- Questioning Beliefs
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Arthur Schopenhauer
Beliefs are not things, so much as they are mental constructions that maintain their form through the action of believing. The more useful a belief appears to be, the more solid it becomes in our minds. The more it seems set in stone, the less the process of believing is apparent. There is the danger of confusing the map with the territory the map is attempting to describe. Imagination is referred to as ‘make-believe’, and said to be not real, yet all of what we believe is ‘made-beliefs’. It is often our imaginations that reveal deeper understanding of the nature of things, rather than our understandings that appear to be set in stone.
When we know we are using our imaginations, we recognize the living-breathing nature of our process of making beliefs, allowing us to at least map the process of mapmaking more accurately. Being able to imagine a different way of going about life leads us to question our beliefs and to wonder, what if this or that type of experience were possible? What other ways might there be of explaining what has been happening?
Questioning and doubting arise out of uncertainty. In turn, new understandings arise out of the ability to doubt the validity or usefulness of our existing beliefs. English writer Charles Caleb Colton expresses that thought well: “Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.” The Webster Dictionary defines doubt as, ‘To waver in opinion or judgment; to be in uncertainty as to belief respecting anything; to hesitate in belief; to be undecided as to the truth of the negative or the affirmative proposition; to be undetermined.’[i]
To question our beliefs is to set aside the map we are following and open our awareness to the territory we are navigating. We ask if we can be sure if what we thought is actually true, let alone useful. Claude Levi-Strauss reminds us, “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” In order to embrace our inherent genius and expand our understanding, we must accept how ignorant we really are. Albert Einstein said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. “ All further learning will illuminate inadequacies in our ways of thinking and lead to more sophisticated understandings.
Beliefs arise in the first place out of the ability to question the nature of our experience and hypothesize why things are the way they are. This hypothesizing is also a way of simultaneously exploring the usefulness of alternative perspectives and questioning existing beliefs, of viewing subjects from certain premises (given or assumed) and inferring conclusions. It is a way to try to answer ‘what if’ or ‘what will happen if’ questions. What if the Earth is round, how do we explain why it appears to be flat? What happens if the earth isn’t flat and we sail our ships toward the horizon?
We question beliefs by asking, “How do you know that?”, “Is it helpful believing that?”, “What evidence do you have of that?”, or “What evidence do you have that might not be true?”, “What doubts do you have about that?”, “What other explanations can you come up with about why that might be?”, or “How might someone else explain that situation?”
Hypotheses can lead to new theories which, when tested and found true or useful, become beliefs. To test our new theory of the flat earth, we get in our ship and sail west, hoping to get to India. As new and more useful ways of understanding a situation arise, previously held beliefs are disempowered and relegated to the status of old notions or superstitions, irrational beliefs resulting from ignorance or fear of the unknown.
Humans are capable of abstract beliefs. Religion and culture often ask us to believe things when we have had no direct experience of the patterns they describe. Often, we merely take other people’s words as truths. Therefore, it is liberating to think about beliefs more as hypotheses and then to regularly assess their usefulness. Our ability to question and hypothesize evolves as the way we make sense of the world expands and deepens.
Beliefs are encoded in the mind using various combinations of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and to a lesser degree gustatory and olfactory representations: the cinema of our minds. Most of these processes generally happen outside of conscious awareness, although people tend to be more aware of one sensory input than the others. When we believe in our beliefs it is like we are hypnotized, entranced by our own assumptions. Simply examining the structure of beliefs tends to deconstruct them, just as dissecting the production elements of a movie as you watch it will mean you just don’t get caught up in the story. Beliefs encode the story of our lives; if you want to change the script, you need to step out of the movie.
[i] Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) (web1913) www.websters-online-dictionary.org/
Excerpt from Essential Wholeness, Integral Psychotherapy, Spiritual Awakening and the Enneagram
