August 29, 2011 (Supplemental
notes to a talk givien to the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in
Georgetown, Texas on 8/28/11)
“Do not believe in anything simply
because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it
is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply
because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in
anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not
believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many
generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that
anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of
one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” --- Siddartha
Guatama (aka "The Buddha" or Enlightened One)
Believing is a
superimposition of will
on a thought, a way to say,
"may it be so," or "amen." This is an act, and it's often done
unconsciously, though of course it theoretically could be done
consciously. We can of course choose what we will and will not believe,
although, interestingly, it may take some habit-building for a new
belief to take hold. At first it feels phony---as if the old belief
still has a hold and the new one seems to be just on the surface.
(Incidentally, one of the ways prayer works is that by affirming
whatever is believed out loud so that others could conceivably
hear---if they were listening---including God as we may imagine that
concept---the whole process reinforces belief.)
Believing is a rather slippery world---meaning that the word means
different things to different people---and is often used in different
senses by the same person. We may believe in angels, but there's a
different sense when we look at our kid or a friend and say, "I believe
in you." There's a related but yet different sense when Mac Davis sings
the late 1960s song, "I believe in music; I believe in Love."
For some, believing is a badge of virtue and even achievement. For
others, it's an act of willed foolishness or even fanaticism. To
believe that which we think should be doubted seems stupid if not
perversely wicked. On the other hand, to not believe that which we
value is wicked in another way, stiff-necked, simple rebellious
stubbornness. Else why would anyone not see what to use seems obvious?
For some, believing is a big deal, attached to passionate feelings. For
others, it's a simple, lighthearted thing, no big deal. Sure, it's okay
to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, and I wouldn't be too
concerned if you passed your sixth year still believing. I might raise
my eyebrow if you are still believing wholeheartedly when you're
twelve. "I hate to disillusion you but..." seems tempting to say. On
the other hand, many of us believe just a little bit in Santa Claus,
enough to take our kids to see him at the Mall.
For some, believing is something they want to flee from, to shun.
Doubting is virtuous, Science is the new religion, and there's an
illusion that we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of all
illusions. Others consider this attitude of non-belief to be yet
another kind of believing in the illusion of doubting and
experimentation, as if that could answer all our questions.
Some Vocabulary Enhancements: Semantics, Hermeneutics,
etc.
Semantics is the study of how words mean. Not their definitions, mind
you, but their connotations, their emotional impact. The American Flag
might have a rather dry definition, but its power in many people's mind
is as a symbol, rich in associations and deep in the sense of
significance. Semantics has evolved in the early 20th century as a way
of integrating psychology and philology or linguistics. Words do not
really mean anything. I mean, another word in another language means
sort of the same thing. But here's where semantics comes in. Certain
words that are okay in one language or in one era take on emotional
impacts when used in other times. Some are taboo, or at least
disreputable. Some are glorious, even sacred! Some words are taboo in
an honored way, so that orthodox Jews cannot write the word G-d in the
three-letter word known to most folks---and not the same word (4
letters) in Hebrew---other equivalents are used. There are thousands of
examples of this from linguistics.
Believing in this sense means different things to different people, and
it's not a matter of definition. Most folks can't describe exactly how
or why a certain word means what it does to them. Semantics gets into
the unconscious association networks.
Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. It's another way of
approaching the awareness of semantics and other elements: It
recognizes that many phenomena and written texts can be interpreted in
different ways. For centuries people sort of took their preferred
interpretations as a given: "My way is of course right, because it
seems that way to me." The concept of relativism or self-deception
didn't exist. Hermeneutics evolved gradually as people began to realize
that there is an art to interpreting. It's not just right or wrong.
Even if there are more clever and less clever ways of doing it, there
is also the potential of different frames of reference that can be
brought to bear. "Frames of reference"?? Yes, you can be right to some
degree in your world, or from your viewpoint and I can also be right
using different criteria for what right or better might be for me. In
the olden days there weren't different criteria for right-ness, there
was just my way, which was backed up by my teachers, who also were
right. You wouldn't suggest that my teachers, who were authorities who
knew more than me, might be mistaken, would you? Of course not!
But this opening of fields of insight to recognize that even wise
authorities might have different viewpoints has grown in our culture.
It used to be known by a few wise elders, but it's becoming common
knowledge. Only becoming---the vast majority of people still not only
take for granted that their way is the right way, their chosen leaders
or authorities are right, but that alternatives weren't just different,
but rather seductions of the devil or in other ways devious, products
of being duped, wicked, nonsense, products of ignorance, etc. The idea
of honorable men (this tended to be a male-gendered world-view) having
honest differences and both sides had good point was and is
inconceivable for large sectors of the population.
Hermeneutics as interpretation as art requires a sense that there are
different ways that an art may be applied---not just good or bad,
better or worse, but also that different criteria may be relevant to
different kinds of art. It makes life more complex but might also be
expressive of a shift to a more complex capacity for thinking,
imagining, intuititing, and understanding.
In-Between Belief
In the same sense, thought itself becomes more complex when people
are invited to contemplate beyond the either-or mode of thinking, to
advance to recognizing shades of gray. This for many begins to happen
in the second half of the first decade of life, but for many others,
laziness and the prevalence of true-false type questions in schools
perpetuates this illusion that most of life is true or false,
either-or, nothing meaningful in-between. For these folks, the idea
that the vast majority of lived experience is neither totally good or
bad, right or wrong, or subject to any other simplistic polarity
boggles their brain. That it's true blows their mind. But it is true!
Believing also operates on a spectrum ranging from don't believe it
happens ever to anyone except in wild fantasy that can be ignored,
2+2=5 sort of thing; to completely believe it, I am here, you are
there. Well, Descartes even doubted the you are there.[ I'm reminded of
the saying that everyone is odd but thee and me and sometimes I wonder
about thee (? source, Quakers? Mark Twain?) ]. But most
stuff, in terms of our sense of probability, varies between the
two extremes. There is the believing in Santa Claus just enough to take
my kid to see Him at the mall, to enjoying the movies and tearing up a
bit at my lost innocence, to really belieiving in whatever---the
traditional concept of God and other dogma, or sort of believe in some
kind of More-Ness type of God but not the guy on the heavenly throne,
etc.
Now here's my main point. I think it's good to recognize the mixture of
affirmation (will) and cognition (thought), the better to use them
consciously. I think it's positively good in general (but not always or
blindly) to "believe in" that which we value, and to believe that what
we don't value deserves not to be valued. It's good to know we can
re-evaluate beliefs rather than be trapped to the point of not even
being able to begin to question them. But that doesn't mean that we are
protected from falsity and illusion by trying to believe nothing.
Believing in nothing, trying to be illusion-less, is also a
belief---belief that (1) it's possible; and (2) it's better than
believing in anything. I propose that it is not possible, that the
effort to believe in nothing is not better, but worse, that it tips one
into nihilism, and from there, cynicism, pessimism, selfish hedonism,
parasitisim, depression, or other negative activities. I am aware that
my belief is a choice, and until I can be persuaded that this belief is
mistaken and also not useful, I'll continue to believe it. It is
theoretcially possible that I may change my mind back to the other
aforementioned "cynical" belief, or turn to some new more sophisticated
synthesis. That'll happen if and when it happens---I don't see it
happening in the anticipated future.
I also think that it's fine to believe poetically, mythically, in a
sense, without having to believe fully, factually, literally. Indeed,
this in-betwen mixture of poetry and fact is an ongoing balance---more
poetic or mythic for some things, more factual and hard-edged for
others. Our decisions as to what the balance should be also needs to be
exercised as wisdom in the here-and-now. No formulas, nor final
criteria, to my knowledge, are absolutely reliable. All involves a best
guess and that will have to do.
This ambiguous state of responsibility is nevertheless to be preferred
to a lazier-minded approach of relying on some arbitrary formula or
ancient authority to guide us as to which is which. At least it has the
belief in the self as a re-valuating, thinking, chooser of what to
believe when and how much and in which way. Far more invigorating,
authentic, and engaged. (This is sort of all I said at the talk,
time being limited... BUT....)
Other Miscellaneous Thoughts
Readers of this web-page are welcome to argue with me, to email me
at
adam@blatner.com, to suggest refinements. If I think they're good
enough to put in, I'll ask you (or you could tell me in advance) for
permission to use your name and general date. This medium allows for
some interactivity if you choose to make it so.
August 28 Morning Thoughts
Belief is a superimposition of will onto cognition. But it’s more
complex than that: There are other factors in play. One is the degree
of consciousness, of awareness of choice. Dreams are believed, but then
again there is no alternative. That’s what’s happening—until you ask if
it’s a dream, at which point you wake up.
Culturally, we’ve been through a historical process of enantiodromia, a
cultural swinging of the pendulum back and forth, a dialectic of
thesis, antithesis, and—what I’m proposing—a new synthesis.
In a time of fear, hunger, guilt, belief was a virtue—and back in those
olden days of the 18th century, there was enough pain, disease, loss,
and wretchedness that the midbrain that uses fight flight reactions was
working overtime.
With a little more civilization—and there is a spectrum from less to
more—it’s not either-or—and we’re only 14% there at present—at most—in
my opinion— but anyway, modern culture—by which I mean from a fuzzy
historical era that took in the perspectives of the enlightenment and
mixed them with industrialization—got into an antithesis.
