Sunday Sermon [Beliefs]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Buried under the conservative hysterics surrounding President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the little story of three Americans who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. They received the award for discovering the existence of an enzyme, telomerase, and the role it plays in repairing damaged DNA strands (actually something quite important for the future of medical treatments for genetic diseases and many cancers).

Yet one of the winners, Elizabeth Blackburn, wasn’t good enough for our last President George Bush, because he fired her from the Federal government's Council on Bioethics. Why? Because she refused to swallow the GOP Kool Aid on stem cell research and that made her persona non grata to the Bush and the Republican Party’s faith-based war on science. Another Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, wrote an excellent piece in the Times on the disinvestment of education and its consequences.

The two stories are connected in that as a nation we once revolutionized public education, leading to an enlightened democracy. Today, we cut school budgets while increasing budgets for prisons and fire Nobel-caliber scientists from government positions.

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-=[ Beliefs ]=-

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows

-- Nisargadatta Maharaj

Your state of mind and your understanding of what contains depends on what you believe about your mind. Whatever those beliefs may be, they are the filters and premises that will determine what you will accept into your mind. When you believe something, you have made it true -- for you.

At the same time, what you believe acts as a limitation of what you will accept into your mind.

There is no such thing as a neutral belief. Every belief has the power to dictate each decision you make. For what is a decision but a conclusion based on everything you believe? And what are beliefs but answers to life’s questions? And what value do our beliefs hold if we have forgotten the questions they were designed to answer?

It is this recognition that you do not understand that is the preparation for the undoing of your false beliefs. The truth, my friends, will correct the errors in your mind. Or, as my friend liked to say, “Free your mind, your ass will follow.”

Love,

Eddie