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The Filter of Belief
One of my all-time greatest “pet peeves” with regards to the New Age movement and pop spirituality is this tenacious teaching that “Belief creates reality.” For some reason, this idea just won’t die, no matter how easy it is to disprove. And it’s so bloody easy to show that it’s wrong that I’m not even going to bother to explain it for you or give you an example, because you should be able to come up with a million and one yourself.
Anyway, I think the reason this notion hangs on though is because it once again offers us a promise of resolving the basic conundrum of human existence: how to make the outside circumstances match the interior ideal. They promise that if you simply believe, that’s all you need. And if that doesn’t work, then you’re just not doing it right. I read somewhere recently that in the original version of Peter Pan, the power of flight was given not by pixie dust, but by belief alone. And that they had to change it and add pixie dust as the main magical ingredient to keep kids from hurting themselves. Whether this is factual or simply an urban legend is largely irrelevant, because it’s “True” in a much more real sense.
John Lash of Metahistory (who I will be doing an email interview with soon) has a decent quote against all this though.
[B]elief in itself creates nothing, but acts to filter all that we can imagine and create.
This to me seems a hundred thousand times more accurate than the New Age idea that belief creates reality. Instead, belief seems to prevent us from creating certain realities. It chokes off potential perspectives and possible alternatives and experiences. So, if that’s the case, how do we go about dismantling our beliefs? Is there anything that belief is really good for?
- Using Beliefs As Stop-Signs
- Delusional Beliefs
- Scientists & God
- Is Belief in God Simplistic?
- Ritual without belief
- Prev: Socrates The Trickster
- Next: Religions As Software
July 31st, 2005 at 1:45 pm
is there like belief past which is a choke hold, and then belief now which is conjuring from imagination into here? because i cant dismiss belief purely as a system that needs dismantling, rather i tend to see it in a new agey fashion i suppose, as part of the process… so i guess belief as a verb im into, as a adjective its a limiter…
maybe some root word analysis would give some insight into the color of the word…
one
human?
July 31st, 2005 at 1:51 pm
That’s a good point. That you can have a belief which allows you to bring something into existence, and you can have beliefs which prevent you from bringing things into existence. If I didn’t have beliefs that helped me bring things into existence, then I wouldn’t have this website, nor would I have accomplished much else in life…
July 31st, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Maybe we could make a distinction between an impulse or a driving image to bring something into reality, and a belief which maybe has more to do with an assumption about how reality already is. Does that work? Where does that take us?
July 31st, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Ahhh, belief. Yet another one of those “agreements” that we unconsciously make so we can get by in the world with other beings. Now, belief “does” create many elements of our world- for instance, a great deal of our economic system is nothing but belief- belief in the value of goods that frequently have no innate value. Many goods which are purely aesthetic (and thus based on a subjective belief in their beauty) are worth far more than goods that are essential. Or just look at the emergence of the economies of online gaming… I recently read an article in which an economist who studies games has now computed that the 77th largest economy in the world belongs to EverQuest- a country of over a million virtual citizens with a per capita GDP of $2300! (The “plats” of EverQuest trade at a higher value than the Yen) The “value” of these goods are based purely upon belief- a belief in attaining status, or that the posession of such goods will bring us happiness.
Our beliefs inform our social interactions. Our assumptions about who we are what we’re capable of. Our attitudes toward everything.
Believing that an oncoming truck is actually Santa Claus coming up to shake your hand, though, isn’t going to stop you from being flattened. But beliefs can, and do, shape a great deal of our lives. Belief creates a great deal of reality- but your reality is one shared with billions of other entities, with their own beliefs.
(Another way to look at this is the Nietzschean angle- belief may create reality, but the realities of those who hold greater amounts of power win out over those with lesser amounts. Thus, we create our own reality either by overcoming the current “shapers of reality” and becoming one ourselves (ala Napoleon or Hegel), or we try to leave their sphere of influence and create our reality in a place where we are free to do so without interference (ala Buddha or Thoreau).)
In any event, only beliefs that are acted upon shape reality. Belief can’t be a process of mental masturbation; visualization and affirmation are only goads to action.
July 31st, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Hm, those are some great points. If I had to paraphrase and boil them down I’d draw two main points out of all that:
- Beliefs do create reality culturally or socially
- Beliefs only create reality when they inform an action, because action is what shapes reality
What does everybody think about that?
PS. That shit about Everquest having the 77th largest economy really flips my lid.
July 31st, 2005 at 5:20 pm
Yes, that pretty much boils it down. And that’s why the New Age trope persists- because it’s half true.
