Customer Reviews

To Believe Or Not To Believe: The Social and Neurological Consequences of Belief Systems

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The research in this book is thorough and up-to-date. The interviews of leading edge thinkers are very valuable reading; the subjects are wide-ranging and interesting and the quotes are marvelous. Part of the book is laid out in a question/answer format which is very effective. This is the book I wish I had been able to read when I was a teenager and was trying to decide what I believed, having rejected the hellfire and brimstone teachings of the local Baptist church. This is the book I wish had been available 40 years later when I was rejecting the ultra conservative Republican programming that I grew up with. Every subject that is covered in this book is timely. Rahasya has brought together ideas and research that most people know nothing about, such as the Sitchin work. As the Australians would say, "Good ON Ya!" If you're ready to think for yourself, you can't go wrong with this book.

As I read the first 2 parts of this book on the Social & Neurological consequences that our belief systems have on us I was amazed at the thought that went into this and the information almost seemed catalytic somehow because it made me start thinking again about these things that for far too long I have simply accepted. The social consequences are in our face today especially when dealing with religious and political beliefs but the neurological consequences were undeniable and new and well documented with HeartMath research and fMRI studies by neuroscientists. When you read what someone like Dr. Andrew Newberg say that the maintenance of belief systems that produce anger cause brain damage in the form of atrophy you really need to take notice, especially when you see the evidence.
But where this book really takes an interesting turn is Part III called "Rewriting Human History." Having a background in archeology I am familiar with the Sumerian clay tablets and what they say but for some reason I never connected the dots between pre-Sumerain civilizations and the influence they had on the first 5 books of the Bible. I mean if we are going to disassemble beliefs what better way than to show through the latest archiological evidence how those early writings are just copied and edited down versions of much much older stories. At first I got hung up on whether or not those Sumerian stories were true or not and realized that it doesn't matter, what matters is that they predate the Torah by centuries if not millennia. This does truly rewrite our human history which is actually a Biblical history that we have blindly accepted. Plus, it's the very "key" to solving the missing link in evolution where the Intelligent Design supporters come in and say ha ha, here is the proof of a designer. They may be right but it's not the designer they had in mind I'm afraid.
So yes, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a serious searcher of truth, but be prepared because it will change the way you see the world and your relationship to it.
Bill Tucker, Taos, New Mexico
P.S. By the way, I also read Rahasya's other book, The 12 Spiritual Laws of Recovery: and Meditations for the 12-Step Program and gave it to my nephew who was having a drug problem and it helped a lot. Rahasya's writing style feels like he's talking only to you so it has an emotional element to it.

Testimonials

Rahasya's detailed exploration of "belief" and the various ways
in which it keeps us locked in destructive modes of thinking and
experiencing life is a wonderful addition to the modern spiritual
library. Reading the book itself is an interesting exercise in watching
the way "beliefs" operate in our lives. He explores a wide range of
themes from an even wider collection of viewpoints. As the Buddha
said, "Find out for yourself what is true."
Bill Martin, The Parent's Tao Te Ching (as seen on Oprah's Book Club)

"Why do we believe what we believe? Poe asks this critical question at
a very critical time in history and delves deeply into a mind-boggling
examination of the neurology of belief and the sociological
consequences and implications for our future. The book covers the
spiritual, scientific, and psychological origins of belief, including the
influence of the world's great religions, with input from scientists,
researchers, and spiritual leaders on how we can change those beliefs
to empower ourselves, humanity, and the planet. The author devotes
ample time to the neuroscience behind belief and comes to the
stunning realization that our beliefs do indeed affect our brains, often
with negative results. Poe's book is a comprehensive and enlightening
look at what we have come to believe, personally and collectively, and
why we must challenge the paradigms that no longer serve us."
Marie D. Jones, author of 2013: End of Days or A New Beginning?
--Envisioning the World After the Events of 2012

Comments in To Believe Or Not To Believe by scientists, researchers, and visionaries:

