The unwisdom of belief
A mind which is constrained by belief can never know the truth
Belief is a problem? No: belief is the problem. On our planet, at the moment, belief is the major problem. If there wasn't so much belief, there wouldn't be so much conflict.
Kevin strongly believes in this kind and style of God; Rachel strongly disbelieves in that kind and style of God. Kevin and Rachel's beliefs separate them from each other.
The next level up from this perceptual estrangement is that beliefs throughout the world are organised into tribes of Kevins and Rachels. These tribes are called Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, whatever. Beliefs function by dividing human from human; tribe from tribe.
Each tribe is confused about the ultimate spiritual verities; each tribe thinks that by adopting belief, its confusion will be cleared away. Belief is an attempt to escape from the manifest existence of human confusion; it is a tribal attempt to swap confusion for certainty.
It is not good for the human mind to be tethered to beliefs. If a mind is tethered to beliefs, that mind cannot think straight. If a mind is constrained by its beliefs, that mind can hardly think at all. It can't stay alert. It can't know itself. It can't even begin on the spiritual path, which has as its starting point personal self-knowledge.
To know oneself as one really is, requires an extraordinary alertness of mind. Such an alertness of mind is drugged stupid by belief. And it is anaesthetised even deeper by dogma. Dogma is the hierarchical level up from belief. And it is anaesthetised deeper still by religion. Religion is the hierarchical level up from dogma.
It might be asked: What is the next hierarchical level up from religion? The answer is uncomfortable. The next hierarchical level up from religion is planetary extinction.
Stakeholders in organised religion might object that this view is too painful to be tolerated. But religion likes pain. Where would religion be without unnecessary pain and the rumour of unnecessary pain? Religion is a terrorist behaviour: an edifice built on the contrived pain of others.
To break free, to begin on the spiritual path, to know oneself, there must be the awareness, the alertness of mind in which there is a felt sense of freedom from all beliefs and from all idealisations. This is because beliefs and ideals surround us with an artificial distorting lens, subverting accurate perception.
All this sounds a lot like Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti's teachings and Christ's early New Age teachings are very nearly identical.
Questions can be put. Do humans actually need beliefs at all? Is any sort of belief necessary for personal spiritual freedom and progress?
Krishnamurti pointed out that we don't need a belief to know that there is sunshine or mountains or rivers. We don't need a belief to know that we and our partners quarrel. We don't have to have a belief to know that life is a terrible, boring misery, with its anguish, ambition and conflicts. All that is a fact. But we demand a belief when we want to escape from a fact in order to enter an unreality.
This goes for any belief, not just religious belief: economic belief, educational belief, medical belief, political belief. The whole lot. Belief is the bogey. To indulge an allusion to Harry Potter: belief is the boggart.
On our planet at the moment, religious beliefs still subtend a lot of economic, educational, medical and political beliefs. Think of America. Think of the failure of America. Think of the collapse of the American Dream. Think of the banksters' victory in eradicating the middle class. And then think of the strength of America's self-destructive beliefs.
What Krishnamurti is suggesting is that one's religion, one's belief in God, is an escape from actuality. And a mind which escapes from the actual, from the facts of relationship, will never find God. A mind which is constrained by belief can never know the truth.
From the facts of which relationships does the human mind seek to escape by burying itself in belief? Inter-personal relationships; inter-competitor relationships; inter-faith relationships; international relationships; inter-generational relationships; inter-specific relationships; inter-planetary relationships; inter-kingdom relationships; inter-dimensional relationships. Escape is sought from the facts of the whole nexus of relationships which is the actuality of what human language, in English, calls God. Or the Higher Evolution.
We need to enquire what belief actually is. What is belief? Belief is corruption.
Belief is corruption because behind belief and morality lies the mind, the self - the self growing big, powerful and strong. If we let spirituality degenerate into religion, we let spirituality degenerate into belief. And then we are in trouble. We are in trouble because belief acts and its act is to corruptly poison the mind. Belief covertly takes the mind in a direction which is not in its best interests. If this happens, the mind cannot be free. It has been corrupted by belief.
