©2022 Michael Raven

As mentioned yesterday, I’m prone to thinking hard about my beliefs. For some 35 years now, I’ve been trying to wrap my arms around just what elements of various systems of belief “work” for me, and those that don’t. There is a lot of Eastern thinking that has an outsized role in how I think, from Tao/Dao to Chan to Zen. I hold some of that thinking in the realm of the philosophical branch of my belief systems and they act as a compass for my beliefs, which are separate and apart from my philosophical values. And those philosophical values are just mostly informed by the Eastern thought (I’m going to reduce it to “Tao” or “Zen” moving forward, and interchangeably so; we can argue about my reasons sometime at a later time, if it really bugs you), as I have been known to find value in some Western thinking as well (existentialism has a role, as far as I am concerned, as does absurdism, amongst others). And, while I think I have a decent grasp on those philosophies as they pertain to me, I’ve never seriously sat down and codified my actual belief system.

Over intermittent posts moving forward, I think I might try to rationalize my beliefs “in the open” to see if I can make something cohesive about it. Or, perhaps, it will always be a chaotic mess that only I can grasp.