Thesis was authority of the church, the king, the slave master, the
male over the female, the rich over the poor, the British over the
Irish, the truth of classes and the divine right of kings... and all
that started to get questioned and undermined in the 18th through the
20th century and in the middle East is still being questioned.
The new belief was that oppression exists and that it’s good to
question, to doubt, to check out reality. Reality is what you can check
out, measure, assess. Reality is the opposite of imagination, dream,
play, art, poetry. We allow those latter categories in children and
artists as long as they know their place, but we believe that we are
not just believing—which in the modern era meant thinking what was not
true. We are questioning, challenging, and what measuring. Science is
sufficient, and scientific methods will answer all our questions. But,
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is also a belief.
The focus has been on the contents of belief, true or false, and
finding out. But this doesn’t appreciate the complexity of belief.
Belief was sort of the same as illusion, and it was inferior to
realistic thinking, clear, reality. We’re also speaking mythically of
Apollonian versus Dionysian, and male versus female, and sun versus
moon, and height versus depth, light versus darkeness—and in other
words, a very crisp, modern, true/false dichotomized way to think that
was part of the modern world in which we were all raised.
Now the 21st century has a new paradigm: Creativity. That is an
activity that, when there is more safety, there is an emergence from
the dawn when it is barely light enough so that all you can see is dark
and light. With more light, you discover the range of colors.
Creativity allows you to play with what seemed so either-or,
true-false. There are ranges of truth, it isn’t either or, there are
different criteria for truth. This can give you a headache if you’re
emotionally attached to only one kind of truth. What’s called
postmodernism and what’s hated by both traditionalists and modernists
alike is the idea that there’s more than one kind of truth, or that the
word itself is misleading—it’s very de-centering, throws you off
balance. But there it is.
There are a whole bunch of words that speak to the growing
awareness—wrestled with by philosophers hundreds of years ago, but kept
at a very dense intellectual plane—that you can’t pin down truth the
way politicians and churchmen and others wanted you to. Horrors! Then
chaos must reign, all will fall apart—or so they threatened. Of course,
to reassure you, let me at this point state my belief:
There’s a kind of more refined consciousness that can include in this
dialog different kinds of consciousness! There are scientific-type
facts—but note that these are not the only reality. They’re not ‘not’
real, but rather they’re one kind. Here’s a kind of reality that is
equally real and absolutely fuzzy and unable to be measured: I like
you. I’m glad to be here. Maybe some of you won’t like what I’m saying.
Some won’t like me. Others will like me but not like what I say. Others
will like some of what I say but disagree gently with a few things.
It’s not either or. But this whole fuzzy mess is very real, what’s
happening here, and it cannot be measured on one axis of true false.
That’s because there are multiple other parameters.
There’s sleep wake, degrees of attention, boredom, confusion; there’s
hunger and disinterest; there’s the tendency to relax the mind into an
attitude of “whatever,” which was very close to submission, but with an
edge of disbelief. Now we’re getting to the meat and potatoes of what
I’m talking about.
A lot of the discourse of belief operated in the last few hundred years
with an overlay of coercison, of we won’t like you if you don’t believe
what we believe. It numbs the will, generates whole clouds of either
submission or rebellion—the old yes-no thing again, either you’re with
us or against us.
In the later 20th and into the 21st century a new freedom is emerging.
Lots of folks don’t know what to do with it. It’s a call to more
consciousness! It’s a call to more consciousness, and creativity, and
conscious choosing, and working out your own integrations, which is a
creative act. It requires learning to dance with your mind among many
colors. It’s learning not to feel that you have to believe it all or
that you have to believe fully.
That leads to another thing that goes with color—saturation,
intensity—how much. Same with thought. Can you love at different
intensities? Sure, you do it all the time—this one you like but as an
acquaintance; that one is more of a friend. And it’s multi-dimensional.
Key word—not a single how much, but many variables get brought in—so
you need to learn to be more creative. This one you love to play
checkers with but you wouldn’t want to date as a potential romantic
partner. Different criteria!
I’m sorry I’m getting so complicated, but that is my point: When
consciousness gets free from the dawn when it’s just dark and light,
when you can feel safe and free to think anything, you begin to notice
colors and sub-types and variations. You begin to notice that you can
believe a little bit in a certain way. You can believe, more or
less, in certain consciously chosen ways. You can even make up what you
believe! Whoa! You can make it up? Then you know it’s not
literally true! Whoa back. Is anything literally true? Ultimately
in all contexts true? There’s the postmodern fix. Oh, this chair
is here. Postmodern response—maybe, but it’s trivial: It’s
reductionistic to think that if you can determine for sure that the
chair is here that you have a leg up on figuring out the impoderables
and mysteries of life.
Reductionism is figuring out that if you learn arithmetic, you can
figure all of math, and if you can do the math, you can figure out
romance. Whoops, change of category. But that’s the point: It’s all a
changeee of category!
So to restate: Belief tends to be thought of in terms of what is
believed, whether it’s true or false. The cultural struggle against
beliefs that seem false to us, compared to other facts—that’s what we
called them—rather than beliefs—that seemed more true (though in
rhetoric that is called begging the question—to call them facts rather
than merely beliefs—this has mainly involved religion in the last few
centuries. A bit politics, too, and gender relations, and other
things—but mainly religion. Which is why there are
Unitarian-Universalists.
But I’m suggesting that belief is neutral, neither good or bad. It
depends on how you consciously use your belief, when and where
you choose to sink part way or on the surface or deep in on this or
that dimension. And you can mix and match. That this is confusing and
too complicated is not in itself an adequate argument against it being
true or practical in light of more knowledge.
This approach brings in what we’ve learned about words, language,
psychology, interpretation, semantics, rhetoric, all words that talk
about how we can think about the way we tend to think. All this began
well in the modern era but few people know these tools yet. I venture
to suggest that half the kids in college if not more have never head
the word “semantics”—or if they’ve heard it, hardly know what a
revolutionary idea this field suggests.
And when you start using semantics on the term belief, it turns out to
be a very slippery word. I believe in the dogma is very different from
what Mac Davis around 1970s sang when he sang, “I believe in Music, I
believe in Love.” or the 60s Broadway musical How to Succeed in
Business without even trying—I believe in you! The hero sings to
himself in the mirror. Or Frankie Lane singing a cheerfully
inter-denominational non-specifically religious song in the 1950s, I
believe.
Hey, I believe in angels 35%. What’s with the percent? Either you
do or you don’t. No, that’s my point. There are sub-types, ways of
expressing things figuratively. This is what poetry and music and
baby-talk and pillow talk and all the arts are really about. There are
many truths that we live with closest to our heart that have little to
do with specific definitions and measurable quantities—and if you
include the criterion of relevance, they’re more real than mere fact.
Little kids haven’t been brainwashed into the illusion that there are
and should rightly be tight compartments between true and false. They
know they’re playing and pretending. They know the knife in their hand
is invisible and doesn’t really cut, and if mommy calls for lunch they
know a drama can be put on hold. They flow in and out of different
types of reality, consciousness, suspending disbelief.
Modern science believes in practicing disbelief as if it were a
religious dogma. Don’t believe, don’t accept anything, question
everything. This is a fine game to play within limits. It’s a silly way
to think about all of life, about love, about child-rearing.
Actually, the superimposition of science (which, I must note, can have
very narrow blinders) onto love actually happened to your parents,
which may be why you’ve been fighting off a heritage that’s a little
neurotic. Dr. Benjamin Spock was popular after WW2—because he was
permissive. Actually, he wan’t particularly permissive at all. The way
he was permissive is that he suggested that it’s okay to pick up a
crying baby. What was that about. Your parents didn’t tell you? From
around 1915 through 1930 and into that decade scientific psychologists
got it into their head that you could and should condition your kids to
cope with reality rather than to wallow in illusion, and reality was
hard. You can’t have what you want, and you’re never too young to learn
this. The key loaded word—note the semantic associations that come
up—is spoiled. Don’t spoil your kid. Don’t pick her up when she cries
or you’ll spoil her. Benjamin Spock was reviled in some quarters for
fighting this what we now considered really painfully stupid expression
of scientific authority. I really suspect that it put a non-trivial
scar on the mentality of a large part of middle America in the middle
of this last century—when we were growing up.
And that’s just one of them. There were all sorts of religious and
political demagogues and would-be authorities and all of them had in
their own mind true beliefs. Belief was for them a word that was like
conviction. It was more virtuous than mere opinions. You may have
opinions, but virtuous I have convictions. Semantics, word use,
spin-doctoring, rhetoric, Humpty Dumpty, the large egg-character in
Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass saying, “When I use a
word, it means anything I want it to mean. And Alice said, in effect,
can you do that? And Humpty replied, The question is only who is to be
master, that’s all. This is rhetoric, propaganda, authority using
cleverness to hypnotize you into believing.
Creativity thinking helps you awaken from the hypnotic state in which
you believe what you think. Now my point is that if you know you’re
doing this, you’re hypnotizing yourself a bit, you know, it’s
okay. If you unconsciously hypnotize yourself,—and a main
principle in depth psychology is that people can unconsciously
hypnotize themselves—they can entrench a thought so well that it
becomes impossible to will yourself to wake up without permission of
another person suggesting it—this depth of double-whammy of thinking or
not thinking certain thoughts, compartmentalizing and dissociating and
repressing, all those words deal with operating from a level where you
think you’re awake but you’re half - hypnotized, a little bit of
sleep-dream like psychology is going on.
