’ve taken from another person against the true reality to see how well they represent it. Never marry a belief. Even a belief that appears to be true will eventually fail you as the true reality itself changes over time and place.
Meta beliefs
The belief I am teaching here, the belief of beliefs, is a meta-belief. It’s like an operating system that can simulate other operating systems inside of it.
The meta-belief is related to the concept of shapeshifting, which is an important ability especially in the spirit world. To learn shapeshifting you will need to be able to change your belief in yourself at will, whilst simultaneously holding the meta-belief in your true self. I will address meta-beliefs and shapeshifting in more detail in future articles.
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