Here’s a curious thing about belief. What you believe in can be anything. It doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t need an externally verifiable point of reference, it doesn’t need to be based in anyone else’s reality at all. This, like so much in the human experience, is a dichotomy. It allows great freedom but it also requires responsibility to yourself and to others around you.

Have you ever thought that as children of the post Enlightenment age we are conditioned to place reason on a pedestal but that life is not actually reasonable at all? Belief is like this, it does not necessarily need to make sense, has no absolutes to conform to, in fact it can be anything.

I once met a man, some twenty five years ago, in a rare records shop. This was in the days of vinyl and I had been a DJ, it was an old haunt of mine, ask any aficionado of vinyl and they will tell you about the collectibility of different pressings, labels, covers and so on. I got to talking with this man about the nature of existence and each thing I told him he said that he knew already. There was something strange about him and our conversation got onto the Baha’i faith, I had some Persian friends who had fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution following religious persecution because of their Baha’i faith. He claimed to know all about this too. I asked him how he knew so much and he told me, without irony, that he was God and had created everything.

I wont go into the exasperating detail of our conversation but I thought that the only way to help this deluded character was to immerse him in the natural worlds and try to talk there. A friend and I bundled him into the bright orange VW Beetle we were in at the time and drove him to a park. It was spring and the trees and plants were in bud, some of them just starting to break out. I asked him if he had made all of this and he replied that of course he had. I asked him by what principles the whole worked and what function it was created to fulfil, he couldn’t answer that but said that it didn’t matter because he was God. I asked him if he had created me and placed a question in my mind that he couldn’t answer and he said of course he had.

I became increasingly concerned for this man’s state of mind, he was clearly in a delusional condition and I tried my best to reach out to him and show him that whatever he imagined the case to be he was not God, the Creator and motivating idea behind what we were all a part of. We walked and talked, drank tea in the tea rooms and his mire became all the more entangled. I realised I could not help him and that he did not want to be helped because his belief was, at that stage, overpowering.

We took him back into town, dropped him off at the record shop and wished him well. I have no idea what became of him or what he made of our conversation. I know that it chilled me because I had learned that external reference points are fundamental requirements as we navigate a path through our lives. Whether they be in the form of mentors, guides, friends, companions or the natural worlds it is contact with agencies beyond ourselves and our own minds that validates our existence. His belief was unfounded in anything other than what his own mind had produced or manufactured, he clearly had no criterion for measuring his beliefs with.

I do not doubt that at that time he believed totally that he was God. Nothing anyone else could say or do would convince him otherwise and this is the warning. Belief is a powerful commodity, something that we all trade in, we invest our belief in certain things and hope for the best. For anyone who seeks a greater return from their investment those belief systems have to be sound. The ramblings of dictators, self-serving shysters, hype merchants or spin doctors will not do it.

The oldest man to have served in the trenches of the Great War died in England at the age of 111, Harry Patch. He was persuaded to speak about his experiences when he reached 100 and condemned all war as folly and a waste of precious life. Millions of young men sent to their deaths on the whim of some General’s strategy dreamed up in a comfortable headquarters. Many of them, no doubt, believed they were serving a greater good in paying the ultimate price. We have so much to learn about being human. It starts with belief, believing in a cohesive model of the Universe that is benign and whose trace can be observed throughout human life.

This is one of your greatest gifts, the ability to choose. To believe in something that is connected to a greater truth than some temporary state of affairs that drives the issues of the day, keeps the media satisfied and editors happy that they’ve filled their newspapers or magazines or kept the rolling news rolling.

Your ability to choose is defined by what information you are exposed to, by the ways you have been shown to assimilate and arrange that information and extract meaning from it. This in itself is defined by the quality of that which teaches, your educators, mentors, role models and so on. A phalanx of supporting and supportive influences whose purpose is to afford you the best possible circumstance in which to grow and develop.

This is a little more on intelligence. Doing it mindfully, to paraphrase that old legal term, with development aforethought.