At a few points in my life, I have felt a desire to publicly enumerate my current beliefs. I'm not sure exactly why. It's probably in large part due to the importance "belief" played in my early Christian religious upbringing. There was always the notion that your belief in God and in Christ as the Son of God having an important role in your salvation. Of even greater importance was the equally vague concept of "accepting Jesus as your personal savior." Such acceptance, the cosmic "opt-in" of salvation, is presumably contingent upon one's belief in Jesus as the Son of God so it's no wonder that belief was so heavily emphasized.

But later, after I had denounced Christianity, I began to feel that our beliefs have no importance whatsoever in the cosmic scheme of things: whether you believe in electricity or not, the lights come on when you flip the switch. Why should this be any less true for the spiritual universe than the physical universe? By contrast, there is the notion, espoused by one of my teachers and by lots of other people whom I respect, that the world is simply what we believe it to be, and that there are infinitely many ways to subjectively experience the same Absolute Reality. In this view, our experience is Reality constrained by our beliefs.

When I challenged my teacher with the light-switch metaphor, she asked if I could stop believing in electricity. In truth, I guess I can't. Beliefs, she said, are very difficult to change. We believe in the solidity of the earth below our feet. We believe in gravity. We believe in things that are so fundamental to our experience that changing them shakes the very foundations of our metaphysical being. Anything less than this is not a belief: it is an opinion. We don't "believe" in the existence of God, or in evolution, or in cosmic inflation so much as we "think" that these things are so.

Of course, the question of where the "true beliefs" emerge from if not sensory experience of absolute reality is still in play. We could turn right around and argue that we all believe in electricity because it's REAL, damn it, and all of this crap about "believing our world into being" is just idle speculation with no practical application.

But that's not the point of this article. The point of this article is for me to selfishly expound upon my current "beliefs," or rather, my current opinions. You will find nothing here that is fundamental to my experience. Take it for a given that I believe in the earth, gravity and electricity, just like you.

So that said, my opinions really haven't changed very much over the past twenty years. I guess I could say that I have refined them.

• There is no external God. The universe is God. I mostly call myself an atheist. When I say "the universe is God," I don't mean that the universe is necessarily sentient or compassionate, only that it is intelligent in a very fundamental sense of the term, self-manifesting, and self-aware insomuch as it contains entities that are capable of perceiving it.

• There is no soul. I see no reason to believe that there is anything more to the mind than that which is manifest by the brain.

• We're all part of the same thing. The concept of a separate self is an illusion created by the mind. The universe doesn't know where you end and where I begin.

• Be excellent to one another. Again, we're all part of the same thing. From the greater perspective, there is no "your suffering" or "my suffering" or "your gain" or "my gain." There is simply suffering and gain, and the enlightened mind will try to minimize suffering and maximize gain all around, not just for himself.

• People are at their best when they are free. Utopia can not be forced on us, we have to get there by ourselves. The best way for us to arrive at a society where everyone is happy is to simply allow each of us to strive for our own happiness and create the means for us to resolve the disputes that arise between us in our mutual pusuits.

These ideas, in a nutshell, form the core of my ideology. If you were to categorize me, you might call me an "anarcho-buddhist-scientist."

I don't try to promote these ideas: I don't really care whether other people agree with them or not. I do care about mutual respect: your ideology becomes unacceptable to me when it constrains the actions of others. So, I guess I'd like to promote the latter two ideas: that we be excellent to one another, and that we are at our best when free.

So that's my little bit of useless drivel for the month. Hope you've enjoyed reading it.