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#Post#: 13503--------------------------------------------------
A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle it)
By: Willie T Date: March 25, 2020, 3:39 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
From one of my courses:
A BELIEF EXPERIMENT
To begin our work on an experiential note, before I present a
lot of heavy conceptual material, I want to propose a thought
experiment — or better yet, call it a belief experiment. A
belief experiment is where you decide that you will deliberately
believe, as much as you can, a certain thing for a strictly
limited period, say, ten minutes. This is quite different from
the many things we believe for all our lives, never having made
a decision in the first place about whether and for how long we
were going to believe them. So many of them were just
programmed in by our world as we were growing up. A belief
experiment is an experiment: you adopt a belief, observe what
happens during the time you adopt the belief, and then let it
go, so that you can evaluate what the effect of that belief is.
I designed this belief experiment to bring out some important
emotional themes of the culture we modern Westerners live in,
although these beliefs have spread all over the world at this
point. It also aims to bring out some things we implicitly
believe, even if we would never want to express them verbally as
our beliefs. We are going to read a statement of belief, which
is deliberately in the form of a religious creed. It is in a
form parallel to the Apostles' Creed, actually, but it reflects
modern beliefs and is not intended to imply anything derogatory
about Christianity. It is about what goes on in our culture,
what we have been taught about the way the world really is and
who we really are, and about some of the consequences flowing
from that conditioning. We are going to believe it and notice
our reactions.
We will do this because we do not come to learn about
mindfulness from a neutral background. We are not objective
observers, unbiased people able to take and examine things as
they are. We bring a lot of cultural baggage as well as
personal baggage, and it is important to experience that fact.
Before you begin, close your eyes and ask your deeper self if it
is all right to participate in the experiment. See whether your
mind says “yes” or “no.”
(LW Reader, pause a few moments now to do this.)
If you get “no” for an answer, bargain a little to see
if your deeper self will allow you to do this experiment for
just ten or fifteen minutes. Then you can go back to believing
all the beliefs that were programmed into you, which you think
of as "your" beliefs.
If you still get a “no”, then fake going through this
experiment as you read the rest of this post, but do not really
put your energy into it. That way you won't look conspicuous to
others.
In order to make use of various cultural norms to increase the
emotional intensity of this experiment, I want you to stand up
at attention, with your right hand on your heart, as if you were
going to pledge allegiance to the flag. Stand in neat, orderly
virtual rows. We will read the statement aloud together,
slowly.
(LW Reader, stand up in this posture, and imagine a whole group
of people around you going through this with you, doing as you
do. Read it out loud, in a firm voice!)
THE WESTERN CREED
I BELIEVE in the material universe as the only and ultimate
reality, a universe controlled by fixed physical laws and blind
chance.
I AFFIRM that the universe has no creator, no objective purpose,
and no objective meaning or destiny.
I MAINTAIN that all ideas about God or gods, enlightened beings,
prophets and saviors, or nonphysical beings or forces are
superstitions and delusions. Life and consciousness are totally
identical to physical processes and arose from chance
interactions of blind physical forces. Like the rest of life,
my life and my consciousness have no objective purpose, meaning,
or destiny.
I BELIEVE that all judgments, values, and moralities, whether my
own or others', are subjective, arising solely from biological
determinants, personal history, and chance. Free will is an
illusion. Therefore, the most rational values I can personally
live by must be based on the knowledge that, for me, what
pleases me is good, what pains me is sad. Those who please me
or help me avoid pain are my friends; those who pain me or keep
me from my pleasure are my enemies. Rationality requires that
friends and enemies be used in ways that maximize my pleasure
and minimize my pain.
I AFFIRM that churches have no real use other than social
support, that there are no objective sins to commit or be
forgiven for, that there is no retribution for sin or reward for
virtue other than that which I can arrange, directly or through
others. Virtue for me is getting what I want without being
caught and being punished by other.
I MAINTAIN that the death of the body is the death of the mind.
There is no afterlife and all hope of such is nonsense.
