I wrote the post below today in response to a summary of a book called "5 Spiritual Solutions" . It's not directly EFT related, but a lot of people come to me for EFT help because they are struggling with their own limiting perfectionistic and absolutist thinking. Perfectionism sounds like it would lead to high performance, but often it leads to paralysis so it's really powerful to learn how to keep it in check. I know there's a rule in polite company not to talk about religion or politics. This is because strongly held beliefs clashing at a dinner party can lead to a heated and sometimes unfriendly discussion. But I'm going to dive in anyway because strongly held beliefs can create equally heated unfriendly discussions inside ourselves, which can be good growing opportunities, or destructive inner battles.
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I would guess there are actually more than 5 solutions, but this book is not pretending that these are the only 5 solutions. It seems to address someone like me who has both spiritual and scientific tendencies. I can never fully embrace any particular religion because I can't help but see each one as a collective opinion rather than an absolute truth. However I do value the spirit of religions in general because for the most part they create community, interconnectedness, moral guidance, purposefulness and the very real and important perspective that there is more to life than what meets the eye... and it's bigger than any one of us, or even all of us together.
I can't help but see the validity multiple points of view. It affects every part of my life. I'm constantly studying science and spirituality together as if they are one topic. Even my approach to my career as an illustrator is as an information designer, because my brain likes to look at all aspects of the information I've been asked to illustrate to understand the dynamics of how things work, how they function, how they communicate, what they mean.
I can't help it. If I carry the logic through far enough down the string of reasoning I can't see how anything can be held as absolute truth. Scientific knowledge is limited by the beliefs and biases and technology available to the scientific community, which constantly proves itself wrong about this or that. So inevitably the model we have right now is not absolutely accurate. The same is true of religions. People don't practice their religion or hold sacred the word for word texts exactly they way their ancestors did, so that's constantly evolving too.
The world and the universe is too big and complex for our limited minds and limited powers of perception to fully comprehend in an absolute way. So we live by a constantly growing and shifting set of estimated probabilities about things. We think, "This seems to be the way things work so it must be true" and then we live by it. With enough motivation and apparent validation we will hold very strongly to certain ideas and think of them as absolute truth... even if there's really no way to actually know for certain.
So we have to live on faith. Faith that what seems to be true or seems to work now will mostly continue to be true or continue to work later. Then the world changes some more and we have to adapt our faith some more. But certain things do remain in the pattern. The need for meaning, understanding, purpose, a higher power, connection, community, and moral guidance are always there in people. However they evolve, spiritual practices and religions and science are all vitally important and necessary to us as a species.
At the same time I think it's important to acknowledge our own fallibility. Even the fallibility of our strongly held beliefs. Because in the fervour to defend our strongly held beliefs we can cause a lot of damage to each other and to ourselves and to innocent bystanders. This is why I think it's important to forever learn and grow, so we can all develop the wisdom to live well, in harmony, and realize our best potential as individuals and as a community.
