Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. I remember it like it was yesterday; it was a foggy Saturday morning in San Francisco, December 1st, 1990. My parents and sister were out of the house and I was reading alone at the kitchen table. Around 10 o'clock, I noticed the family across the street
drive away in their blue Jeep. The mom, dad, and two daughter team returned home just a couple of hours later, but now they had a dead tree tied to the roof of their car. Well, the tree wasn't exactly dead as in brown without any leaves on it or anything like that, it was actually very green and lush, but the tree's trunk had been sawed off,
so there was no way to replant or revive it. Stranger still, the neighbors didn't carry the tree through the side gate to the backyard, where I expected a five-foot tree to go, they hauled it up the stairs and into the living room. They had opened the curtains and positioned the tree by the window for everyone to see. What in the world
were they doing? Mesmerized, I put the book down and watched as they proceeded to wrap the tree with string lights and crown it with what looked like a Barbie doll at the very top. Like some perfectly timed prank, our next-door neighbors pulled into their driveway with an identical tree in the back of their truck. And then a station wagon drove past
our house with a similar tree sticking out the back. I had never heard about Christmas before, because five months prior to this phenomenon, my family and I immigrated to the United States from Israel, where I was born and raised until my early teens.
It wouldn't be fair to say that I was raised Jewish, however. My family never kept kosher, which is a long-standing Jewish practice that outlaws the simultaneous consumption of dairy and meat, for example, as well as prohibiting certain seafood dishes, pork, and a few other technicalities, nor did we ever celebrate any of the Jewish holidays, or any holiday, for that matter. We only went to the synagogue once a year, and even that
was more of a social tradition than a devotional one. And although I had studied the Old Testament at school because it was as mandatory as geography and math, it was more of a history class than a cultural one, except we didn't learn about any other religions. According to Jewish law, you see, Judaism is a religion that is assigned to you at birth. If your mother is Jewish then you are too whether you ever acknowledge it or not.
We never discussed God at home. And the one time I asked my dad about the questionable Bible stories that I had learned at school, he simply told me not to take them too seriously. But one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the States, was that people in America were significantly more in touch with their
religion than anyone I'd ever met in Israel. The extended family I met in California, seemed to cling to their Judaism as something that united them, while I was more curious in exploring the diversity around me, especially after the Christmas tree incident. There were many new religions for me to discover and very little of what
I initially witnessed made any sense at all. It turns out Christmas trees have nothing to do with Christ, and although Easter is about Jesus's resurrection, the holiday focuses mainly on the Easter Bunny, who only appears cute and cuddly, but apparently judges children as either good or disobedient. There was so much to learn. I started thinking about my own beliefs and philosophies; where and how they had
originated, and whether they had any merit or validity? It became clear that I had somehow constructed my own belief system, but I had never taken the time to question it. As it turns out, some of my own beliefs don't even make sense. I still experience a moment of trepidation whenever I accidentally drop the salt shaker at a restaurant or I cross a black cat on the street. Am I forever doomed or will tossing some salt
over my left shoulder fix everything? We've all been raised to believe more superstitions than we realize. And over the years, we have either written them off as nothing more than folklore, or we actually accept them as true, and then call them beliefs, not superstitions.
