My mental illness and my philosophy

The other week I was chatting with someone about starting a philosophy group in Cheltenham and he asked what I meant by philosophy. It threw me a little and I struggled to find an answer, I wanted to say something about universal knowledge, knowledge of the general principles of life. But I ended up saying that it is the ability to question your core beliefs, are they the same thing? For me I see core beliefs as holding all our beliefs together, for me it is the soul that holds our core beliefs and these become attached at an early age. Being able to doubt the beliefs at the center of our mind is a skill that takes a lot of practice, mostly through meditation. I guess the universal laws, or first principles also have the property of being hard to doubt.

For a long time, since the beginning of my illness, I have seen philosophy as the solution to all the worlds problems. If only every person knew how to reason we would be living in heaven on earth, I was the one to teach the world reason. There is a phrase that I have not heard for a while, zeitgeist (time-ghost), I believed that it was philosophy that had shaped the world, all the great philosophers creating the different ages, being the most influential figures. I still find it hard to doubt that knowledge dictates decisions, and knowledge comes from our first principles. As I've matured, I've become more aware of the influence emotions have on our decisions, it's not just black and white, good and bad choices, but that our self-awareness and our confidence play a major role in shaping our personality and also our choices.

There is no doubt in my mind that because of my illness I have had a closer look at my core beliefs. Because I've experienced some very chaotic spirits my core beliefs have changed dramatically in short spaces of time. In 2011 I was in the middle of a psychotic episode, a massive one, and I was controlling the spiritual world, but within a couple of weeks, whilst in hospital, I lost all spiritual beliefs and went back to my knowledge of physics, from all idealism to all materialism in less than a month, it caused a huge amount of brain trauma and I was anxious and depressed for over a year, until I regained some spirituality. If everyone could use pure reason to generate their core beliefs, maybe the world would be a better place.