= =
This morning checking my email, an ad: I’m a true believer. In a brand
of mattress’s ability to give a good night sleep.
- - -
Another quote from the Buddha: There is nothing more
dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a
poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations.
It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.
I interpret this to mean not reasonable questioning, as he suggested at
the top of this webpage, but paralyzing doubt that refused to act
because of a lack of solid guarantees. That's not intellectual
humility, that's a cop-out. The real challenge is to balance not having
a guarantee to making a fair guess and playing it through. Nor does it
mean a refusal to change your mind. Well, yes, if the only reason is
that the going gets tough. But even then in some situations, I take my
lack of progress to be a hint that it is fighting higher fate to try to
push the river, so to speak. But the game is taking responsibility for
choices.
82711 Further Notes on Belief and Believing—to be revised and
re-worked
Of course I should Include William James’ essay, “The Will to
Believe.”
I’m still contemplating his words, and am unsure if I have fully
digested them. But I’m pretty sure he affirms the general idea of it
being okay to choose to believe something even if it’s not totally
rational.
I get the sense that he has some commitment to science and there’s a
degree of inclusion of non-rational thought that would be distasteful
for him, but that he’s also unwilling to make judgments about those for
whom there is a greater tolerance and indeed even some preference for
the mysterious.
I’m relatively sure he’s wrestling with the problem of belief in a more
complex fashion, and that’s the point. It isn’t simply either-or.
- - - -
81011: Believing is actually a rather complex psychological
process and it deserves to be examined. To believe something is to add
to a thought a degree of willed assent. To doubt something is to add to
a thought a degree of willed reservation, as if to say, “wait, maybe
that isn’t so.” With belief, one implies, “Amen, may it be so” or “Yes,
that’s it.” So what we have is a thought or image or idea and an
attitude, an inner action, added on.
The second point about belief is that it isn’t distinct. Some people
make it distinct, affirm it so often that it can seem to be a
virtue—or, in the eyes of those who don’t agree—a vice. True believer
is for some a compliment and for others the phrase suggests either a
brainwashed cult member or some kind of fanatic.
Semantics
So now we have a perspective called semantics. This is the study
of the emotional impact of words. It’s inter-disciplinary: It seems
like linguistics, but really is closer to rhetoric, social psychology,
spin-doctoring, advertising, propaganda. I became interested in these
forms of mind-bending games as an early adolescent—in retrospect I
think it was my quiet form of rebellion— and it fed into my later
interest in how people fool themselves and each other—which is a big
part of depth psychology and psychiatry—back when psychiatrists really
talked with patients on how they made sense of their experience.
Semantics—what images and feelings are aroused when you hear words like
America, God, apple pie, Satan, and so forth? This stuff goes right to
the heart of the profound levels of non-rationality that people still
don’t want to own. We can’t help it, certain words trigger images
or feelings. How that works is semantics, and we haven’t got a nice set
of neat answers, believe me. It must be enough to ask the question.
Now, the problem with semantics is that for an individual, a
word—especially loaded words—is caught in a network of often
unconscious associations. Who used to use that word and how did you
feel about them? Was the word used in contexts that were scary or
sweet? And on close examination—here’s the point—every word means
something a little different to every person! There is rarely full
agreement. You might get people thinking they agree, but when it comes
down to it, what you meant by “in time” isn’t what I meant----a week
isn’t ten years. Lawsuits are made of this difference in interpretation.
And that leads to a second word to introduce, beside semantics:
hermeneutics. That’s the art of interpretation. When I grew up things
were defined and we were supposed to believe in definitions. Let’s go
to the dictionary. It was almost a religious gesture. Ladies and
Gentlemen, definitions are soooo 20th century! Most important words—not
trivial words—cannot be defined because they are ambiguous. They
partake of different semantic associations in different people.
Interpretation in the olden days was simply exposing the right
understanding of, say, a parable. But wait a minute, maybe there are
two different interpretations? Which is better? And then with a
shift of perspective, the very act of interpretation is exposed. It
turns out that this person’s interpretation is biased severely towards
this person’s need to make this other point! And the other person’s
interpretation goes another way. And backing off, you begin to realize
that interpretation is itself an art that can be done better and worse,
but also—and this is important—like art, can be done in very different
ways! So the art of interpretation is not only highly complex, but it’s
open to argument as to how to evaluate different approaches to
interpretation. That’s why a big word, hermeneutics, is needed. It
opens us up to our active involvement in ambiguity—or, dare I say, the
inevitability of differences in how we think and believe.
Now we’re getting closer to the postmodernist crux of the matter. Who’s
right? We felt entitled to getting an answer from the experts, from our
parents, our teachers. No matter that our parents gave us the
answer a thousand times as we were growing up: You kids work it out.
Nooo, we didn’t believe that this was actually true. There had to be a
right answer, and one of us—and it wasn’t me—had it! But what if it is
really a deeper truth, a different approach to truth—you kids work it
out!?
That’s what you’ve been doing with your spouses and family and friends,
now that you think of it. There are now out-there-fixed-answers to most
of the little glitches that happen in life. You just work it out, give
a little here, they give a little there, you find an alternative,
whatever. But the problem here is that it is impossible to write about
this problem definitively—it eludes any definition. Now that we’ve
learned about chaos theory and fractals maybe we can realize—lots of
things in life are not neat and clean and have clear boundaries, but
rather they are vague, fuzzy, and open to negotiations. Indeed, most
important things.
All this relates to belief if we relax our beliefs that we should know
what we’re talking about, that if I say something clearly you’ll take
it the way I meant it, that we’re not all superimposing our own often
quite unconscious reactions on words and interpretations and
interactions. The illusion that we’re all rational needs to be
deconstructed every bit as much as the illusion that the world is flat
and the sun goes around it. I know, but it seems that way.
In the Hindu tradition, illusion as a category was recognized as being
so powerful and pervasive that it was personified as a god----goddess,
actually, name of Maya—. Speaking as a depth psychologist,
psychiatrist, and philosopher, I don’t think we can escape from
illusion.
Believing that we have liberated ourselves from the most common and
gripping illusions of our past does not mean we’re free from
illusion—only those illusions. Indeed, it may well be argued that it is
an illusion that human minds can function without illusion.
Epistemology
Here’s another big word. Philosophy, the love of knowledge, really
asking with deep respect, what’s what, opens to many questions.
Ethics—what’s fair. Meta-physics: what’s real. Epistemology: How
do we know what we think we know? Yeah, they all overlap
somewhat. But hermeneutics, semantics, belief, epistemology—all relate.
And we live now in a world-view transition that goes along with the
shift from the modern era to the postmodern era—a time when everything
is changing more rapidly and also being recognized as being far more
complex than we thought it was.
Cell biology, astronomy, sub-atomic physics, linguistics, history,
everything. Psychology and philosophy too, and as an offshoot,
religion. Which leads us back to belief.
Belief is about all sorts of things besides religion. We believe
in our kids, communicate that we mix hope and thinking in an optimistic
fashion as a form of blessing, encouragement. I believe in you. And
these elements are used in songs, as Mac Davis sang in the late 1960s,
I believe in music, I believe in Love. That’s a belief in hope, and
affirmation of a sense of alignment in values with good things. It’s
saying yes to what you want to emerge in what seems like a better
world. Depending on the country you’re in, it might be a word like
freedom—that has lots of different meanings. Free enterprise is a
semantic flip that blinds us to the possibility that a good deal of
what is called free enterprise imposes coercive economic pressures on
poor people and is in truth wicked exploitation—even virtual slavery.
But no one wants to taint such as wonderful phrase as free enterprise.
Then again, the charm of the antebellum South was built on the backs of
slaves and no one wanted to look at much less take responsibility for
the sheer brutality that must be involved in keeping people enslaved.
So people use words to mask the ugly parts of life.
What I want to emphasize is that belief is a word.
- - -
There are shades of belief. There is in-between belief. I have a lot of
things that I sort of believe. I enjoy certain images. I don’t take
them literally, but I enjoy them—like Santa Claus and faeries like
Tinkerbelle. To say I don’t believe wouldn’t be a fair
description of my mind. To say I don’t really believe asks me to
compare my factual evaluation with my mythic and poetic life.
I confess I haven’t been able to differentiate between believing and
optimism, between faith and hope. And even if you give me neat
definitions, it wouldn’t help deep down, because I hear Obi-Wan-Kenobe
saying to Luke Skywalker, “Turn to the Light, Luke, turn away from the
dark side!”
Belief as “Electricity”
In some ways the metaphor of electricity can apply to believing as
a kind of mental energy: You can learn about it, and learn to use it in
a lot of ways. You can modulate it and channel it rather then just feel
zapped by it.
Belief is to myth as electric current is to magnetic force—they’re
related in different ways. That’s why it’s called electro-magnetic
energy. Belief and myth overlap in a sense. Both categories need to be
semantically refurbished. We need to let go of our old associations to
these words and learn to think of both believing and myth in fresh and
more practical ways.