Now sit down, close your eyes, and observe your body state and
your feeling state. Continue to watch your feelings and bodily
state while you continue to believe this statement. Do not
worry about intellectual considerations and arguments, but watch
your feelings and body state.
(LW Reader, take at least a couple of minutes to do this. You
might find it helpful to take some notes on your reactions
before reading on.)
OK. It would be very valuable to spend some hours sharing our
reactions and observations with each other, but since we have
many other things to do, let me share some of the ways people
usually react to this belief experiment.
Some people report feeling depressed, like they want to give up.
Most feel sad. I can see from many of your reactions that you
understand that. Others report feeling small or closed in. On
the physical level, some people report that they feel contracted
or dizzy, that their neck hurts, or that their heart rate has
increased. Others may report the experiment helps bring them
into the here and now.
In fact, this experiment is not asking you to believe much of
anything that is particularly different from what is usually
believed by you and by most people around you in the
intellectual circles most of you live in. This is what Western
scientistic culture teaches all the time. It is seldom put in
the form of a bald statement, a creed, an explicit set of
beliefs, but these beliefs are what you get reinforced for; this
is "rationality."
People usually report they discover that a part of them really
believes much of this Western creed, even though consciously
they may think of themselves as spiritual people, who wouldn't
at all agree with statements of this kind. I think that no
matter how different people would normally say their conscious
belief systems are from the creed, the fact that we are
Westerners means that some part of us, often a big part of us,
believes it. It has been conditioned into us and reinforced in
many, many ways over many years. Some people who believe they
are spiritual people have cried when they discover that a part
of them really does believe much of this creed.
I can show you every ostensibly factual statement in this creed,
in some form or another, in basic science textbooks everywhere.
Science (in a distorted form) is the religion of our times. It
is what is officially taught in a variety of ways. You can
externally rebel against this creed, you can have your religious
belief systems, but you know what so-called scientific people
think about your religion, the delusions that weak-willed people
like you, unable to face harsh reality, need to get by.
If you do believe in God, in some kind of spiritual nature to
the universe, in a higher purpose to life, do you ever have
moments of conflict when you think maybe you are wrong in some
of it? Maybe parts of your belief are silly? Maybe it is
immature? We are all taught that so-called primitives need to
believe in God, but aren't we educated people supposed to rise
above primitive superstition?
Actually, in the real sense of science, this put-down is a very
unscientific attitude, but as a social system, this kind of
creed has been taught to us, indoctrinated in us, conditioned in
us, often in much the same way that Ivan Pavlov's dogs were
conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell. This Western
creed exemplifies scientism, science distorted into an
intolerant, fundamentalistic belief system.
WHEN BELIEFS BECOME AUTOMATIC HABITS
Many of us are on a spiritual quest. We hope that there is more
to life than is summarized in this Western creed. And yet its
view is supposed to be sophisticated, proven scientific
knowledge. This attitude constantly affects people on the path.
One of the things I am convinced of is that the more beliefs you
have that are relatively unconscious, that are implicit, that
tend to operate automatically, the more enslaved you are. The
more implicit beliefs, the more “karma” you have, to
use a Buddhist term. If you consciously know you believe
something, you could test that belief.
If you know you believe, for instance, that people will always
betray you, you could, if you wanted to, actually test that
belief. You could say, "I believe people are inherently
untrustworthy, but I might be wrong, so why don't I try an
experiment of trusting a few people and see if they all betray
me?"
Unfortunately, beliefs simply become habits of thinking, habits
of feeling, habits of perceiving. They literally twist the way
we perceive the world, and they just seem natural. We think
that is simply the way things are. We lose the opportunity to
question them, to test them. One of the very important aspects
of mindfulness training is that you learn more and more to see
your own beliefs, to see them in operation, to test them, and to
start seeing the consequences they have for your life. Then you
will eventually have a chance to make decisions about whether
you want to continue to believe them or to change them, rather
than just assuming that they are true.
Well, the ten minutes devoted to the experiment are up, you can
go back to your old set of beliefs.
Except, in a sense, you may not be able to go all the way back.