We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism
is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in
a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending
to know things they do not know. This is certainly a future worth
fighting for. It may be the only future compatible with our long-term
survival as a species. But the only path between now and then, that I
can see, is for us to be rigorously honest in the present. It seems to me
that intellectual honesty is now, and will always be, deeper and more
durable, and more easily spread, than "atheism."
Sam Harris, author of Letters to a Christian Nation and End of Faith
**************************
How do you get out of a belief system? First you have to destruct the
belief system. Traditionally, the teacher is supposed to remove your
ignorance. But when you remove ignorance, you start with removing
what is causing the ignorance, which is your belief system. So the
teacher's job indeed is to fi rst deconstruct your belief system. And then
to give you inspiration so you'll go out to create a path to discover
what is spirit, what is beauty, what is love, because these things
nobody can teach you. So teaching really should be a demolition job.
Amit Goswami
**************************
Fundamentalism, in and of itself, is benign and can be personally
beneficial, but the anger and prejudice generated by extreme beliefs
can permanently damage your brain.
Dr. Andrew Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain
************************
The first thing we need to do is realize that some of our old beliefs are
dysfunctional and no longer work, if indeed they ever did. If the desire
to do that isn't there, there's nothing to do.
Fred Alan Wolf, author of Taking the Quantum Leap
************************
The difficulty in today's world is our technology and science has
outrun our theological advances. The reason for that is in technology
and science, we have had the courage to ask the single question that
theology has been afraid to ask, Is it possible that there's something I
don't know about this, the knowing of which would change everything?
~~~~~~
What if everything we thought about God up to this point was not
necessarily true? Tomorrow's God is what emerges from our
willingness to question our prior assumption.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God
**********************
What the brain likes to do is to simply replace
old ideas or beliefs with new ones.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, author of Evolve Your Brain
~~~~~~
I see the main problem as a spiritual one, not a resource problem, or a
problem with this or that government, but a larger problem centered
around human beliefs, the troublesome elements founded in our mythology.
Our problematic mythology is collapsing all around us.
It is a mythology that is predatory.
Albert Villoldo,Ph.D.

There's an abundance of testimonials and research data that backs up everything in this book at [...]

An excellent book and what else would we expect from Rahasya Poe, who with his wife, Dhara Lemos, are co-publishers of THE LOTUS GUIDE magazine..During interviews with cutting-edge thinkers, scientists, and healers, Rahasya Poe received the inspiration to document some of the social and neurological consequences of belief systems. As Rahasya has been on a spiritual quest for many years and has integrated these principles into his own life combining heart with mind, TO BELIEVE OR NOT TO BELIEVE contains many "aha" moments to aid our own awakening!

I essentially sent this same review to Mr. Poe: With some reservations, I LOVE this book. So much of it is so well-written, well-documented and well thought out. It cuts through so much of the irrational and delusional thinking that surrounds us, and does it in a compassionate and understanding way. Poe interviewed some people who obviously would not agree with his rejection of the supernatural, but I think each of them had something to contribute the evolution of spirituality.

That said, I wish Poe had gone with his gut instinct and left the extra-terrestial hypotheses out...perhaps fleshing that out in another book. Here it struck me as out of place. How did we get here and where did we come from is a great question of course. I suppose it is possible (though quite unlikely if you look at the logistics of space travel, speed of light limitations, energy required, etc.) that we have been visited by beings from somewhere else. But the idea (which Poe curiously back up with scriptural references, despite his earlier analysis of how unreliable scripture really is) strikes me as another example of the "god of the gaps" approach to things (i.e., if you don't understand how something works, then the Divine must have had a hand in it...if the history of science shows anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance as God, and furthermore, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) Plus, never mind that if an intelligent being from another place showed up here, the likelihood that it resembled us in any form or substance would be infinitesimally small, but there is the added problem of how--without any good direction--they would identify us as the most interesting species on which to focus attention. Even if those issues are overcome, we are back to "well, then, where and how did those guys evolve and develop?" An Intelligent Designer has no more explanatory power than the god of Genesis. Poof, ta-da's still have to be explained, and even if the world was seeded from somewhere else, then somewhere else something developed that we don't yet understand, but ultimately we could.

Accounts of flying machines and things in the sky do not strike me as evidence of ancient visitations, as they do Poe. As long as people have been self-aware, they have probably fantasized about flying as birds and insect are capable. Creative thinkers would not limit themselves to attaching wings like Icarus, but could also think about how much easier it would be to ride on a flying carpet or chariot and a boat that could go fast enough to take off in the air. I think we need to give humans credit for their imaginations.

The other comment is about evolution. I see so often the "problems" of evolution mentioned (as Poe does), with ideas to back up the thoughts, but no references and little indication of more than a rudimentary understanding of what really evolution is or how it works. I again saw the partial eye or partial wing arguments against "macro-evolution," despite the many real findings of partial eyes and partial wings in the evidence. The entire process of going from light sensitive skin patch to camera eye takes no more than 400,000 years. There was time for complex eyes to evolve 1500 times over. Still, it takes roughly between 100,000 years and 5 million years for speciation splitting to occur. Has there been enough time? Yes. Time is not the issue. Average rates of evolution seen from colonized studies show that a mouse could be turned into the size of an elephant in a mere 10,000 years. The number of species builds up exponentially with splitting, Some are pruned through extinction of course. Guessing 10 million species on earth, but padding that to 100 million to cover unknown ones, if you started with a single species 3.5 billion years ago, you could still end up with 100 million species today if each ancestor split into two descendants only once every 200 million years.

