My Beliefs:
First and fore most the only belief that stands out in my mind at this moment is my belief in love. One most have love in their life and I believe in being with the one I have love for. Love is wanting to be with that person, show them affection and kindness, wanting to live with them and for them but yet it is more than words can describe.
For myself, I believe I do have a path. We all have a path we follow knowingly or not. This path touches on every part of our life. It touches on the spiritual as being where we put our faith, it touches on the mental aspect of our lives as in how we think and our philosophies. And it touches on the physical material part of our lives meaning it drives us to make ourselves become a certain person.
Your path can be your prison if you follow my example and question it. Then you run around in circles asking yourself why you believe in such things or why that path is your path. Once you find your path, if you sit and stare too long at it you ask questions. You ask yourself deadly questions and then feel as if you know nothing when you can't find the answers. If you find your path believe in it as you. It is you and you are it. If you try and look to hard into it you start to scrutinize it and so criticize yourself. You become locked in a battle with yourself, loosing yourself after you have found it.
I believe I found my path not too long ago, also that I questioned myself and inherently questioned it...which made me loose a lot of my confidence in my own knowledge. I started to question other things and now I am fighting my way back to being at a balance.
Balance...I believe that balance within yourself is when you are at peace with your relationship to your surroundings. Balance is a matter of equality and an act of complementing. Harmony is best obtained when the scales are at equal height, because that is the time that both great forces in the universe are moving at the same speed in a gentle growth in life. Balance is always there though, even when the scales are tipped. For when the scales are tipped you have a one great force complemented by a smaller. For the action of a stronger force on one side of the scale, there is a lesser force on the other...balance is still there but since equality is not the cause of such inequaity makes a different impact on what it effects. Change always occurs in both situations of balance but it is slow during equality and fast during complementing.
I have been told that Balance is used by the Shadow Jedi as a tool for finding one's self. That we surround ourselves in layers of perception. And to find ourselves we must go thru those layers of perception. First we would have to discuss what is perception... I believe it is a a way to view things. One's perception of a situation is their point of view and creates their opinion, but perception isn't always at the angel you are looking at, it is also what glasses (or so everyone like to call them) you see thru when looking out. This is the perception I believe was meant when I was told about how balance is used as a tool. Now that type of perception is your beliefs, your philosophies. There is no true way to make those glasses clearer, for I believe there is no true truth behind everything, only the truth within yourself. Your truth. Could this be why I don't understand? Let me make an example and see if I understand this at all. (picking one of my faults of course) EX. I perceive that I get defensive when in a group and I am the main focus. Apply Balance : If I know they are just joking and believe in my abilities, why I am being defensive when there is no reason to complement the situation with that. It only creates a disharmony. Looking Deeper: Perhaps I am believing I should act that way because of the constant teasing I was put thru as a child. It seems that part of me is not really part of me at all. That was something forced onto me while I was a child and had no concept that it was happening. Is that how Balance works? It seems to work that way but how about something deeper than reactions to situations. EX2. I believe everyone needs love. Apply Balance: well, there are many polar aspects in life and both have to be represented so that there is a set of scales to balance. There has to be elements to balance out or there would be no concept of balance. But how does knowing that help me find myself? Maybe I am applying Balance to the wrong thing here. Maybe not the aspect of love itself but why I feel myself and others need to have it in their lives. Apply Balance again: If I know how much joy can come from love then I would wish that joy to everyone else, but balance says that all that joy is off set by hate. Which means perhaps I was put thru so many hateful situations that I stress that love is a necesity. I stress it because I either feel I have not had love or that I have love but have seen a lot of hateful situations. Which shows me that I treasure the love I had from my home and see how much was needed in the other kids' hearts when I was younger because they put me thru a lot of their hate and anger. And the last question is do I understand what I just said and do I believe it... Is this the way a shadow should go about finding him or herself? Is Balance the key or some other form needed? This is something I will have to meditate on.
I also believe that knowledge is important. Knowledge is understanding...which comes from learning. You understand why something is after you learn why it is and why it isn't. But is that the same method for all things? Are all things as cut and dry that to understand them is to have knowledge about them? Religion is a good example (Christianity in particular)...we have knowledge on god, we know him because we learned about him...but do we understand him? We know God loves all the world that is what we are taught but we really don't know why. So I just proved my theory wrong...Then in the light of this example what do I believe knowledge is? This is a very confusing subject and seeing how it's 11pm I think I'll stop my wondering on this final note and see if anyone can reply with their point of view. But I think I will continue to post when I decide to think on these things like I did tonight. Because I want to hear what others think about the things I write in my journal.