I hope that you will always be more sensitive to these aspects
of your belief system. One of the great "spiritual teachers" of
the world was the early American patriot Patrick Henry, who
said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." We usually
think of his statement on
a political level, but it is extremely important on a
psychological and spiritual level. Like any statement, it can
be twisted out of context, so that you start thinking paranoia
is the way to go, but let's not go that far. We have to train
ourselves to be vigilant, however, because so much of our mind
is automatized; it just runs by itself, taking away our liberty.
#Post#: 13504--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Hidden In Him Date: March 25, 2020, 3:46 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Willie T link=topic=855.msg13503#msg13503
date=1585168763]
THE WESTERN CREED
I BELIEVE in the material universe as the only and ultimate
reality, a universe controlled by fixed physical laws and blind
chance.
I AFFIRM that the universe has no creator, no objective purpose,
and no objective meaning or destiny.
I MAINTAIN....
[/quote]
I read all the way through to the first few lines of "THE
WESTERN CREED," and I have to say this is creeping me out a
little, LoL.
I'll let someone else be the test guinea pig first. If they
don't make it, I'm out.
#Post#: 13505--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Willie T Date: March 25, 2020, 3:54 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Hidden In Him link=topic=855.msg13504#msg13504
date=1585169171]
I read all the way through to the first few lines of "THE
WESTERN CREED," and I have to say this is creeping me out a
little, LoL.
I'll let someone else be the test guinea pig first. If they
don't make it, I'm out.
[/quote]I didn't say this in the OP, since I already know many
people won't really understand the initial instructions given,
up front, but I suspect there will not be many people who can do
this sort of thing.
#Post#: 13508--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Willie T Date: March 25, 2020, 4:28 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The main point of this experiment is to allow people to see
within themselves if they honestly do really know why they
"believe" what they say they believe.
#Post#: 13518--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Hidden In Him Date: March 25, 2020, 8:01 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Willie T link=topic=855.msg13508#msg13508
date=1585171734]
Now sit down, close your eyes, and observe your body state and
your feeling state. Continue to watch your feelings and bodily
state while you continue to believe this statement. Do not
worry about intellectual considerations and arguments, but watch
your feelings and body state.
(LW Reader, take at least a couple of minutes to do this. You
might find it helpful to take some notes on your reactions
before reading on.)
[/quote]
Ok, back to creepy again. I tried getting a little farther,
Willie, but for me, my "bodily state" says to flat leave this
stuff alone, LoL.
Sorry, bud, but I think I'm just too used to being filled with
the Joy of the Spirit to be able to manage this test...
If the Lord ever takes me to Hell someday as a witness to it,
I'll have no choice...
But if left with a choice I think I'd prefer doing [I]that[/i],
LoL.
#Post#: 13520--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Willie T Date: March 25, 2020, 9:11 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Hidden In Him link=topic=855.msg13504#msg13504
date=1585169171]
I read all the way through to the first few lines of "THE
WESTERN CREED," and I have to say this is creeping me out a
little, LoL.
I'll let someone else be the test guinea pig first. If they
don't make it, I'm out.
[/quote]You do understand, don't you, that the Professor
deliberately came up with supposed "beliefs" for us to consider,
that were purposefully just as much OPPOSITE of the religious
beliefs most of us were raised with as he possibly could? That
was the total necessity to: 1) avoid petty arguing, and 2) to
get us to try and view as "believable" in our minds, (for just a
very short period of time) the most absurd things we could dream
of. And 3) to help us realize much of the world actually does
feel they have thoroughly rational and legitimate reasons to
hold these views..... and that most of us would utterly fail at
any attempt to validate OUR beliefs above theirs. He was
opening up his teaching on getting us to actually have some
inkling of a real idea of WHY we believe what we think we
believe...….. other than, "I was TOLD" to believe it, so I just
do."
#Post#: 13521--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Rita Date: March 26, 2020, 1:04 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Hi Willie,
I started to read the western creed and On some of them, and I
would need to give much more time to this ( I am off work to on
Friday ) the second creed I instantly knew I did not believe the
second creed, and suspect that this may be the case with any,
ut I also suspect that some I will waver with and have to
reflect on- which I presume is the whole point. When we waver it
means that deep down we are not as sure as we think we are about
what we believe.