Believing is a mixture of will and attention along with a varied
content. Myth has an additional force of social consensus. I’m not
trying to be too precise in my definition here, because I’m pretty sure
that whatever I say will be superseded as we learn more about mind and
its power.
The main thing about belief and electricity is that it can be
graduated, enjoy middle levels. This is important, because a more
conscious skill in modulating this middle region makes all the
difference! The trick is to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold
‘em.
Let’s be clear that for many of you the word is semantically
loaded—that’s saying that there are a bunch of associations there that
may have been true for aspects of the word that you were exposed to
once in your life----many of you, for example, got burned out on the
word “belief” as it was inextricably connected with blind submission..
Belief was an activity that entailed stifling of doubt in
oneself and if felt bad. So belief feels bad.
This is true for one type of believing, a very common type
in our culture, but yet only one of many—so you need to recognize it
also as a stereotype, a prejudice, begin to loosen the tendency to
believe what you’ve become habituating to thinking.
Now to stretch you: Around forty years ago plus or minus a hundred
years there emerged the concept of being agnostic as fashionable, a
belief that non-belief is somehow a noble intellectual stance, almost
heroic. When contrasted with the doubt-stifling kinds of beliefs of
traditionalism, agnosticism and viewing the previous types of belief as
superstitions made sense. There was even a kind of overshoot: It seemed
possible to become free of all illusion!
Now I’ll state my present belief—and am willing to argue this with a
smile. I don’t think we can escape illusion. The idea that we can and
that some have may well also be illusory, and I await good evidence to
suggest that I’m mistaken. I haven’t found it yet.
So I see currents of fashion about believing, thinking, considering
what is and is not real, what may and may not be included as criteria
for reality, all that is expanding and going through changes. My
current bias—my belief—is that we cannot escape illusion, but we can
choose and choose again and then revise and choose again what we choose
to believe. We can engage in a conscious process of myth-making.
The criterion becomes not what is, but what works for me. How much what
works for me needs to fit with varying criteria may differ from person
to person.
All this also slips into a more postmodernist
view of truth. We were raised in an era that was itself a mixture of
two world-views: Traditionalism said that the essential truths were
there to be understood, accepted, even if they needed to be
interpreted. But they’re there in the scriptures and a few sacred
political documents and traditions. Truth is given. Modernity shifted
into a varied stance that suggested that many traditional sources were
not to be blindly trusted, that science can bring truth forth, but that
truth does exist, it can be found, discovered, argued, mainly through
reason. Belief and myth is suspect.
The postmodern era has called even this reasonable position into
question. This is for a number of reasons:
– worldviews differ, the idea that there are paradigms,
world-views, is still new. What is considered fact or
scientifically-demonstrable is often considered less important than
political, social, and basic philosophical inclination. Respect, love,
loyalty, kindness, and other core values are at least as important as
mere rational coordination. Also, there is so much in life that is not
touched by mere fact—especially in the realms of human endeavors, those
arrangements that fill our lives more than mere fact.
– related to this, what is relevant often deals with what and
who is loved and hated rather than, again, mere fact
– all supposed truths are framed by words that, on close
examination, quickly break down into associations, previous meanings,
other examples, and, most importantly, the often unconscious weighting
we attribute to the various components of our semantic grid within
which words operate. It turns out that these grids are in turn
distorted by the entire personality and its individuality—temperament,
memories, social-technical era, people associations, fashionable ideas,
etc. It turns out that no two people ever believe exactly the same
general dogma of any religion or cult. There is always some difference,
at least, in the nuances of key words or ideals.
– the criteria used in weighing truth of a proposition similarly
differ
– and as for a word having the same meaning to people of
different cultures or generations, well, that just further complicates
the process described above.
Of course there seems to be agreement, but what is going on is a
political process: Words, laws, ideals, are assumed to have basic
definitions. Often this co-constructed and negotiated process has a
provisional stability. Ultimately, though, there are loopholes,
differences in interpretation, and these fill the dockets of courts of
appeal. It’s all a process of active construction—there’s no “there”
there.
(The same can be said for life itself, which involves a continuous
interchange of the very atoms that support it. All that continues is
the ongoing re-construction of the pattern with re-cycled and renewed
materials.)
We’re talking about epistemology now: How do we know what we know? What
is truth? What is reality? In short, what, in our most sophisticated
present world-view, taking in all we know about, seems to be fair to
say about what we can and should believe.
My best response is that there are no givens, no guarantees, all is
interpretation, it depends on what frames of reference and criteria for
more or less validity you choose; and also gradients of relevance—how
important this or that angle is for you. This varies not only from
person to person, but situation to situation. In that case, this and
such seemed more relevant, but it’s different in this problem.
Now to shift to psychology. I find that people try to get out of
having to choose, having to take responsibility. It would be easier if
there were a guaranteed criterion or set of guidelines. Yes, it would
be easier—that’s the point—but in true contemporary maturity, easier is
no longer a rational cause. Many things that are more true are neither
easy or convenient, and this in fact does not make them not so. The
world does not bend to our preferences and in fact never did—although
there may have been a relatively short time in our infancy when it
seemed to mostly do so.
Aside from wanting the world to be true in the way that would be most
convenient for us, and if not that, at least wanting the world to be
true in a way that we can readily understand, there is also the
possibility that the world will not fulfill either wish in some ways:
It is often not convenient—gravity is a good example here—and often not
even readily understandable. In fact, it not only takes a good deal of
learning, through several levels of learning more, but at the edge of
great learning it turns out that there remain limits and mysteries and
fuzzy bits. No guarantees, no final answers. You need to be okay about
this, having grounded your confidence.
But, alas, in the 21st century, final knowledge is not to be ours not
only now, nor in ten thousand years, but never—because there is not and
can not be any final knowledge. Instead of knowing, our job is to turn
to giving it our best guess and working mainly in terms of peacemaking.
Belief
Epistemology Semantics Hermeneutics Myth
I believe in you. I believe in your potential to grow and become more
fully whatever you delight in!
I believe in music, I believe in love.
I believe that what I think is so. I believe that what I think and know
is not fully so, only that it is in vaguely the right direction.
I believe in history, in paradigm shifts, and that much of what I
believe may turn out to be not so, or at least by no means all of it.
8/8/11 Believing
To believe something, or believe in something, is by no means a clear
process. Unitarians tend to be overly focused on the need to rise above
what they consider foolish or primitive beliefs. Believing falls to the
same category as superstition. These are mainly associated with
the dogmas of religions that have been rejected by the
congregational members.
But words carry over. Foreigner was a bad word a century or so ago.
That we all descended from foreigners was quite forgotten. True
believers has that same negative tone. So we need to introduce the
first word here. Words can be tools, just as a knife or scissors or
screwdriver. The word is semantics. It is the study of words—not word
roots, or the evolution of words, but rather how words have an impact
on mind and especially emotion.
Words are ambiguous. Consider the following: twilight, dusk, evening.
Do some of those words attract you more than others? It’s a subtle
taste difference? Exploring why would take time, but it would
relate to fragments of song, or episodes in your life that were
associated with one of those words.
Can you imagine belief being a wonderful thing? How about if someone
you respected looked at you with love and said, “I believe in you”
? How would that feel?
What does it mean to believe in another person?
Here’s another image: The country-popular-music singer in the 1970s,
Mac Davis, sings “I believe in music, I believe in love.”
What does that mean?
Can you imagine really getting into believing anything?
How about those of you who are on the more skeptical side? How about
believing in the importance of deconstructing any and all beliefs! Away
with superstition. Standing on the top of a wind-swept hill with the
delicious cold wind of dis-illusion flowing through your hair. Not
chilly, really, just bracing. Ahhh. Free from the chains of
superstition and dogma. Sure!
But that’s such a small and over-rated moment, a fantasy, a brief aha!
Moment of feeling justified, right. And they thought they were right!
Well, we showed them who’s right! Yah!
Okay, now back away slowly. You’re right, they’re wrong. You’ve proven
your point. No need to run back over and kick the dead body. You
won.
But the fear and struggle was deep and wide enough while it went on
that deep inside there’s a desire to demolish not only the beliefs you
found oppressive in your own life, but the whole idea of believing. And
here’s where a word, semantics, can muck up your thinking.
Because there are lots of types of belief, in-between belief,
non-fanatical, but not disillusioned or cynical either. Like
foreigners. Some you might actually get to know, to like.
Toyland and Belief
There’s an overlap here among ideas about myth and myth-making,
becoming involved in telling or listening to or reading or watching
stories, and also in the ambiguous process of believing, more or less.
The point to note is that there are many uses of the word belief. You
can believe things poetically and not literally.
It’s fun to plunge in and immerse yourself in a myth. There’s a bit of
loss of the ordinary self, with all its attendant concerns:
– other people need things—especially kids or sick or
relatively helpless people—it’s distracting
– reality can be demanding and ambiguous, requiring an
activity of scanning, questioning, re-checking—really, it’s somewhat
tiring
– habits of expecting pop quizzes and sudden shifts
of attention can become ingrained, leading to a hyper-alert, up-tight
character. Warriors are close to this edginess. It’s the opposite of
mellow.
