Beliefs Are Building Blocks

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, words have always played. If you have his name or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will.

So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

William James expressed those thoughts in his 1906 essay, What Pragmatism Means. The quest to find an answer to unknown aspects of the self rests in giving them a name based on our systematic value system. Once a spiritual belief is acknowledged by name, and then incorporated into physical life in some way, part of the riddle of life is solved.

Names give things character. Nothing important in human terms is unnamed; it must have a moniker to be respected and understood. The name may be filled with gray matter and fabricated truths, but name associations are accepted as fact. We create new beliefs and they conform to accepted names and then we experience them through our ideas and feelings. Feelings are a natural part of our reality. They are an extremely powerful form energy. Feelings have an impact on every phase of our reality, and that includes the weather.

A mind boggling as well as mind stimulating element of the self dances through linear time and dresses itself in the costume of the age. This aspect of the self opens cracks in our belief structure thorough physical experiences, and we expand our consciousness. Our beliefs are building blocks. We create them through metaphysical as well as objective stimulation.