I have a reflective personality , so that maybe why I find this
kind of thing intriguing xx
Rita
#Post#: 13528--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Nancy Date: March 26, 2020, 7:29 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Willie T link=topic=855.msg13503#msg13503
date=1585168763]
From one of my courses:
A BELIEF EXPERIMENT
To begin our work on an experiential note, before I present a
lot of heavy conceptual material, I want to propose a thought
experiment — or better yet, call it a belief experiment. A
belief experiment is where you decide that you will deliberately
believe, as much as you can, a certain thing for a strictly
limited period, say, ten minutes. This is quite different from
the many things we believe for all our lives, never having made
a decision in the first place about whether and for how long we
were going to believe them. So many of them were just
programmed in by our world as we were growing up. A belief
experiment is an experiment: you adopt a belief, observe what
happens during the time you adopt the belief, and then let it
go, so that you can evaluate what the effect of that belief is.
I designed this belief experiment to bring out some important
emotional themes of the culture we modern Westerners live in,
although these beliefs have spread all over the world at this
point. It also aims to bring out some things we implicitly
believe, even if we would never want to express them verbally as
our beliefs. We are going to read a statement of belief, which
is deliberately in the form of a religious creed. It is in a
form parallel to the Apostles' Creed, actually, but it reflects
modern beliefs and is not intended to imply anything derogatory
about Christianity. It is about what goes on in our culture,
what we have been taught about the way the world really is and
who we really are, and about some of the consequences flowing
from that conditioning. We are going to believe it and notice
our reactions.
We will do this because we do not come to learn about
mindfulness from a neutral background. We are not objective
observers, unbiased people able to take and examine things as
they are. We bring a lot of cultural baggage as well as
personal baggage, and it is important to experience that fact.
Before you begin, close your eyes and ask your deeper self if it
is all right to participate in the experiment. See whether your
mind says “yes” or “no.”
(LW Reader, pause a few moments now to do this.)
If you get “no” for an answer, bargain a little to see
if your deeper self will allow you to do this experiment for
just ten or fifteen minutes. Then you can go back to believing
all the beliefs that were programmed into you, which you think
of as "your" beliefs.
If you still get a “no”, then fake going through this
experiment as you read the rest of this post, but do not really
put your energy into it. That way you won't look conspicuous to
others.
In order to make use of various cultural norms to increase the
emotional intensity of this experiment, I want you to stand up
at attention, with your right hand on your heart, as if you were
going to pledge allegiance to the flag. Stand in neat, orderly
virtual rows. We will read the statement aloud together,
slowly.
(LW Reader, stand up in this posture, and imagine a whole group
of people around you going through this with you, doing as you
do. Read it out loud, in a firm voice!)
THE WESTERN CREED
I BELIEVE in the material universe as the only and ultimate
reality, a universe controlled by fixed physical laws and blind
chance.
I AFFIRM that the universe has no creator, no objective purpose,
and no objective meaning or destiny.
I MAINTAIN that all ideas about God or gods, enlightened beings,
prophets and saviors, or nonphysical beings or forces are
superstitions and delusions. Life and consciousness are totally
identical to physical processes and arose from chance
interactions of blind physical forces. Like the rest of life,
my life and my consciousness have no objective purpose, meaning,
or destiny.
I BELIEVE that all judgments, values, and moralities, whether my
own or others', are subjective, arising solely from biological
determinants, personal history, and chance. Free will is an
illusion. Therefore, the most rational values I can personally
live by must be based on the knowledge that, for me, what
pleases me is good, what pains me is sad. Those who please me
or help me avoid pain are my friends; those who pain me or keep
me from my pleasure are my enemies. Rationality requires that
friends and enemies be used in ways that maximize my pleasure
and minimize my pain.