– diversification of life into household duties—always
something else to be done, either soon or someday—that seems more
important than daydreaming; also clubs and role commitments for them;
places to go, things to shop for, money to earn more of...
Etc.
To believe is also then a focusing on giving attention to, or turning
attention to what you believe in. Other things that impinged on your
awareness in a figure-ground sense slip into the background, become the
ground rather than the figure.
Myth invites you to enter this story.
Belief as Childish
Consider the lyrics of the song “Toyland” (by Victor Herbert):
Toyland, toyland, little girl and boy land: When you dwell within it
you are ever happy there!
Childhood toyland, mystical merry toyland! Once you pass its borders
you can never return again!
(Melody by Glen MacDonough)
I don’t agree that you can never return again! We prove it at our Art
of Play workshop. The statement / song lyric / in the sociocultural
perspective: a clear division between childhood and grown-up, stop
being a baby, in a rigorous way, practiced in Western culture for
centuries.
The minute you could work on farm or trade you were
desperately needed, just to keep life going. On the other hand, any
kind of softness or weakness was demanded to be squelched, get over it,
because there wasn’t time to deal with more subtle emotional states;
nor did folks have the skills to do so.
So, pragmatic need for abandoning childhood has become
less true. There was a sadness and loss, those kinds of statements
reflect that nostalgia.
Being child-like was devalued, also, because there were no needs
for the qualities associated with childhood. It’s not true any more,
and in fact, what we propose is that the mental attitude that happens
in pretend play, the multi-dimensional functions, are needed today
because they help in creative problem solving; They help in mental
health, emotional well being, interpersonal thriving. And finally,
people can keep those qualities of childhood and mature with them.
People who do this selectively become creative, scientists, artists,
their personalities become exploratory, stepping through societal and
cultural boundaries and limitations.
The more people we can encourage to retain that playful skill set, keep
it alive, the more options we will have.
We’re not trying to turn everyone into performance artists. Whenever
your personality develops, we want to promote this aspect of
mindfulness, wherever it is—assembly lines, landscape work, monetary
politics, stay-at-home mind. This is an endowment of humanity
Breakset, imagine, explore, enjoy. Play and humor as
health-ful. We have ways that can help people reclaim it, develop it,
enjoy it, use it. Amen.
Myth: Terms like myth can take on a secondary life of their own, aside
from what they were originally trying to describe. This secondary life
can hamper the growth of what they are describing. For example: a term
like myth, useful to step back from something, give it a shorthand
name. But the name starts to attract opinions and theories, those
attractions then affect the term and what it refers to in an unhealthy
way. Myth, belief, etc.
Very careful:
Beliefs are mindless and bad and superstitious and oppressive, but
critical thinking is good, and doubting and skepticism is good. You
have to look at belief.
Many beliefs are myths. That means they’re not so.
They are so not so you need to really critically examine them. A valid
belief has to stand up to critical examination or it’s no better than
superstition. And the main criterion is whether it’s factually so. Is
there evidence to substantiate it. Substance is key—it betrays a
materialistic measuring stick.
Mere belief is too feminine, intuitive, weak-minded,
fuzzy-brained, sentimental. It’s like believing that you’re your kitty
is cute. Whatever cute means. Cute does not stand up well to critical
examination.
So, wait a minute. As we think about it, most of
what’s fun for us is fuzzy, soft, emotional, sweet, unclear, not
substantial, ambiguous, ill-defined, tasty, juicy, whatever other words
are carry a mixed connotation.
Connotation is the emotional impact of a word. I like this word, I hate
that word. I can tolerate sweet euphemisms, I feel uncomfortable about
straight words—almost spitting them out as epithets. Words for poopy,
poop, feces, shit, each has its own semantic network of associations.
Aww, cute. Did the baby mess her diaper? We’ll clean it up. Ugh, dog
doo. Yuk.
Connotation: Savior. God. Jesus. Source. All-that-is. Sacred. These
words have different connotations, each a little different for each of
you! Do you believe? Maybe, more or less, depending on what word
we use. Some believe in nothing at all. Some believe in humanism, as if
that were a clear doctrine. And so forth.
Let’s be clear: We are not going to get any agreement. Connotations and
semantic networks operate unconsciously, and the unconscious cannot be
grasped and clearly identified. It’s like one of those brain tumors
that even if you get some of it, most of it, surgically, it has edges
into the unknown that you can’t identify or grasp.
The era of modernity had some belief that it was at least theoretically
true that truth was accessible, someday. It exists, truth does, out
there. Now I make this point because in contrast, in the postmodern
world, there is and can be no truth, not even theoretically. This is
because a primary truth—an obvious reality—is that there are several
existing phenomena that combine make it theoretically impossible to
ascertain truth:
1. The unconscious mind and its associations is built up
of millions of experiences in which various words are attached to
different sets of emotions, resulting in complex semantic networks.
2. The nature of complexity arises from the growing
awareness that everything and everybody is much more complex—composed
of a far greater number of variables all weighted along a much wider
and ambiguous spectrum of values—so that in their aggregate, everything
is truly unique. Of course, God loves it that way, but such a view is
quite incompatible with any dogma. Okay, forget the allusion to God—I
was just being provocative.
3. The complexity of individuals is taken to an
exponential degree when two or more people mix in relationships,
groups, organizations. In truth, no generalization is absolutely true
about any business, group, or organization. Such comments assume a
homogeneity or similarity of intent that just doesn’t exist. It makes
it more difficult to feel self-righteous and angry at them, but that’s
just the way it is. Reality as we have come to appreciate it in the
postmodern era is impossible to really conceive us in any abstract
term. All generalizations are stereotypes, prejudices, and they don’t
do justice to the actual complexity being described.
4. What I’m getting out was stated by Friederich Nietzsche
about 120 years ago—that all knowledge is perspective. But there are
almost 7 billion perspective-makers, each of whom is different from the
others—so it becomes actually quite impossible to make any
pronouncements as if they are truths.
5. Indeed, the whole game shifts from debate and determination of who’s
right to something more like family dynamics than democracy. The goal
becomes peacemaking.
6. Oh, I should add that war, proving how right you are, works
for short periods of time, but then the recovering minority gets enough
steam up to rebel again. Might in the long run does not make right, it
makes further wars. It took a few centuries to begin to get clear about
that and folks still don’t understand it.
- - - -
801a
I believe in skepticism, in semantics, in deconstruction, in
hermeneutics, in wisdom, in discernment, in pragmatism, in analysis.
All these words are tools. I especially believe in semantics, the word
for the activity that analyzes words—not just their histories—that’s
etymology, or philology—but more, the way they work in the mind. Words
feed the desire to be lazy. More than sex—whatever Freud said—people
are lazy, they don’t want to think, they want simple, easy answers.
This runs very very deep in the psyche. Kids learn words that have
magic, and weirdly enough, other people with the same cultural
background play into it, mommies do, so that there are several words
that have power: Mine! Noooooo! Gimme! Words like that. Very early in
life and very powerfully kids learn that words are magic, they
sometimes fulfill the desire, or are short-cuts to getting the desire
fulfilled. “Up!” with hands raised gets you raised up!
Later in life teachers begin to feed you nonsense and kids know it’s
nonsense though they can’t explain why. There’s truth and then there’s
lies and there’s fibs, and there are secrets that aren’t exactly lies
but they’re naughty, which is different from bad or is it.
Semantics
The field known as semantics unpacks all this and really holds up
into the light the way words can be spun around and used for or
against. Belief is one of those words. For example, I’ve been reading a
scholarly exploration of the idea of “common sense,” which for many
masks as reality. There’s another word, taken for granted, as in the
phrase, "Let’s be realistic." But Jane Wagner, the comedienne, wrote
that “Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.”
Belief is an interesting word that can be used in different ways. It
can be a pleasant affirmation. I believe in you. I believe in
music, I believ in love. Mac Davis sang this song in the 60s. It can be
a challenge of virtue—and worse: To call someone an unbeliever was a
precursor to possible violence!
For Unitarians, it’s been a pervasive fashion to believe in questioning
belief, in skepticism. Considering the mountain of beliefs that are
worthy of being carefully re-evaluated with skeptical eye, I’m not
surprised. Joke: I heard the Ku Klux Klan in a small Southern town
didn’t know what to do with the Unitarian family that moved in. So they
burned a question-mark on their lawn.
But the focus is on words, and our tendencies to believe that they seem
to have a definite meaning, even when if we dare stop and think—oh,
that hurts my brain—that they very definitely do not—or that folks use
the meaning to serve whatever they mean at the time. And belief is one
of those slippery words.
I’m asking you to notice how it’s hard to digest this. Semantics is
even more subversive than skepticism. I mean, it’s one thing to be
skeptical about a claim made by fools out there! No way do I believe
that! We—emphasis—we don’t believe that. There’s comfort in numbers. It
serves the adolescent rebellion in us. I’ll confess, being skeptical
was my mild way of being quietly, intellectually rebellious
as a teenager.
But semantics cuts deeper, it makes me ask, what do I mean when I use a
word, and it exposes the profound and uncomfortable reality that folks
mean different things when they use the same word, and even the same
people who use a word give it different meaning in different contexts.
Freedom is a big one, sure, freedom is good, great, to die for----wait
a minute, I didn’t mean freedom for you to marry, or freedom for you to
ingest that substance... that’s not freedom, that’s uh licence.
