Belief, disbelief and non-belief. [View All]

[GliderGuider]

Here's a different approach to the question of belief, based on the Buddhist concept that all human psychological suffering springs from attachment - from our attachments to people, things, ideas and our world view as a whole.

We all know that religious believers tend to attach themselves very strongly to their particular set of beliefs. That attachment has a number of effects we also recognize. The main one is that they tend to seek out and accept ideas that support their belief system and either avoid or strongly reject any ideas that call it into question. In science this behaviour is known as confirmation bias. Whenever the universe insists on presenting them with evidence that supports the opposite position they have to work very hard to defend their beliefs, on the understanding that their beliefs define who they are. To do this they may bend themselves into logical pretzels in an effort to reframe the evidence, attack the messenger, or deny the evidence altogether. This gives rise to the state known as cognitive dissonance, which is a main source of the suffering I mentioned above.

One of the ideas I've been playing with for the last few years is that all belief systems trigger these responses. In essence, all belief systems cause suffering.

Accepting this idea has some unexpected consequences, because it applies not just to the religious, but to all of us.

Everyone divides the universe of ideas into three parts: those that we accept, those that we might accept if they were justified under the same rules we apply to acceptable ideas, and those we reject. For instance, for many of us the first category might include things like the scientific method, the reality of the self and the material nature of the universe. The second category might include fringier topics like electron entanglement, telepathy and Zero Point Energy. The "reject" category might take in concepts like ancient astronauts, channeled writings, the power of intention - and God.

The stronger one's commitment is to a set of accepted beliefs, the smaller the second category tends to become, as items from it are deemed a priori to be unacceptable and are placed instead into the third, rejected set - which is in turn fenced off in uncompromising terms.

The problem with any belief system, however reasonable it seems to its adherents, is that it sets up the conditions for suffering: clinging to the good, rejecting the bad, and defining oneself in terms of that clinging and rejection. For example, we might be faced with an intransigent, proselytizing Christian fundamentalist who insists on engaging us in a dialog. Even on the Internet such exchanges can cause us to suffer, as our impatience, anger and outrage raises our blood pressure and cortisol levels, while the need to defend our world-view against such obvious ignorance causes us to cling ever tighter to our beliefs.

A wise friend once told me, "In an exchange, if you ever find yourself attacking, blaming or defending, you can take it for granted that your ego is running the show." The ego is all about attachment, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that it's a very short hop from attacking, blaming or defending to personal suffering.

The idea I'm playing with is that we may not need to believe everything we think. The decision to believe or disbelieve in any idea generally requires us to make a judgement on its "truth" of the idea. Aside from (or because of) the epistemological difficulties that can pose, we usually take the shortcut of determining whether the idea is congruent with our preexisting world-view. It's clear that making such a call automatically takes the result out of the realm of Truth.

What I'm playing with instead is not making that judgment. My decision is very simple: to stay open, let it all in and see what resonates, without collapsing into belief or disbelief about any of it. I'm trying to learn how to separate the idea of Value from the arbitrary box called Truth. All the stuff that was previously tossed straight into the hokum hamper now lands in a big heap on my living room floor. I sit with each new item asking myself not "Is this True?" but "What is its value to me?"

It can be a tough game to play, because it requires us to recognize that the self is not the set of beliefs the mind holds. The self it doesn't spring from them, and is definitely not identical to them. There is only one part of part of our mental structure that is a product of our beliefs, and that's our ego. Our personality - our Self - is far more than just that one element, but our cultural conditioning, whether religious or secular, makes that pretty hard to see.

It also helps to be able to embrace both sides of a paradox, an ability that may be fundamental to the development of wisdom. I find that I'm now comfortable with the idea that the universe is a purely material construct of matter and energy, as well as the idea that the universe is a living organism whose every particle participates in the unfolding of consciousness. While neither of these views can be proven "True", both of them have value to me. Dumb that duality down a bit, and it becomes the whole atheism/theism dichotomy - to which I now apply the same rules.

It may be hard to see the value in such an approach. After all, it leads to the benign examination of ideas about astral planes, Akashic records and astrology as well as ideas about jet planes, computer data records and astronomy. However I've found that I can think about the first set without having to believe in them, and I can think about the second group without clinging to their truth either. The result has been less angst, anger, rejection and inner turmoil - in short, less psychological suffering.

Buddha may have been right about that whole attachment thing.