Visionary Heart Alchemy

It is a fairly common occurrence to see people become dogmatic about having no dogma, being against dogma or being nondogmatic. Often this is accompanied by judgments about those they perceive as having dogmas or the dogmas they think they hold. They have intolerance for dogma. These are common signs that having no dogma, or being against dogma, has become a dogmatic fixation and are indication of lack of correct understanding of the Principles of Two Truths.

Part of this error is usually the mistaking “dogma” as meaning the belief, tenants and/or postulates someone holds as functional truths rather then the dogmatic fixation on those functional truths. It is an understandable mistake as both kinds of meaning are represented in the dictionary and many conventional religions (especially the Jerusalem Three-Judaism, Christianity and Islam) present their relative truths as Absolute Truth. However, beliefs, postulates, etc are part of the skillful means of interacting with relative reality. Whether they be drawn from the application of some spiritual system, personal experience, or agreement of convention everyone (except, perhaps, a completely enlightened beings) makes use of tenants that they hold about reality. I invite anyone who thinks they are beyond all beliefs to send me all of the money they have because the value of that money is entirely dependent of people’s belief in it. World War II could be said to have been caused in large part due to the collapse of belief in the value German currency by the world after World War I. A barrel full of the stuff might have gotten you a loaf of bread.

Everybody hold beliefs about reality that they have not personally verified. Take the idea of the Earth being round. Only Astronauts have direct sensory verification of this idea. Airplane pilots/navigators and ship captains who have navigated routes from enough points can pretty reliably infer the spherical shape of the world. Someone with enough knowledge of individually verifiable things such as known laws of physics, direct astronomical observation and the like, can assert that the earth being round functions to explain why a lot of things occur as they do, however how many of the people who believe the world is round fit it any of these categories. It is only a small percentage.

We all believe things that we have not personally verified. This is a functional necessity and only becomes a problem when we dogmatize our beliefs or when the beliefs are dysfunctional. To think all beliefs are bad is itself a belief. While ultimate freedom might be a state of freedom from all beliefs there is no way to conceptually contrive this state. If you have any concepts including concepts about beliefs you are not free of beliefs. The relative approximation of this ultimate freedom that both reflects and leads to that freedom is dissolving the dogmatic fixation on the beliefs and other relative truths. This allows them to be continually revised or abandon in favor of new insight and revelation in the most functional way within ones developmental process. Dogmatizing a position of no dogma can seriously hinder this because it can be very hard to recognize and it can hinder access to a number of powerfully functional skillful means.

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