Looking at FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS

When I began this blog a little over a month ago my theme was, “Beliefs which were not put into our heads by other people.” My personal list of such beliefs was short, and I’ve exhausted it unless I think of some more. Now I find myself wishing that this were a dialogue instead of a monologue. I think of a lot more questions than I do answers.

But . . . as I write this I realize that I’m falling back once more on the idea that other people have the answers, that if I could just talk to the right people I would find out what the Source, consciousness, life and life after life, and all the weirdness of the universe is about.

In a way that is a productive thought: If I have attained a few beliefs and realizations on my own, there must be other people who have independently attained some valid self-originated beliefs which go beyond mine. In fact it would be amazing if there were not people whose independently originated insights greatly outnumber my own.

While the thought of looking to others for their direct and original knowledge is productive, it also has its dangers. For one thing, if an individual’s directly intuited knowledge contradicts another’s, there is probably no proof (other than evidence of insanity) as to who is right and who is wrong. (I would say, for example, that the author of the biblical book of “Revelation” was a raving lunatic, and yet his craziness is still providing fodder for sermons and movies and television documentaries.) For another thing – illustrated by “Revelation” and elsewhere – relying on other people’s presumed direct inspiration from God has produced the very “holy books” and “scriptures” which muddle our heads with second-hand nonsense when were are young. Right in this one paragraph we have the recipe for religious wars.

In spite of the hazards of looking to others for truths, I continue to wish that this blog were a dialogue among individuals, restricted to things they learned which did not come from other people.

I can’t remember ever hearing of such a dialogue. If we watch television or listen to radio or read “news and opinion”, we are constantly assailed with reports and comments by one set of people about what another set of people has done, said, or written.

In fact I might have listed among my “independent insights” the one which suddenly came to me one day: Humans are incredibly interested in humans.

Most people are almost constantly preoccupied with what other people are doing. Think about it. Analyze what your news and entertainment providers are giving you in an unending stream of words and images, and it is really amazing. You don’t even need to look that far: Just listen to what is said at lunch, around the water cooler, over coffee, and on the telephone. People are endlessly interested in people, and the shallower they are as thinkers, the more other people’s doings fill their lives.

To round this post out with some semblance of a unified topic, I’ll say that it is sad that for my other blog, VIEW FROM THE MOON -- in which I look at world events and dwell on injustice, hypocrisy, and in particular lies by omission – I’m never at a loss for a subject. In fact each morning I have to choose among competing topics for VIEW FROM THE MOON. But for FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS I often sit looking out the window and wishing something would come to me. What does this tell us about the world – or is it just about me? All the more reason I wish this were a dialogue.

Changing Fashions in Belief

I began FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS with emphasis on distinguishing beliefs we acquired through our intuition or other immediate experience from those we learned from other people. I think that if most of us eliminated all of our beliefs which we could trace to another person’s mind there would be very few beliefs left.

Would you think that the world was flat, or that the Earth moved around the sun, unless someone had told you otherwise?

Would you think that democracy was the greatest form of government if you hadn’t been taught that it was? If you had been taught from kindergarten through college that an absolute monarchy is the finest and heaven-blessed form of government, what are the odds you would believe otherwise? If you were a happy and prosperous Italian under Mussolini, or a working person enjoying new opportunities and prosperity under Hitler, might you not think that Fascism or National Socialism was the ideal political philosophy? If you feel otherwise now, why is that?

What if you’d been born in the ancient world, where it was universally believed that slavery was a normal and proper institution? Would you automatically have condemned slavery as you probably do now?

Would you “believe in” Jesus or Mohammed or Jehovah or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or Mormonism unless someone had taught you what to believe? Even when people change their religious beliefs they usually go from one “teaching” to another, do they not?

In science -- in physics and astronomy and geology - there are proofs available which help enable us to evaluate what is true and untrue . . . but what about religious, social, and political beliefs? What constitutes “acceptable” social, moral, racial, and sexual views has changed radically just in my lifetime within the United States. And you can multiply that by all the countries in the world, where a political essay which might win you a prize today in China or Russia would have resulted in your imprisonment not many years ago. American university presidents and college professors have been forced out of their positions in recent years for saying things which would have been considered bedrock fact in the 1940’s and 1950’s. They are not in trouble because what they say is contradicted by fact, but because they are going up against the latest fad in arbitrary preferences.

That is the most fascinating thing about all this: Virtually none of the old beliefs (say those dating from 1920-1960) have been contradicted, much less disproved by new evidence. Formerly acceptable and respectable beliefs – taught in universities, promulgated by national governments, regarded by the average person as normal and proper – on racial differences, segregation, eugenics, immigration, sexual behavior, sexual differences, sexual roles, and mores generally, have changed drastically since 1900 not because they have been “disproved” but because they have been “disapproved”. Indeed, genetics and intelligence testing and other areas of research have probably bolstered and affirmed “outmoded” beliefs more than torn them down.

What has changed is not what is true, but what is fashionable to believe.

For that reason among many others there is a welcome feeling of security in knowing something because you have experienced it yourself, as contrasted with “knowing” something you have been told by other people, whether in books, classrooms, sermons, newspapers, television shows, movies, or politically correct lunchtime chats among colleagues.