A fascinating and challenging book that encourages us to dare to doubt, because it is the questioning that makes us conscious. Understanding how our beliefs shape and limit our experience of life is absolutely essential right now, because we need to change the way we think if we are to solve the myriad personal and social problems we face today. This perceptive book points the way forward.
Timothy Freke, author of The Laughing Jesus, Lucid Living, and How Long Is Now?
Rahasya’s detailed exploration of “belief” and the various ways in which it keeps us locked in destructive modes of thinking and experiencing life is a wonderful addition to the modern spiritual library. Reading the book itself is an interesting exercise in watching the way “beliefs” operate in our lives. He explores a wide range of themes from an even wider collection of viewpoints. As the Buddha said, “Find out for yourself what is true.
Bill Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching (as seen on Oprah’s Book Club)
Why do we believe what we believe? Poe asks this critical question at a very critical time in history and delves deeply into a mind-boggling examination of the neurology of belief and the sociological consequences and implications for our future. The book covers the spiritual, scientific, and psychological origins of belief, including the influence of the world’s great religions, with input from scientists, researchers, and spiritual leaders on how we can change those beliefs to empower ourselves, humanity, and the planet. The author devotes ample time to the neuroscience behind belief and comes to the stunning realization that our beliefs do indeed affect our brains, often with negative results. Poe’s book is a comprehensive and enlightening look at what we have come to believe, personally and collectively, and why we must challenge the paradigms that no longer serve us.
Marie D. Jones, author of 2013: End of Days or A New Beginning?—Envisioning the World After the Events of 2012
We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know things they do not know. This is certainly a future worth fighting for. It may be the only future compatible with our long-term survival as a species. But the only path between now and then, that I can see, is for us to be rigorously honest in the present. It seems to me that intellectual honesty is now, and will always be, deeper and more durable, and more easily spread, than “atheism.”
Sam Harris, author of Letters to a Christian Nation and End of Faith
How do you get out of a belief system? First you have to destruct the belief system. Traditionally, the teacher is supposed to remove your ignorance. But when you remove ignorance, you start with removing what is causing the ignorance, which is your belief system. So the teacher’s job indeed is to first deconstruct your belief system. And then to give you inspiration so you’ll go out to create a path to discover what is spirit, what is beauty, what is love, because these things nobody can teach you. So teaching really should be a demolition job.
Amit Goswami
Fundamentalism, in and of itself, is benign and can be personally beneficial, but the anger and prejudice generated by extreme beliefs can permanently damage your brain.
Dr. Andrew Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain
The first thing we need to do is realize that some of our old beliefs are dysfunctional and no longer work, if indeed they ever did. If the desire to do that isn’t there, there’s nothing to do.
Fred Alan Wolf, author of Taking the Quantum Leap
The difficulty in today’s world is our technology and science has outrun our theological advances. The reason for that is in technology and science, we have had the courage to ask the single question that theology has been afraid to ask, Is it possible that there’s something I don’t know about this, the knowing of which would change everything?
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What if everything we thought about God up to this point was not necessarily true? Tomorrow’s God is what emerges from our willingness to question our prior assumption.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God
What the brain likes to do is to simply replace old ideas or beliefs with new ones.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, author of Evolve Your Brain
I see the main problem as a spiritual one, not a resource problem, or a problem with this or that government, but a larger problem centered around human beliefs, the troublesome elements founded in our mythology. Our problematic mythology is collapsing all around us. It is a mythology that is predatory.
Albert Villoldo, Ph.D.