Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

it’s interesting what happens when you’re no longer told what to believe and realize you can choose to believe what you wish.

I’ve recently been thinking about why I believe what I believe.

In the winter of my junior year of college, I took a linguistics anthropology class. It was 100% to fulfill a credit, but I ended up loving the class. Not only was it about language, but also about how humans connect with one another.

To open the class, the professor asked us to write down six things that we believe to be true. After, we would share our top three that hadn’t yet been mentioned — proving that the belief system, while being one of the things that unites us, is also highly individual. 

And for kicks and the purpose of highly educational text, here were my six truths:

1. Karma.

What you give is what you get. You give good, you get good. You give bad, you get bad. It’s a simple concept — which I feel is the secret to the truths of life and the point of why we’re here. The meaning of life isn’t complicated; it’s simple, just as karma is. 

Now, if you put out bad energy by accident, that’s different. That’s a learning opportunity. But putting out bad on purpose (cough, cough, some people in politics), then karma will come back. I swear it.

2. Both God and the Universe exist as separate powers — it’s neither one nor the other.

This one is tricky. I grew up Mormon, a rather new religion with structure, specific teachings, a specific God, and, of course, Heaven and Hell. But as I grew, I didn’t believe in some of those concepts so much. There was much more power in Mother Nature than Joseph Smith ever had. The things of the earth belong to the universe.

My concept of God came next, and that being is the umbrella over everything else. If Mother Nature and the Universe are the now, God is the past. My truth is that there is more than just our solar system, so something had to have created all of that before our Universe existed. 

3. Humanity has been ruined by the implemented biased government systems.

Humans are humans. We’re all here for the first time (unless you believe in reincarnation), just trying to make it. Some are richer than others, though. Some are treated better because of their skin tone. Some are treated worse because of where they’re from. Society, right as it began, created a bias. The governments only made it worse. 

There’s a hierarchy in every society. This much is obviously true. But you add a government that tries to make the majority happy, but it’s never the case. And suddenly, humans are pitted against one another like we don’t all bleed the same blood. Sides are taken based on what you believe about people. 

If you’re reading this and you’re up to date on American politics, you can see this bright as day. It’s Democrats vs Republicans. More recently, morality vs no morals. Blue vs Red. Either way, it is human against human. All are just trying to survive. In a place where we used to sing and dance and tell stories and make art, we’ve created a war. But you can’t win a war when it’s you vs you.

4. Dreams unlock the subconscious.

Say what you want about your ability to suppress emotions until they cease to exist, but I swear they will always bubble up. This comes from someone who chronically overuses the words I’m fine and acts as though things that bother them don’t bother them anymore than the shower faucet running cold for the first fifteen seconds of the water being turned on.

I’m not in on the philosophy of the mind. I smoked far too little weed and didn’t take a lick of hard drugs in college, so I believe that part of my mind is not unlocked. But I know enough to understand that the dreamscape is a completely separate universe from our own reality — a separate universe in the sense that our reality created it. Your brain can’t just create a face, so every face you’ve seen in a dream has already existed. But this mind wanders, unlike reality. In reality, what is happening right now and in the past is and has happened. 

But the dreamscape? The dreamscape is all of that plus more. In the dreamscape, the mind can problem-solve. And what better problems to solve than the ones buried so far down that the mind needed to be completely exhausted of your current reality to find them. It makes you face things in your sleep that you refuse to face in your reality.

5. Religion is flawed because people are flawed.

While I believe in the concept of God, I cannot believe in religion. I believe it stemmed from the fear of not knowing — not knowing where we came from or where we’re going. As humans, we love to know things — we’re curious by nature — but the not knowing of the beginning and the end kills us.

So for years and years and years we’ve workshopped what could happen and what could’ve been. For example, in the Mormon church, I was taught that I chose to come to Earth and I chose my parents. And after you die, you have to be baptized to get to the highest heavenly kingdom. There are options, though — think of it as Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Bronze is Hell. 

Hell was created because we got bored. We created stakes, created a black and white, good vs. evil type of protocol.Those who lived their lives believing in God live well after death, but those who don’t burn with Satan. But these good vs.evil lists vary between religions. Some might go to Hell if they drink coffee, while others will join them if they have premarital sex. Others may only burn if they kill someone. Confusing, right?

Humans aren’t perfect. That’s a fact. And because humans aren’t perfect and each carries their own set of beliefs and experiences, one who creates a religion creates a flawed one, my fault. There is no perfect religion.

And I must say, this always led me to question why people (me included, for a bit at least), get so obsessed with trying to find the “perfect” religion.

6. Sixth senses.

Call it manifesting, call it your dreamscape, call it a sixth sense. Either way, I feel as though I and many others have a sort of predictive power about us. I’ve predicted jury duty for three different people. My friend Rosie has a sixth sense about numbers. And I’ve had a few times where I’ve written stories based loosely on the people in my life, and it’s come true. 

Now I don’t know what causes these senses. I’ve wrestled with the idea that perhaps we saw a preview of our entire life before we were even born, and we get some sort of weird deja vu before the event takes place, hence why I returned to my belief in the concept of God. But wherever it comes from, whatever it’s caused by, it’s no fluke. You’ve got five senses…and then a special sixth sense for good luck.

Anyway. I grew up believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Zeus. Now I’m here.

I prompt you with this: what are six things that you believe to be true?

– Mia