Words, so belief is one of those words. Most unitarians scorn is as
partaking of going along with ideas that seem foolish—much of which
tends to be associated with religions who tend to make the word belief
a virtue. To believe what is in common sense not believable needs to be
criticized.
But, folks, the word is slippery. We believe in stronger and milder
ways in a million things that are more or less illusory—like how cute
our grandkids are. Or our kitty. Much of what is actually aesthetic
judgment is treated as reality. Mmm this soup is good. Not it may taste
foul to me but I’ve grown to like this. No, it is good.
Making Up Beliefs !?!?
Can you do that? Now
I’ll confess my bias. I’ve chosen to believe in a number of weird
things that I’ve half made-up. Worse, I feel comfortable believing in
them half-way, or two-thirds, and it works for me.
So that’s my next point. The mind is far from rational. Indeed, most
folks operate out of a set of beliefs and assumptions—of the order of a
hundred moderate-strength and vague notions and a thousand
particulars—that tend to feel adequate. They’re loosely assembled,
kluged together with duct tape, so to speak. Covered with a whitewash
of rationality. I mean they seem reasonable.
In our time, we ask for a little more rationality and less superstition
than in the olden days, compared to our grandparents. You wouldn’t want
me to engage in a careful analysis of any one of your assumption
systems and discover that they are based on weak or faulty or
inconsistent assumptions. We only pretend we’re rational but in fact
it’s relative to how very irrational we feel and to some degree think
our ancestors were, and other religions are, and political opponents,
and so forth—you know, “them.”
I’m noting an uncomfortable depth of non-rationality and
irrationality—non-rationality making no claim to being reasonable—that
operates in individual and collective mind activities. I don’t object
to this, please note, I just question the illusion of rationality that
gets pasted on top of this. Okay, then, let’s go back and look at some
other words:
Hermeneutics
It’s a good word, like semantics. Hermeneutics is the art of
interpretation. Now in the olden days there was good old truth. If you
were too dumb to get it, the authority would explain it to you. But it
was truth. Of course, other bad people, or dumb, or whatever
explanation came to hand, had other explanations—but they were wrong.
In the last few centuries some deep thinkers started looking at the
ways we evaluate interpretations. The word itself interposed a little
distance between words and meaning. Interpretation? There were
definitions, but what is this word “interpretation”?
It means that whole passages, like single words, can have different
meanings. (I hear a protest: "No way!" and a teenaged voice saying,
"Way!" Not only can holy scriptures, laws, even constitutions can be
interpreted differently but the activity of discovering or assigning
the meaning to a group of words can be done better or worse! Voice:
According to what criteria? Now we’re getting to the
complexity.
The question is, said Alice, speaking to Humpty Dumpty in the Through
the Looking-Glass story of the Alice in Wonderland series written by
Lewis Carroll in the mid 19th century, the question is whether you can
make words mean whatever you want. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty,
who is to be master , that’s all.
Rhetoric
Here's another the term used by the ancient Greeks to refer to the
art of persuasion, which is close to the art of interpretation and
semantics.
Rhetoric it was one of the core subjects in the curriculum for middle
and upper class kids. Later we used words like propaganda analysis, and
logical fallacies, and semantics. This kind of looking at the ways we
think and the words we use and the ways we use those words is enjoying
a resurgence in the inflow of cognitive therapy, also known as
analyzing your self-talk. But I want to see this stuff taught in the
6th or 7th grade—which is when kids read Alice in Wonderland, about
then. Let’s start playing with words and interposing some distance
between our wiser, more discriminating faculties and the words we tend
to believe mean something.
Don’t believe in words meaning what they seem to mean!
An associate idea: Don’t believe in clear definitions. I don’t know
where that came into history, maybe with Socrates. Either a words means
this or it means that, either or. But it’s simply not so! There are
shades of gray and it’s all fuzzy-boundaried and vague. And yes, it
must be, it has to be, it really is. That some find it gives them
headaches and de-stabilizes their self-righteous position only exposes
the deeper truth that some folks feel secure because of what they
believe rather than finding a basis for self-esteem on something less
epistemologically slippery.
As for me, my security lies in the way I swim in the unfolding flow of
ideas, beliefs, and constructions being a creative process, negotiated,
argued for, and always provisional. I’m odd that way. It’s as if I’ve
learned to swim in a world that hasn’t gotten used to the idea that
we’re all going to be underwater soon. I’m not attached to
word-configurations. I use definitions provisionally, in light of what
is useful for the task.
But does anything mean anything? I reply: Do you mean in all
contexts? Them: Yeah. Me: No. Them: Yaaaaaa! And even that can
take different forms. Yaaa being frightened withdrawal or Yaaaa being a
cry of fury and violent attack of me. So this activity of challenging
is dangerous.
Yet I pair that deconstructive activity with active mythmaking. I am
not afraid to believe in all sorts of things and not believe in many
other things and also partly believe.
That means that I don’t give full assent to thinking I
understand that what I sort of think is the way things are is literally
or completely the way things really are. I 82% believe in angels, or
forces of guidance and good fortune, or whatever accounts for those
meaningful coincidences called synchronicities. I certainly do not
believe in many of the popular notions about what angels are and do,
and yet I find some elements of that construction to be useful.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all that turns out
to be a complex of galoomphology that will have emerged in a thousand
years and will explain it all.. But right now we use terms that are
vaguely familiar to describe what we intuit as real but can’t yet
explain.
I certainly believe that those who are professional skeptics about
everything are either lying to themselves or not having much fun,
because I think a certain amount of faith and provisional, implicit
belief is necessary for just getting through life today. Full
skepticism means that I’d have to be up here on the defensive in armor
because one of you might well be carrying a gun and find my words so
offensive that you shoot me. And yet I trust you. What’s with that?
We don’t have to be either this or that, credulous, believing
everything, or skeptical, believing nothing. We go through life more or
less believing and this threshold of doubt goes up and down. Did I lock
the car? Let me check if I have that bottle of water. I think you’re
friendly, ah, your smile supports that belief... though it could be
just fooling me and he’s preparing to strike. Ah, et tu, Brutus?
Whoa.
Either-Or (August 1, 2011)
Believing—what do you believe, what if I believe differently, does
that make one of us wrong? Belief was a big deal for thousands of
years—it was important that you believed, and that you believed the
right things and not the wrong things. If you found yourself having
doubts or wanderings of your mind into independent channels,
unauthorized channels, shape up quick. If you are reluctant to repent
adequately, terrible punishments now and hereafter were threatened, and
these were no empty threats.
Then we went through a period in the last few centuries, amplified—or
just more free—to say “I don’t believe that!” and to say that about an
increasing number of traditional dogmas, prejudices, superstions,
notions, and so forth. Scholars were also digging up doubts about
whether the infallible scriptures might be—horrors!—a bit distorted by
translation, bias, or other reasons.
In some circles believing is noble, in other circles it’s near
delusional or at least childish. Then there’s a third angle, known to
scholars again for millennia: Don’t take it literally. Now I’m
sorry to say that I don’t know if most people really learned how
to interpret various stories as allegories. Depending on background, it
seems that authorized people only could elucidate the meaning. We
peasants were not instructed in the art of hermeneutics—which is to
spiritual truth something like rhetoric is to speech-making. Basically,
what’s coming down in the last century and more recently is that more
folks are realizing that one has to take many elements of stories with
more than a grain of salt: they are legends and we ourselves need to
empower ourselves to use them to make a point or discard them. Yikes!
Can you do that?
= = =
7-20-11 Re-Thinking Believing
Abstract for announcement: Believing is a rather complex activity that
easily tolerates internal inconsistencies. Adam Blatner will discuss
some thoughts about different styles of belief and will further
entertain dialog.
Adam Blatner, M.D., is a retired psychiatrist living in Sun City since
1997, who has been thinking about the psychology of spirituality for
over 50 years.
- -
-
Draft
The key point to be presented today is the idea that we need to loosen
up about belief and believing. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing,
either-or. When Mac Davis sang “I believe in music, I believe in Love,”
in the 1960s, he expressed the common, looser, more poetic middle
ground.
Admittedly, there does seem to be a context set in the field of
religion that deals with belief in an either-or fashion—either you do
believe, or you don’t. Perhaps you don’t believe enough. What is
referred to is dogma, ideas that fly in the face of reason, and
affirming non-belief for some folks is a symbolic breaking away of the
chains of true belief—belief in the literal truth, the historical and
deep metaphysical truth of whatever some denomination affirms as its
core. It’s lovely to be a non-believer.
But wait, my point today involves the semantics of that word. It’s a
word that really has many different meanings, is fuzzy. There’s a time
in childhood when kids believe literally in Santa Claus, and the truth
is that lots of healthy kids don’t give up on that belief—they modify
it. They can tolerate the following: I know it’s not really true, but I
enjoy believing. Now this isn’t clearly logical, but then again that’s
the point: The mind can tolerate and indeed thrives on its own mushy
non-logical nature—which allows for mixed experiences of poetry and
song lyrics, pet names and nicknames, and innumerable other
“permutations” of reality that generate the juice that makes life worth
living.
