Your beliefs define you, and they shouldn’t. Think of your beliefs like a crust between you and reality. They like to call it the veil, but a crust is also a good description of it. The truth has to get through that crust to get to you and reveal itself.
Your belief systems form an impenetrable shell around you. I know this because there are lots of people that I try to talk to, and I want to talk to them on a different level. But before I can do that, I have to work with this crust because if you touch the crust wrong, they attack, which isn’t useful. If you touch it too positively, all you do is reinforce it.
That’s important. Remember these two points.
- If the belief crust is touched wrong the person attacks.
- If it’s touched too positively, all you do is reinforce it.
I am constantly looking for a way to work through the crust and find out how we can communicate underneath it, actual being to being.
In Sufism, one of the ways we use to get through the crust is with love and caring ,and with longing, which can be a very useful way to approach it. If you’re at least longing for the truth, longing for unity, then when your crust gets hit wrong, the longing can stay there.
The goal is to work your way through it, finally knowing that this crust is not necessary.
Until then the crust feels like it defines you, your ego, your false self, but it doesn’t define you. There is a you underneath everything that is completely free of this. Longing is the urge to come out and be the master driving your life, to live your life without the confusion.
Beliefs don’t need to define you; you can actually be fully alive without them.