Who shapes your beliefs?
Do you follow your parents’ beliefs or are your beliefs a protest against theirs?
Are your beliefs heartfelt or based on external evidence?
Do you use your beliefs as a tool or as a weapon?
How sure are you of what you believe? Are you open to change? Are you committed to convincing others that your beliefs are correct?
Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions?
Are you comfortable having a belief no-one else shares?
Who are you?
You were brought up by your parents or one of them, or by someone else. These people moulded your behaviour, your responses, your likes and dislikes, your prejudices. You probably had teachers for years. To what extent did their attitudes influence you?
Is it possible that you see the world the way you want it to be? What about aspects of the world about which you can have no direct perception; things such as the atoms and molecules you are made of?
You only know of this level of reality because other people tell you it exists. You have no direct experience of it. You can learn through studying or reading or listening to people, that there are processes going on in your body that change the food you eat into a different form through the breaking up and reorganising of molecules. Whether you know it or not, such things on and are the basis for life.
Who do you think you are?
Who is the you able to contemplate and respond to these questions? Is it separate from your mind? Does it dwell in your mind? If your mind is you, how do you relate to your feelings and emotions?
Who do you think you are?
Descartes is often quoted for his famous “I think, therefore I am”. Is it the thinking that creates me? Is the fact that I think, proof of my existence? Interesting questions.
The Book of Lies
Mary Horlock
Text Publishing 2011
ISBN: 9781921758102
$32.95
288 pp
Mary Horlock twists her yarns expertly into the strands that form the lay of rope that winds its way through a difficult, interconnected past and present on the Island of Guernsey. She tackles aspects of the Nazi occupation in the Second World War and the struggles of a teenage girl more than forty years later. Horlock uses her extensive and intimate knowledge of the island and its people, along with an understanding of teenage angst and imagination, to give us an inspired tale of family frictions, loyalties, courage, deception and betrayal, loss, love and loneliness.
Did you manage to solve the puzzle in the last post? Did you have to change your thinking to solve it? If you did not manage to solve it and you now look at the solution presented above, can you discover something in your thinking that stopped you? Did you find an entirely different solution?
Devil in the Milk
Keith Woodford
Craig Potton Publishing
2007 (updated 2010)
ISBN: 9781877333705
NZ$34.99
257 pp, including index
Most people in Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe drink cow’s milk, some in large quantities and many from an early age. What Prof Woodford writes about in this book should therefore be of concern to hundreds of millions of people. It is a story of research, business, government and vested interests. Those whose interests seem to be least considered in the way milk is presented to us are the consumers of the milk.
Is the education we offer our young people equipping them for a fulfilling life? There is too much knowledge available to impart it all. How do those who set the curriculum choose what should be taught? The pool of knowledge is growing exponentially; however, the pool of useful questions is much more manageable.
There are some very worrying indications that most people have given up thinking. Andy Bilchbaum and Mike Bonanno, who some years ago made up ‘the Yes Men’1, gave addresses to august bodies, including the WTO (World Trade Organisation). In their presentations they made outrageous suggestions and claims, and those in the audience responded with nodding heads and even acclaim. No-one in the audience was thinking – no-one asked questions or challenged the impersonators.