“I believe in you” is not meant to be a statement of fact, because it’s
ambiguous on several counts: What does it mean? I believe you exist? I
believe you’re perfect and have no flaws? It’s more in the sense of “I
believe in your potential,” but most folks who say anything like this
will quickly allow the qualification, “...if you don’t mess things up.”
It’s meant as an encouragement, a mixture of “I really am trying to
recognize you, see you, appreciate your strengths, and to some extent
perhaps I do see your potential more clearly than you do” or something
like that. It’s a nice thing to be able to say to someone; a nice thing
to have someone say to you.
But it’s a different sense of the term, Believe.
There’s also the sense of provisional. I believe that’s so—but I’m
aware that you could correct me. It’s okay, not the end of the world. I
can believe this and the choice of words—or maybe the nonverbal
emphasis—can communicate how threatened I’d be, how angry or enraged,
if you don’t believe along with me.
Back to our context in a church or spiritual community—Unitarians
generally value being non-dogmatic. Believing this or that is
definitely not a requirement. Well, maybe I believe you’re not going to
violently assault me—a belief in general civility, and a belief that we
all hold lightly to what we believe and allow others to believe what
they do.
Lots of folks get real uncomfortable with the word, even, again because
they’re in emotional reaction to the way belief was used in their
childhood. The word can be used as a hammer, no doubt about it. I’m
really talking about semantics, sensitizing you to how words can have
light or heavy emotional weight. I’m talking about critical thinking
and playful thinking and relaxing your own defensive reactivity about
triggers. This applies to all sorts of words that deal with heavy
emotional subjects—political, sexual, religious, and so forth.
Open to the way that lots of folks enjoy believing even though they
know that what they believe may not be literally true. It’s more of an
allegory, a poetic way of speaking, trying to express that middle
sphere of sort-of-believing. I believe in music, I believe in love.
Mythology Reconsidered (May, 2011)
We are surrounded by myth, but it is either ignored, considered
sentimental, or confused with fact. America is a great country, our
religion is good—indeed, the best, and my grandkids are the cutest.
These value judgments are attached to a few factual ideas that are
teased out from the larger phenomenon—with the negative elements
ignored. Or, for our enemies, the opposite is so, ignoring the positive
elements of their culture or cause. Our religion is not myth; their
religion is.
Really, though, what we’re talking about is the interplay of two
aspects of mind—the assessment of fact, in a matter-of-fact fashion;
and the assessment of the meaning, implications, or tones associated
with fact or fable. Myth has been not only marginalized—treated as a
second-best reality, not as good as fact—, but associated with certain
kinds of stories associated especially with spiritual entities. Myth
blurs into fable, legend, non-spiritual themes, comic books,
contemporary stories that have captured the imaginations of children
and also or mainly adults, and characters, too.
Sports and its characters are mythic, as are celebrities and their
performances. The glamorous or disgusting—such elements may have a
little factual dimension, but their vitality comes from their power to
pull at the psychic motivations that are in part fulfilled vicariously,
through our varying degrees of identification. We may identify both
with hero in the winning and also with the villain to some degree, for
his delicious wickedness. Hey, in good stories, in many a movie
“fight,”, the bad guy almost wins!
What is important is the way folks live to some significant degree—some
more than that, even, in mythic worlds.
7/6/11
The key point to be presented today is the idea that we need to
loosen up about belief and believing. It doesn’t have to be all or
nothing, either-or. When Mac Davis sang “I believe in music, I believe
in Love,” in the 1960s, he expressed the common, looser, more poetic
middle ground.
Admittedly, there does seem to be a context set in the field of
religion that deals with belief in an either-or fashion—either you do
believe, or you don’t. Perhaps you don’t believe enough. What is
referred to is dogma, ideas that fly in the face of reason, and
affirming non-belief for some folks is a symbolic breaking away of the
chains of true belief—belief in the literal truth, the historical and
deep metaphysical truth of whatever some denomination affirms as its
core. It’s lovely to be a non-believer.
But wait, my point today involves the semantics of that word. It’s a
word that really has many different meanings, is fuzzy. There’s a time
in childhood when kids believe literally in Santa Claus, and the truth
is that lots of healthy kids don’t give up on that belief—they modify
it. They can tolerate the following: I know it’s not really true, but I
enjoy believing. Now this isn’t clearly logical, but then again that’s
the point: The mind can tolerate and indeed thrives on its own mushy
non-logical nature—which allows for mixed experiences of poetry and
song lyrics, pet names and nicknames, and innumerable other
“permutations” of reality that generate the juice that makes life worth
living.
“I believe in you” is not meant to be a statement of fact, because it’s
ambiguous on several counts: What does it mean? I believe you exist? I
believe you’re perfect and have no flaws? It’s more in the sense of “I
believe in your potential,” but most folks who say anything like this
will quickly allow the qualification, “...if you don’t mess things up.”
It’s meant as an encouragement, a mixture of “I really am trying to
recognize you, see you, appreciate your strengths, and to some extent
perhaps I do see your potential more clearly than you do” or something
like that. It’s a nice thing to be able to say to someone; a nice thing
to have someone say to you.
But it’s a different sense of the term, Believe.
There’s also the sense of provisional. I believe that’s so—but I’m
aware that you could correct me. It’s okay, not the end of the world. I
can believe this and the choice of words—or maybe the nonverbal
emphasis—can communicate how threatened I’d be, how angry or enraged,
if you don’t believe along with me.
Back to our context in a church or spiritual community—Unitarians
generally value being non-dogmatic. Believing this or that is
definitely not a requirement. Well, maybe I believe you’re not going to
violently assault me—a belief in general civility, and a belief that we
all hold lightly to what we believe and allow others to believe what
they do.
Lots of folks get real uncomfortable with the word, even, again because
they’re in emotional reaction to the way belief was used in their
childhood. The word can be used as a hammer, no doubt about it. I’m
really talking about semantics, sensitizing you to how words can have
light or heavy emotional weight. I’m talking about critical thinking
and playful thinking and relaxing your own defensive reactivity about
triggers. This applies to all sorts of words that deal with heavy
emotional subjects—political, sexual, religious, and so forth.
Open to the way that lots of folks enjoy believing even though they
know that what they believe may not be literally true. It’s more of an
allegory, a poetic way of speaking, trying to express that middle
sphere of sort-of-believing. I believe in music, I believe in love.
61611
It is possible to believe and to know you’re making it up. In the
olden days that knowledge was taken to be a negative, as if one somehow
diminished the idea. But this is a misunderstanding of the way mind
works. The idea that truth must be factual, must be out there,
measurable, is an artifact of the 18th - 20th century positivist
world-view. It’s associated with several corollaries. One is that there
is one universe, no more; and that our existence has all its meaning in
terms of how well we cope and build within this out-there-objective
reality. There are no other realities.
What’s flagrantly left out is subjective experience, although this
accounts for half of what we live; and inter-subjective
what-we-create-together accounts for another 40% Dealing with the
constraints of physical reality may only be 10%! We must realize that
what was called superstition, and what we flee from, are ideas that are
held on the intersubjective level and sometimes subjectively by many
people. What we’re fleeing from is not the ideas so much as the
associated idea that it is right and important to impose those ideas on
children and society.
But Thomas Jefferson was closer to it when he said something like if it
doesn’t break my bones or pick my pocket, believe what you will.
The illusion that there are no illusions and we can seek to achieve
that bliss of disbelief is as wicked as the illusion that this or that
illusion is factually true and we must impose it on you.
If you pause and think about it, illusions are not only pervasive, but
they make up the very fabric of human life. Jung calls them the
archetypes, and they account for bonding between parent and child,
among family members, the sense of we in any context, romance, the
whole illusion of fellowship. There are no objective elements in social
relations, only symbols created to signify our intentions and feelings.
There are levels of tradition and degrees to which one confuses these
illusions and factual reality, which overlaps in the modern mind with
degrees to which one must bow to their authority. If it’s called
scientific and it’s measured and it’s in print in some peer reviewed
journal it carries more authority than if it lacks those qualities. But
it’s all illusion.
We’re in the 21st century now, the postmodern era. People have been
looking very hard for objectivity and have indeed found a good deal of
it, but it’s always within certain contexts. In the realm of human
affairs, science is very much more attenuated than it is within the
physical sciences, and at the extremes of astronomical distances or
sub-microscopic fields, at the very fast or slow, very powerful or very
subtle, our knowledge not only faces barriers of ignorance, but
mysteries about how the cosmos does NOT operate according to laws we
understand to be appropriate for the middle area.
Other than to critique the modern prideful viewpoint that it really
knows what’s real and what’s not, I want to emphasize again that the
illusion that much of life is objective—which is what I grew up
believing—needs radical revision, and even reversal.
When we realize that mind is a kind of dimension or category of valid
reality, it opens up things in one way and makes trouble in others.
First of all, it explains so much of our world that is pervaded by,
infused by, mind, emotion, attitude, expectation, desire.
Second of all, it opens to another mystery: People are so very
different, and more, they experience things that cannot be accounted
for by our objective consensus. There are two categories for this:
common sense, which is nothing more than a collective hunch, a social
consensus that can simply be a prejudice of region and historical era.
The second category involves the weirdos, those experiences that are
generally not talked about or shared. This category includes, in the
West, psychic experiences, mystical experiences, contacts with
extra-terrestrials, and thousands of local cults, new age beliefs, and
so forth.