Now, beliefs can push limits, but they’re still constrained by them. Human nature is an insidious beast, and it takes a lot of personal will to bend it. For instance, the failure of Communism was a failure of belief and a failure of action. The belief that the revolution would produce a “new communist man” wasn’t backed up by action capable of creating the “new communist man”. On the other hand, had Lenin and Stalin had access to early 21st century genetic science, pharmacology, and linguistic brainwashing techniques, constructing such a man might have been a possiblity (though a scary and abhorrent one).
On the other hand, the power of Fascism was backed by both belief AND human nature. By filling people’s heads with propaganda and creating a system that pandered to the baser instincts of human nature (violence, accumulation of power, glory, and wealth, tribal chauvinism), a “belief-based” totalitarian system was created that could have probably sustained itself indefinitely, had the democratic world not stepped in to draw the lines. “1984″ illustrates the point clearly- in a properly structured totalitarian system, the boot can crush the face forever, and it does so by limiting people’s capabilities to “believe” in anything else by restricting their language.
Thus belief does quite a bit to construct reality socially and culturally, though it doesn’t do it all- a combination of belief, human nature, and material factors build society.
As for the EQ economy… yeah, that is a mind-blowing figure. What’s even more amazing, IMHO, is how much money South Koreans are spending on online gaming- run some searches, the articles will come up. S. Koreans are spending thousands on worlds that don’t even exist, while their counterparts in the North are starving to death.
July 31st, 2005 at 5:25 pm
without action any form of thought falls flat. the spere of influence bit is interesting. if your personal level of power isn`t sufficient to effect control(or change) in a space then you should look at relocation as a strategy. action is what shapes reality on this plane. maybe what we have is a memory of a time where we existed on a plane where thought was enough? maybe this memory lies at the genetic or neuro-chemical level and causes delusional thinking.
July 31st, 2005 at 5:32 pm
That reminds me… this whole connection between belief and language - what is it? Is their linkage connected to this idea that beliefs can influence social/cultural reality? Seems like it must be. I know NLP probably has something to say about this…
July 31st, 2005 at 6:17 pm
well it would seem that words that have beliefs or (insert another word for “belief” here) infused (definition, or perceived meanings) become talismans or spells cast….
the indo-european root etymology of belief:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/roots/zzl02000.html
same as love and leave?
hmm, be-love…
perhaps belief, the system & word has been co opted of late… the meaning twisted into a prison when it used to be a happier tool….
so you have a thought, imagine something, then to will it into existence through action you must be-love……
McKenna says he doesnt believe in anything except for freedom, because belief automatically rules out the opposite… maybe thats its function, its this world of duality…
i dont really see belief as the same as dogma… which also has interesting Indo-European roots:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/roots/zzd00700.html
July 31st, 2005 at 7:07 pm
Fucking, Indo-European roots are the best!
“Leave” in that instance seems to relate to permission, as when somebody says, “By your leave…” or “With your permission.” It seems that “believe” then did originally have a totally different connotation, almost of giving permission to love something. It’s almost like saying, “I believe in God” means, “I give myself permission to love God.”
THAT BLOWS MY MIND!!
Crazy that “dogma” relates to both “decoration” and “discipline”… Perhaps the decoration is sort of like the incidental effects of the discipline that it takes to love something, after you’ve given yourself permission to do so.
July 31st, 2005 at 7:29 pm
in nlp terms belief is a pre-supposition. it`s either correct, valid and true, which is functional or it`s invalid, invalid and false, and therefore not going to work as a tool.
the logic chain goes like this;
if this happens—i will do this—-and this will happen. pretty straightforward. if you alter the first bit by challenging the belief, then the chain collapses and there is potential for different things to happen.
my personal view on belief is that beliefs form when the facts run out. i call that speculation. good as a passtime, shit as a way to run one`s life.
mckenna probably would accept a slight semantic correction regarding freedom. he would accept as fact that freedom exists and that the opposite is real too.
August 1st, 2005 at 1:32 pm
If you look at belief in a purely functional sense it can act as a filter. If you believe something, as long as it’s in the realm of possibility, it kind of switches the filters on how you perceive the world and you start noticing things that relate to your beliefs. Noticing gives you the power to act upon, which in turn allows you to carve out a space where your belief can have room to grow and flourish.
An easy experiment on filters is to set your filter for a color, say “red” or “blue.” Once you do this, that color will pop out at you all day. Then you can try setting your filter for, say, “beauty.”