If we had no fossils at all (and we have darn few, considering the number of species and the countless individuals within them that have come and gone), the evidence from molecular genetics, geography, species distribution, and geology is overwhelming. Darwinism is not "survival of the fittest" as popularly portrayed, and it is not a random process. Phenotype leaps are part of it, and crudely illustrated by the gross morphological changes that can result from even the smallest genetic change. Mutations greatly increase in the face of environmental stressors and that is an integral part of the process. Natural selection, genetic drift (the only "random" part), sexual selection, and facilitated variation have extremely powerful effects.

As for our own self-awareness coming from breeding with something from space, the idea is not necessary. We know that Neanderthals were intelligent and self-aware. We appear to have wiped out this species, just as we have contributed in our relatively short time on earth to the demise of many others. Plus, we know from recent experiments that several other existing species are self-aware (elephants, dolphins, bonobos, magpies). Intelligence and self-awareness are two traits that can evolve just as hair and eyes and wings.

These comments are not meant to detract from the overall goodness of this book. You can be sure I will refer back to it a great deal.

This book "To Believe or not To Believe" by Rahasya Poe is simply an inquiry into mysteries small and big. You will learn new things. This book is a vast mind exercise, with links to many useful and intriguing web-sites, some hopeful, some profound. Any intellectually honest spiritual and/or religious person owes it to themselves to read this book.

Put your beliefs, your faith, to the test. This goes for Atheists too, for Atheism is also a belief system . . . and don't kid yourself that it is not. If "Seeing is Believing", well, some are born blind, and others become blind. You simply can't see what you can not see.

We are the relations amongst ourselves and God. Let there be peace, and let it begin with you.

Peter Joe Sanchez - San Francisco - North America, USA - June 28, 2011

This book really is a life changer! Mr. Poe ties together so many amazing points and issues. He is not just a forward thinker, but he acts on his beliefs more than most. He is doing great things to make this world a better place. Starting by publish his magazine " The Lotus Guide" and now this book. I would highly recommend this To Believe or Not To Believe to anyone looking to up their knowledge base and to change their own world for the better.

With a life-long passion for wisdom literature, I learned of Rahasya's book To Believe or Not to Believe, first as a friend who respected his dedication to writing it, and then as a spiritual path student who delights in the reading/reflection path. I was overjoyed on both fronts! To watch a creative endeavor emerge from a friend is a rare privilege. Seeing drafts on his computer and book cover artwork on the coffee table was like having a backstage pass! (When you are famous, dear Rahasya, I can say I knew you then!) But when the book emerged, alongside other significant contemporary message books, I began my contemplative relationship with it. With yellow marker in hand, I sat down to learn and assimilate.
The first delighter is his easy, conversational writing style, which vibrationally places the author in the "room" with the reader, and not far off on some intellectual wavelength. The second delighter is having numerous discourses available in one book a la the compilation of Rahasya's interviews with many distinguished world teachers. The third and most important delighter is that Rahasya did not edit out the far out or the controversial. Those of us who have spent any time at all on the contemplative path are already familiar with our role as spiritual energy conduits and consciousness co-creators, but we must also understand and activate our role in the world at large with our eyes wide-open to the impact of all levels of consciousness, diverse and all too often absurd beliefs, and well-intended but totally insane actions within our collective experience. I highly recommend this book as a means to do so...moving the mojo from the meditation cushion to wisdom community activation. Om Ananda, re-cycle, and walk/work/socialize with others of like-mind! Pamela Jamian, Founder, Peace Ananda Music.

Rahasya's book gives one an overview of some of the problems many have with allowing our minds to open to larger more brilliant thoughts. Getting out of the biblical dictates, cultural mores and finding your way into your own beliefs can be a stretch for some. However, his book can help open your eyes and mind. Reading the material, the interviews and life thoughts from some in the metaphysical world can really awaken one's thoughts. Take your time as you digest the energy of this book. It could change your life and the beliefs you thought you had.

"Tell the publisher! I'd like to listen to this!" Hey Amazon! Can we get a button like that? This is a fascinating subject. I heard a two hour interview with Rahasya Poe on Coast to Coast AM (do a Google) on March 20th of 2011. Intriguing whether you have a religion or not. Great food for thought, I'd love to hear the book but finding a few hours to sit down and have a good read is not something life affords me.