As children, we rarely demand any sort of evidence for anything we're told. For example, I remember teachers telling me that if anyone were to step over me while I sat on the floor, it would forever stunt my growth, unless, of course, they immediately stepped
back the way they came. This superstition was the teachers' seemingly innocent effort to prevent anyone from tripping over the students who sat in the hallways with their legs stretched out, but I still question their methods of preying on our vulnerability and gullibility. We not only obediently sat with our legs crossed after that, but we also fervently warned all the other students of the terrible fate awaiting them if they weren't
careful to do the same. The concept of scaring people into compliance is nothing new, of course, it's biblical. But scare tactics greatly underestimate our reasoning intelligence. As Albert Einstein surmised: If people are only good because they fear punishment or hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. And so we get older, but the superstitions don't stop. A four-leaf clover is a sign of good luck, just like a rabbit's foot or a horseshoe, but heaven forbid we open
an umbrella indoors or walk under a ladder, right? If you hear ringing in your left ear, it's apparently because someone is speaking ill of you, whereas the opposite is true with the right. And if your palm itches, it supposedly means you will receive a large sum of money from an unexpected source. So, go ahead: scratch that palm just in case,
it's no different than knocking on wood to avoid bad luck. At some point, however, we stop believing that a watermelon would actually grow in our stomachs if we were to accidentally swallow a seed, just like we stopped believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. Yet 85% of skyscrapers still skip the 13th floor, and we continue
to wish on shooting stars and birthday candles. By setting out to understand what people believe, why we believe what we do, and how much of what we believe is actually true, I've learned that all of our truths, individual or collective, depend on time, place, and circumstance. The black cat, for instance, is a symbol of prosperity and good luck in Scotland and Japan, but it's a symbol of misfortune and even death in most
of European and Western cultures. What is true for one person isn't necessarily true for another. But what if the cat is just a cat, neither good nor evil, and we, on the other hand, are compulsive, meaning-making machines who assign reason to whatever we don't understand? My conclusion is that the only thing that makes something true
is our choice to believe that it is. Some may argue that things like gravity are true whether we choose to believe in them or not, but even gravity is subject to time, place, and circumstance. Travel far enough away from the center of the Earth or dive into water, and the effects of gravity start to change. We search for answers, come up with theories, and even make up stories, all in an effort to explain the unexplainable.
We are so afraid of not knowing the truth, in fact, that we prefer believing a lie rather than living with the discomfort of the unknown. I actually rejoice in the beauty of mystery because I've discovered that a great calm and inner peace can be derived from letting go of our compulsive need to know. I don't consider myself a skeptic, nor do I claim that the world is full of lies. On the contrary, I believe the world is full of truths.
Whether it's astrology, romance, destiny, Christ, Muhammad, Judaism, anarchy, heaven, or any other story or theory that we've ever heard, what makes them true is our choice to believe that they are, and for the most part, that's OK. Everything is a belief system, whether it's ancient or new, dogmatic or otherwise. Beliefs are based on personal
choices and experiences often founded on subjective feelings. It is therefore inevitable that the exact opposite of what each of us knows to be true, is equally true for somebody else, somewhere else, depending on their time, place, or circumstance. Having faith, however, is not about knowing anything with absolute certainty, but about
being okay, even relieved, that some things cannot be known. When we didn't know what caused thunder and lightning, for example, we believe that God was expressing his anger and disapproval, but that's not faith, that's scapegoating. We can't know why certain things occur, but faith in God acknowledges that God works in mysterious ways for reasons that are far beyond our comprehension. This does not necessarily translate to believing in organized religion, the Bible, or least of all the, church.
I use the word God, by the way, to encompass all variations of mystery, be it the universe, higher power, Mother Nature, Father Time, energy, et cetera. My definition of God is a little unique, as it doesn't conjure a white man in the sky who dispenses blessings for good behavior and harsh judgments to condemn the bad. That's because
I don't believe God does that, religion does. And as Anne Lamott cleverly put it, You can safely assume you've created God in your own image if it turns out that your God hates the same people you do. Our sensitive egos turn personal opinions into what
we often mistakenly call facts, but they aren't factual at all, just comforting. And that's where mindful discretion is imperative to distinguish between beliefs that the ego clings to for validation, and unbiased observations that focus on what is really going on, inconvenient and uncomfortable as they may be. If we're lucky, we find something to believe in that contributes to our overall happiness, health, peace of mind, and a sense
of purpose. It doesn't matter whether we experience a deep connection with a higher power through prayer, meditation, nature, service, congregation, song, silence, movement, art, illness, or even a near-death incident, what matters is that we remember our moment of truth, unique to us as it may be, that we live in line with our core values, whatever they may be, and that we allow others to explore and experience the divine in whatever form resonates with them the most, even if it's completely
different from our own, because different isn't wrong. While I think having a belief system can be beneficial, it can be dangerous to believe in something solely because we have heard it repeated a million times, or worse yet, because we've repeated it to ourselves over the course of many years. But that's the wonderful news about re-evaluating our belief system: we can embrace a new truth even after decades
of believing the opposite. Or, of course, we can choose to stay stuck. Either way, we have to live with the consequences.