It is only in freedom that one can find out what is true; what is God; what is the highest. This cannot be done through belief, because a believer's belief projects what the believer thinks ought to be God, what the believer thinks ought to be true. Belief projects a constructed fantasy, or a received fantasy constructed by others.
And another difficulty is that beliefs also clutter up the mind, filling it with yesterday's junk and trash. A cup is useful only when it is empty. A mind that is stuffed full with beliefs, with dogmas, with superstitions, with assertions, with quotations and proof-texts, is an uncreative mind. It is a useless mind. It is a mind which cannot be filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit, or with whatever you call the creative energy of the universe.
A further difficulty is that the mind of the believer is a repetitive mind; a mind which continually parrots yesterday's bad ideas under the guise of certainty-mantras. It is like an endless tape endlessly replaying the same old stuff, and endlessly and inevitably deteriorating into noise for noise's sake, as the tape wears out. Repetition is not truth.
So are we suggesting here is that belief is not a good thing? Yes. And by good in this context is meant tending towards growth and free forward evolution. Such a suggestion might not play well among the Southern Baptists.
Is belief a bad thing? Yes. But instead of bad, one might say tending towards ossification and stasis.
On the subject of belief, churchbores sometimes rehearse the nostrum that if you don't believe in something, you are in danger of believing in anything. This is a schoolboy debating point. Is there an answer?
To believe in something is to give away one's power to a human cultural invention. This human cultural invention is called a belief. The belief is a cultural artefact; an expedient superstition. It's a lump of stuff propping up the status quo of acceptable thinking.
The belief is an invented chunk of words designed to support a fixed position. It radiates a sort of cold, negative energy which is truth-phobic. The more beliefs you allow to be implanted in your mind, the less truth gets through to you.
So, if you don't believe in something, you are not in danger of believing in anything: you are in danger of receiving a lot of new truth fast. Not new beliefs: new truth, new spiritual data, new revelations.
On this view, a belief is a chosen intellectual construct which has the function of keeping truth out. A belief is an instrument of stuckness. If an array of such beliefs is assembled in an organised, patterned and interlinked manner, as in a catechism, or a creed, or a dogma, or an atonement theory, and is wilfully held in place in conscious intellection, the mind becomes almost blind. The belief-array functions as a tight filter preventing the entry of new revelations.
It's worth checking in a dictionary. What does it say under the word belief? Something like: a belief is a conviction of the truth of something; an opinion or doctrine held to be true.
A belief is a thought-form, a construct on the mental plane (the fifth dimension), which carries an exclusive truth-claim energy which functions in the intellection by saying: "I am right; that which is anti-me is wrong". A belief is a conflict-signifier energised by a right-versus-wrong referent. And thus we lose the Southern Baptists again.
One background problem here is that there is no such thing in the spiritual world as right or wrong. These are simply the control fictions of religiosity. One of the central lies of the religious experiment on our planet has been that a moral stasis is possible. This lie asserts that certain things are eternally right and their polar opposites are eternally wrong; certain things are good and their polar opposites are evil.
But, in actuality, there can be no such dichotomy because there is no stasis in the spiritual world. Nothing is static. All is process. All is change. All is movement. All is dance. God's will is Evolution. Static positions nowhere exist.
If we attempt to set up a static position against the prevailing fluency of All That Is - a static position such as a belief - we get ill and we begin to shrivel spiritually into an anxious, undead fear. It is exactly this fear which energises fundamentalist violence in the domains of religion, economics, education, medicine and politics.
In the spiritual mind there can be no legitimate place for belief because the spiritual mind has to be kept free and open at all times to receive new data uncritically. It cannot do this efficiently if it is cluttered up with belief-constructs which function to keep new data out.
Belief is unwise.
But what do you do if a new idea comes along? How do you make a spiritual value-judgement about it? How do you assess it? How do you work out whether it is true or not?
What you do is this. You ask: Is this new idea interesting? Is it beautiful? Does it feel good? Does it keep me free?
If the answer to each of these four questions, considered unhurriedly over a period of time, is yes, then you might be inclined to trust your intuition and regard the new idea as veridical.
But it is veridical only for you, only provisionally, and only for now.