D’oh! I just spent this whole comment basically restating the quote at the end of Tim’s post. Anyway, I guess all that is just to say that I have experience of this working in my own life, and the belief=filter thing is pretty useful
(I still am willing to allow for the possibility that belief is even more powerful than even “noticing,” that in some sense we do “create,” but that it is difficult when we are enmeshed in a globe of six billion other souls also believing/creating/filtering. One might be able to create a world for oneself where one can fly around a la Peter Pan, but unless you can get a whole lot of other people to believe in that world with you, all you’ve succeeded in doing is cutting yourself off from “reality.”)
August 1st, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Kylark, that sounds really similar to some of the exercises that Robert Anton Wilson describes in Prometheus Rising.
August 1st, 2005 at 2:30 pm
I haven’t read that; in fact I’ve never read any RAW. I guess I’ve never read him because he was popular among some acquaintances of mine in college, this whole goth pretend-vampire crowd, and I always associate him with that. Maybe I’ll check it out.
August 1st, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Tim, since you seem to be in full-on skeptic mode, you might be interested in this piece about Conspiracy as Religion (via Deconsumption). There’s no permalink, you have to scroll down:
http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm
It’s really thought-provoking; the author posits that the structures in the human psyche that provide for religious belief haven’t gone away; they’ve just been turned toward new targets. Now the “gods” are all-powerful humans that make the world the way it is. He then lists some tenets of uncritical conspiracy theorists that show how it can be akin to religion in its lack of critical thinking. Fortunately, I don’t ascribe to all of them!
Here’s his summary, but the whole article is definitely worth reading:
1. Everything is controlled by a higher power - there are no random events. But this power is human, and human only. 2. Secret groups of people with this power cause everything to happen. 3. They have this vast power because absolutely anything is possible. As long as I imagine it, it can and will happen. There are no limits except human ones. 4. Since there are limits in my life, they can only have been created by humans. 5. If not for the conspiracy, we would be in a Paradise. All bad things in the world were caused by humanity - there is nothing outside humanity. Before humanity had godlike powers, everything was perfect.
August 1st, 2005 at 3:08 pm
Oh that sounds awesome. I’ve written much the same thing elsewhere about conspiracy theory and religion. And frankly, those 5 points are exactly why I think it’s such a good match to gnosticism.
PS. Be forewarned, I don’t uncritically recommend RAW, but there is a lot of good info to be gleaned from that book.
August 1st, 2005 at 3:09 pm
what if belief is more like a Brita filter…. or that sharper image ion air filter thing (which is like the only thing on TV that i want)…
or whatever part of your body that filters toxins & waste….
thinking about it, it really seems like this goes back to your giving up power questions…
a filter, is a tool… and can be used with positive or negative application…
i think not only was he saying that the opposite of freedom exists, but that he intended on ruling it out as a possibility…..
one
human?
August 1st, 2005 at 3:20 pm
I think I’m bagging what you’re raking here human, although the ability to articulate it is only dawning slowly. Beliefs aren’t a bad thing of themselves. You just have to choose good ones to use, because they ARE going to filter things out (or in) accordingly. They don’t just incidentally close off other possibilities, they do it quite intentionally. It’s a stop sign set up around philosophies that say: “Warning! The bridge is out!” (even though the bridge may not actually be out)
One example I’ve been pondering, is this whole debate about Plato vs. Aristotle, the Ideal vs. the Real. And the early Church made the seemingly nonsensical doctrinal decision to say that Jesus was both completely Real and completely Ideal (full man, fully god). And this cheesed off both the platonists and the aristotelians, but what it did was to set up a sort of super-strength filter against the outcomes each of those other philosophies leads to. Again, this is likely why the Church tried to crush Gnosticism, because it circumvented the anti-platonic filter they’d set up. But in the Reformation, the anti-platonic filter was broken off again when Martin Luther came up with Sola Fide (Faith Alone) as the path to salvation - Protestantism as platonism in disguise. Whereas Catholics taught that Good Works were also a part of it, the actions we take on the Aristotelian earth plane, balanced against the reward in Heaven. I always thought they were just being restrictive, but I’m starting to see the philosophical underpinnings of it. It’s kind of brilliant, whether or not you agree with the filters they chose to apply.
August 1st, 2005 at 3:23 pm
Also, I wonder if the reason we’re seeing so much interest in the “Was Jesus Married?” and “Did Jesus Fuck?” questions is because they are the pendulum swinging back to the middle, away from the Protestant/Evangelical “faith alone” Platonic ideal…
August 4th, 2005 at 4:46 am
[…] se the other day between “human” and I and some other commenters regarding the nature of belief, and whether there are any positive uses of it. Without tryin […]