Now what if truth isn’t an either-or category? What if it’s really
quite possible for people to have idiosyncratic experiences and they
operate as truth within that person’s life?
This whole problem has been obscured by the growth of the field of
psychiatry, supplanting religion. The idea that there’s being realistic
and there’s being mad, crazy, insane, is a very artificial division
between extremes. It’s like the division between work and play,
childhood and adulthood. There are a few semi-valid issues here, but on
the whole, it’s an artificially imposed difference, a set of words and
associated meanings, an illusion. The truth is not that everyone is a
little crazy, as if that’s a bad thing, but that there is a vast middle
ground of imagination and illusory experience that makes for the great
majority of human experience.
Do you like your work? Do you hate this or that? Can you differentiate
your own preferences and tastes from reality? I confess that I had
trouble with this: I used to think that “interesting” was an objective
category, and if I could only explain well enough why something was
interesting, then others would indeed join me in being interested.
Gradually it dawned on me that interest was subjective, not
objective—people were or were not interested, and explaining why might
help involve only a very tiny fraction of those who in fact might have
been a little interested.
I’m making a plea here for meta-cognition, for cultivating the ability
to think about the way you think. This includes the capacity to know
you’re pretending, you’re living as-if, almost all of the time, and it
works just fine, thank you.
I’m suggesting that it’s a good idea to know explicitly that you are
looking at the way you think you know, to add another level of
reflection. Knowing that you don’t just think, but you imagine, you
pretend, you play, your thinking is infused dynamically with made-up
expectations, common illusions, social norms, selected memories—this is
like knowing that life is more complicated than what it seems on the
surface. It’s like knowing about anatomy and physiology and germs and
electricity—all phenomena that a few hundred years ago was considered
occult—which means hidden. We know much more about it, or we think we
do, or we believe experts do, so we don’t have to worry.
I’m suggesting that the mind is an illusion-generating organ, as much
as the kidney is a urine-generating organ, and we cannot, can not, rise
above it. I frankly believe and await evidence to the contrary that
those who claim they have indeed risen beyond illusion have indeed done
so, or might they instead have learned another set of more refined
illusions that interpret raw perception without such a thick backstory
of expectations? I’m talking about Zen satori here. But what’s the
chance that this is itself a very refined type of illusion?
Leaving out the illusion that we can transcend our illusion-making,
there is something that we can indeed do: We can not give in to the
illusion that every illusion is really real. There’s a thick gradient
of knowing that we’re playing—and indeed, the prevalent and
life-affirming activity of play, the activity that gives live so much
richness and joy, sweetness and spice, meaning and the feeling of
having really lived—all involves having played more fully! And play in
turn is a quality that offers a dual experience: On one level, we do in
a variably exploratory way, within the realms of pretend activity or
rules or whatever. On another level—and this dual level experience and
action is crucial!—we live at more than one level much of the time,
whether or not we’re explicitly aware of it—on another level, we are
generating communications and attitudes that make this activity
playful, safe, pretend. Things don’t count. You can sometimes take it
over. If you lose, there’s no big loss, we’re all friends here.
Let me note that our commercialization of everything including play has
created vivid phenomena, institutions in which what is called play has
a great deal of weight. Economically and politically, winning and
losing at games is almost as bad as war. There are also forms of play
that are almost war, in terms of people inflicting bodily harm on one
another—harm that may be permanent and rarely fatal. In this category
include kids games structured by parents or imitating real games in
which when Charlie Brown strikes out the social consequences are not
trivial. Ladies and Gentleman, all that kind of stuff is called play
but it’s really closer to work and seriousness. It’s not fun.
The truth of play is that you’re pretty safe. There are borderline
games in which the fun is dallying with being unsafe, falling off the
roof or out of the tree. But on the whole, play is physically safe, and
more important, socially safe. You’re still my friend even if you acted
like a monster chasing me and I acted like I was really scared.
I’m suggesting that much of life is infused with elements of play and
elements of illusion and that this makes life juicy. There are not
actual clear boundaries among categories, so it’s okay to realize that
people play with their food, play with cooking, and that eating is
partly illusory. Candlelight and wine—oh, don’t get me started on the
illusions associated with better and worse wines and liquors, with the
games associated with refined tastes in food, in music, etc. We’re
talking not full illusion, but not not-illusion either.
So the point I’m getting at is to recognize it, and embrace much of it.
When you know you’re playing, you know you’re making it up, and you can
choose to modify the way you make it up. How much do you want to
believe this? Much of life involves shifting levels of belief. Levels
of belief.
You drive along believing things are okay—this is adaptive. If you
drove along expecting that in fact at any moment some crazy guy would
swerve into your lane you wouldn’t be able to drive at all. But it’s
in-between: You 1% know that’s possible, and if some guy drifts, your
alert level goes almost instantaneously—if you’re not absorbed in a
phone conversation—to 30% and if he drifts more to 95% and you’re
beginning to slow down or take your own evasive action. Illusion shifts
very quickly—the mind can do that. Wha? What was that funny sound?!!!
From another perspective I’m talking about this being the century that
psychology enters the mainstream. Science entered the mainstream in the
20th century, and psychology needs to in the 21st century. We were sort
of blind to psychology. The earliest gropings of rat psychology and
psychoanalysis seemed stupid and merited being somewhat dismissed or
marginalized. It wasn’t something all of us could use. But there were
some good ideas there that needed to be refined out, the way oil needed
refinement at the end of the 19th century in order to become useable
gasoline. And near the end of the 20th and early 21st century,
psychology is becoming user-friendly.
It needs to enter the mainstream of philosophy and religion. We need to
recognize how much the mind and its attitudes, its ways of using
language, its expectations and world-views—really affects our illusion
that there is a reality that’s free of illusion.
Half the people we grew up with—maybe 90%—didn’t think this way because
they were shallow. Things were the way they appeared. Were it not for
the common knowledge that the earth was round and the earth went around
the sun, folks wouldn’t believe it; but the line of Popeye, I yam what
I yam and that’s what I yam, has been the unspoken motto of the 95% of
the human race. It is non-reflective. There’s no meta-cognition, no
thinking about our thinking, no recognition that the way we think, our
capacity for generating illusion, is the core thing to be thought
about.
When you know you’re making it all up—or, just to concede the point
that there may be some reality beyond our minds—almost all of it up,
then you can get involved in noticing how much and in what way you’re
making it up and that maybe some of the stuff you make up is really
inherited from how others made it up—most of the stuff, if you stop to
think about it—and then you become free to re-evaluate what you think
and perhaps choose to think, believe, create, something different!
Teenagers do this as they separate from their parents. The trouble is
that most don’t do it consciously. I’m selling doing it consciously.
I’m not suggesting we try not to do it—try to live without illusion.
There was some hope for this in the mid-20th century as we fled from
what we thought was superstition, the excesses of both religious and
political fanaticism. But we confused the deeper process of recognizing
the nature of mind with certain specific elements—to not believe
certain things any longer didn’t mean we could use our minds and not
believe anything. That was itself an illusion, the illusion of being
triumphantly illusion-free. It played out.
Summary
Dare to consider that you are making up your world as you live it.
Dare to open to the idea that this activity of creating your own life
operates to a degree that is far greater than you may have realized. I
concede that there is an operation of fortune, of the impact of
externally-caused events. I’m not one who makes this claim in an
absolute fashion—I’m not convinced that such an extreme stance is
accurate. On the other hand, our interpretation of what we have already
created as it interacts with what is presented to us from the outside,
and how we interpret this interplay and our own responses to it—there’s
a lot that we are co-creating. Interpretation is an active process, not
a neutral perception. We superimpose our own expectations and biases on
experience and confuse that with the illusion of unbiased, impartial
reality-testing. What an illusion!
The first illusion is that “it” (i.e., events and their significance)
is operating independently of you out there. Let that idea serve as the
foundation for a willingness to chose what you believe. Know that
belief isn’t all or nothing. You can believe something and know it’s
not factually true—but neither is it false. It’s what you choose to
believe.
Mac Davis had a song in the late 1960s that goes, I believe in music; I
believe in love. Belief in this case is not a statement assessing cold,
hard, evidence-based fact. Rather, it’s a statement of affirmation, of
blessing. It means, “I choose to affirm the value of...” One can
say, “I believe in you” and not mean that I believe you exist, but
rather I believe in your power to tap into your talents and strengths.
We can believe in a positive future without being naive. I would go so
far as to say that this kind of conscious optimism is for the most part
healthy, while pessimism operates simply as an excuse to dis-engage, as
in, It’s all going to hell, so it’s okay if I retreat to my short-term
goals and narrow interests. Nor do I mind a measure of retreat—I’m
hardly in a go go go mode. But I do think some reaching out beyond my
private interests or the needs of loved ones.
We can love, and love is largely illusory—but a very healthy one. We
can live as if there’s a meaning, and what meanings we choose to add
on, whether they be supernatural religion or a transcendent myth.
My proposal is that we dare to know that we’re making up myths and dare
to make them in a wider-scope, deeper grounding in the past, hopeful
for the future, inclusive of what you have to offer as art or work,
politics or care of the family, whatever. The cosmos truly needs all
kinds.
.
