How The Beliefs You Hold Shape Your Life
Photo by prottoy hassan on Unsplash
by WITHIN Meditation teacher Jonathan Borella
It is a rare and precious thing to be born a human in this universe.
As far as we can tell, it is the one station from which consciousness has evolved enough reflective powers to transform itself and realize a state of being that transcends the basic drives of its forebears to merely eat, sleep, and procreate. Humans, it seems, have the unique privilege of experiencing awe as we contemplate the scale of the cosmos, of not just living but living with a purpose, and of exercising our own will to participate in the cultivation and conditioning of our own character.
These are pleasures granted by the mind that knows itself. Just as these are unique to us, they go hand in hand with a species of suffering that is also unique to us.
To have all one’s basic needs met and still want more is the sad predicament of our kind.It is born from the same evolutionary adaptation that makes us available to wonder and imagination. To gaze out over the ocean and feel alienated or insignificant is the angst of a mind that can conceive of itself as separated from, and thus vulnerable to, the world.
Spirituality is our desperate attempt to free ourselves from mind made constraints and realize our highest human potential. It is the search for ultimate well-being that has preoccupied our ancestors since primates won the powers of abstract thought.
As a search for well-being, spirituality is not limited to the animist, polytheist, or monotheist traditions of antiquity nor to the new-age mysticism of today. Philosophy, medicine, physics, politics, and indeed hedonism are simply evolved ways of searching for well-being and are themselves a symptom of spirituality. Each of them start with their own assumption of the way the world is, regarded as truth.
Thus every spiritual path considers its culmination to be the direct realization of the truth, which releases the tension in our desires pulling against a world that resists them. One’s being aligns with the way things are.
An assumption of the way the world is is a belief, and no spiritual system can gain any traction without it.
Even the Zen ideal of a beginner's mind is based on a belief that reality is basically ungraspable and any attempt to model it mentally is delusive. Zen is full of paradoxes. But this paradox reveals that there is an inescapable relationship between belief and spirituality, and, therefore, between belief and well-being. Whether or not your quest is successful - whether or not you even begin the quest - depends on what you believe about the world, yourself, and what is possible.
Many spiritual paths place salvation in belief itself. For Christians, the way to heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ, for Muslims in Muhamed. Besides faith in their various figureheads, religions generally come with their own sets of doctrines and dogmas that also require belief.
Many self help gurus of the modern era likewise espouse The Power of Belief, and even science, though free of dogma in principle, believes in its own method as the solution to all of life’s problems.
It only takes a quick glance at the menu of beliefs offered by each of these systems to know that many of them are incompatible. Just as we wouldn’t stomach a banana split topping for our halibut filet, we are not going to reach the pinnacle of spirituality simply by embracing all of the beliefs held in its name.
Besides being incompatible with each other, we now know some historically cherished beliefs to be incompatible with well-being in terms of physical and psychological health. This is a conundrum. Anyone on a search for ultimate well-being can expect a fair amount of anxiety coming from the question of what to believe.
One of the most helpful answers to this dilemma, I believe, was given by the Buddha to a group of people known as the Kalamas. They had hosted spiritual teachers of many sorts, each praising his own beliefs and disparaging the beliefs of others. The Kalamas were at a loss as to what to believe.
So, they asked the Buddha which of the teachers they should believe in. His response makes him remarkable among his peers in all spiritual traditions, philosophies, and scientific disciplines. To the Buddha, well-being does not depend on what you believe so much as why you believe. He offered the Kalamas a long list of bad reasons to believe something. It includes reports, legends, traditions, scripture, logical conjecture, inference, analogies, agreement through pondering views, probability, and the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.” You may be wondering, “What reasons are left?”
The Buddha told the Kalamas that only when they knew for themselves certain beliefs to be skillful - that is, leading to happiness and welfare - should they be adopted and carried out. Conversely, they were instructed to abandon beliefs when they knew them to lead to harm and suffering.
This approach flips the role of belief on its head. Rather than an end in itself, belief is a means to an end with practical applications in the spiritual life.
Consider the difference in fulfillment one is likely to feel if they believe it is possible for them to reach their goals through their own effort versus one who believes effort is wasted in a world that is stacked against them. Which is likely to realize their vision? Which is likely to feel empowered? Which is likely to perceive themself as in a position to help others?
Though the Buddha dismissed most beliefs related to metaphysical questions as distractions from true spiritual life, he did regard certain beliefs about the efficacy of action as objectively more skillful than others precisely because of how people behave based on their beliefs.
For there to be any hope of ultimate well-being, the Buddha taught, you have to believe that ultimate well-being is possible for you. You have to believe that your actions have consequences for better or worse. And you have to believe that it is possible, through your own effort, to act more and more skilfully with better and better results.
A belief is just a way we approximate something about the world to ourselves. Because our faculties of perception are so limited, we can only live in a conditioned and fabricated representation.
Though this puts ever having direct knowledge of the truth just outside reach, it is also what makes liberation from suffering possible. Rather than passively accepting the beliefs of a tradition or helplessly submitting to beliefs that form willy nilly, you can train your mind to form new models and representations that motivate you and empower you.
Any time you catch yourself reciting a belief such as, “It’s too hard,” “I’m too damaged,” “They don’t want me to succeed,” stop and ask yourself what believing such a thing is going to lead you to do or not do.
Does it lead to happiness and welfare or suffering and harm? Likewise, whenever you find yourself in a rut, stuck in some habit you sincerely want to change, or caught in some unsatisfying interpersonal dynamic, stop and ask yourself, “What beliefs and attitudes brought me here?”
Once you see for yourself how acting on different beliefs leads to different outcomes, you’ll be naturally drawn to the skillful ones and uninterested in the unskillful. And then one day the breakthrough will happen. As you are training your beliefs to be more and more skillful, it will dawn on you that all beliefs are intended, contrived, and fabricated, and thus inconstant and not ultimately yours or who or what you really are. You’ll have no reason to cling to any belief at all. This, just this, is the ultimate well-being.
Jonathan teaches occasionally in our online studio. Join him for a class this week!