“Self-exploration is the antidote for the harmful disease known as ego.”
When someone asks you whether you believe in god, it isn’t a philosophical question to think about. Instead, it is about raising a question about our practice of believing. So, inquiring about believing in god is an intellectual practice, not a philosophy. It allows you to charge yourself and question your complacency and self-satisfaction.
We generally treat belief and faith as synonyms, but they differ: faith is based on trust, which ends in the face of doubt, but belief is believed to be true without questioning it. We ask something we believe the most, but the belief itself is unquestioned. What does this confusion of belief and faith do to us? When you say you have faith in god, it can be believed that god exists, but one can have faith without the corresponding belief and vice versa. When we are born, we usually don’t have any religion or faith. It is like we are an open book with blank pages.
All cultures are based on belief, and science is based on doubt. Like scientific inquiry, cultural inquiry should also be based on the curious method. When discussing belief, we must understand who is believing, which means we must understand ourselves. Our journey in this world involves becoming aware of the world around us and within ourselves. But before we know ourselves, we are inscribed by our parents, teachers, society, and worldly education on our blank pages—those pages filled with disputed beliefs turned out to be our solid cultural identities, our own identities. For instance, the belief that the Earth is flat was once widely accepted, but scientific inquiry and evidence have proven it false. The definition of belief is to ask questions to understand ourselves and the world. Still, it makes sense of self-satisfaction that we have only learned about things in the world, and then we start to believe in god without having an inch of faith. We filled our open book with belief in something which was never questioned. We are never given the option to know this world, about god, about creation and about us. We believe this because our society asks us to think about specific cultures and their rituals.
When we believe without knowing, it gives birth to ego. Ego in itself is a contagious disease. When we are born, we have no ego. We are egoless, innocent. We are like a canvas ready to sketch a beautiful painting of knowledge and realisation. We are prepared to witness our garden of earthly delights. We picture it with our own experiences and observations and release it from the perspective of who is seeing. Still, the painting is distorted by the perception of our parents, society, family, school, and university, all of which go on to strengthen the ego. All our education methods, culture, and society give birth to this one disease: the ego. We seem to believe that painting is your own belief, but it is a sketch of society’s beliefs and colours of culture that gradually create a painting of ego.
Our stance should be to gain knowledge of ourselves rather than the belief coming our way. It is not a matter of god or its faith. It’s a liberation from the act of believing itself, a step towards intellectual freedom.
Our journey is not one of unquestioning belief but of seeking knowledge. It’s a path that begins with doubt, not belief. When we believe, we stop questioning, and this stagnation leads to our intellectual growth. However, when we ask, we empower ourselves with the potential for deeper understanding. As we gain this understanding, we become more aware of ourselves, our faith, our god, our culture, and our core beliefs. We then create a painting of self-inquiry and pure awareness, a testament to our intellectual freedom. This freedom is not just a concept but a tangible state of being that allows us to transcend the limitations of our beliefs and embrace the vastness of knowledge and understanding.