Belief in Reality

“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” - Lewis Carroll

It is my belief that suffering is the inevitable and unavoidable result of the clash between what we think (or believe) reality is (or should be) and what it actually and truly is. This opens up a huge can of worms that philosophers have been arguing over for millennia. I'm just going to focus on the words, and what others have come to accept as their meanings. I leave most of the philosophizing to the philosophers. I thought it would interesting to start with looking at the meaning of belief, and it's related words (those which define the word itself).

belief - mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something.

That leaves me with a whole bunch of words worth looking into a little further. To start with, belief is a noun, which means that in a sense, it is a sort of thing, or object. The "thing" here would be a label describing an action or process. Which is the "mental acceptance of and conviction in".

mental - of or pertaining to the mind

acceptance - the act of assenting or believing

conviction - a fixed or firm belief

The process itself is in relation to the "truth, or "reality.

truth - conformity with fact or reality

valid - producing the desired results

reality -something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent

And for good measure, just to further define reality itself.

fact - knowledge or information based on real occurrences

knowledge - acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition: knowledge of many things.

Generally, a fact is defined as something that is true, something that actually exists, or something that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation. I find it fascinating that it is difficult to distinguish the difference between a belief and reality. Both in actual practice (or reality!) and in a dictionary!! Words are damn important.

So we could say that the process of believing is to strongly agree in your mind with what you want (desire) the world to be, based upon what you have believed up to that point. It helps explain the hard time so many great thinkers have had over the ages.

What gives words their power is what we believe them to mean. And they mean whatever we want them to mean. We can change our thoughts by changing the words that we use to both speak and think. Even better, we can add to this the power of choosing what the words we use actually mean. However, it would help greatly in our communication skills if we actually stick closely to the original meaning. Otherwise we are likely to soon find ourselves (even more) insane.

“All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.” - Felix Frankfurter