I AFFIRM that churches have no real use other than social
support, that there are no objective sins to commit or be
forgiven for, that there is no retribution for sin or reward for
virtue other than that which I can arrange, directly or through
others. Virtue for me is getting what I want without being
caught and being punished by other.
I MAINTAIN that the death of the body is the death of the mind.
There is no afterlife and all hope of such is nonsense.
Now sit down, close your eyes, and observe your body state and
your feeling state. Continue to watch your feelings and bodily
state while you continue to believe this statement. Do not
worry about intellectual considerations and arguments, but watch
your feelings and body state.
(LW Reader, take at least a couple of minutes to do this. You
might find it helpful to take some notes on your reactions
before reading on.)
OK. It would be very valuable to spend some hours sharing our
reactions and observations with each other, but since we have
many other things to do, let me share some of the ways people
usually react to this belief experiment.
Some people report feeling depressed, like they want to give up.
Most feel sad. I can see from many of your reactions that you
understand that. Others report feeling small or closed in. On
the physical level, some people report that they feel contracted
or dizzy, that their neck hurts, or that their heart rate has
increased. Others may report the experiment helps bring them
into the here and now.
In fact, this experiment is not asking you to believe much of
anything that is particularly different from what is usually
believed by you and by most people around you in the
intellectual circles most of you live in. This is what Western
scientistic culture teaches all the time. It is seldom put in
the form of a bald statement, a creed, an explicit set of
beliefs, but these beliefs are what you get reinforced for; this
is "rationality."
People usually report they discover that a part of them really
believes much of this Western creed, even though consciously
they may think of themselves as spiritual people, who wouldn't
at all agree with statements of this kind. I think that no
matter how different people would normally say their conscious
belief systems are from the creed, the fact that we are
Westerners means that some part of us, often a big part of us,
believes it. It has been conditioned into us and reinforced in
many, many ways over many years. Some people who believe they
are spiritual people have cried when they discover that a part
of them really does believe much of this creed.
I can show you every ostensibly factual statement in this creed,
in some form or another, in basic science textbooks everywhere.
Science (in a distorted form) is the religion of our times. It
is what is officially taught in a variety of ways. You can
externally rebel against this creed, you can have your religious
belief systems, but you know what so-called scientific people
think about your religion, the delusions that weak-willed people
like you, unable to face harsh reality, need to get by.
If you do believe in God, in some kind of spiritual nature to
the universe, in a higher purpose to life, do you ever have
moments of conflict when you think maybe you are wrong in some
of it? Maybe parts of your belief are silly? Maybe it is
immature? We are all taught that so-called primitives need to
believe in God, but aren't we educated people supposed to rise
above primitive superstition?
Actually, in the real sense of science, this put-down is a very
unscientific attitude, but as a social system, this kind of
creed has been taught to us, indoctrinated in us, conditioned in
us, often in much the same way that Ivan Pavlov's dogs were
conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell. This Western
creed exemplifies scientism, science distorted into an
intolerant, fundamentalistic belief system.
WHEN BELIEFS BECOME AUTOMATIC HABITS
Many of us are on a spiritual quest. We hope that there is more
to life than is summarized in this Western creed. And yet its
view is supposed to be sophisticated, proven scientific
knowledge. This attitude constantly affects people on the path.
One of the things I am convinced of is that the more beliefs you
have that are relatively unconscious, that are implicit, that
tend to operate automatically, the more enslaved you are. The
more implicit beliefs, the more “karma” you have, to
use a Buddhist term. If you consciously know you believe
something, you could test that belief.
If you know you believe, for instance, that people will always
betray you, you could, if you wanted to, actually test that
belief. You could say, "I believe people are inherently
untrustworthy, but I might be wrong, so why don't I try an
experiment of trusting a few people and see if they all betray
me?"
Unfortunately, beliefs simply become habits of thinking, habits
of feeling, habits of perceiving. They literally twist the way
we perceive the world, and they just seem natural. We think
that is simply the way things are. We lose the opportunity to
question them, to test them. One of the very important aspects
of mindfulness training is that you learn more and more to see
your own beliefs, to see them in operation, to test them, and to
start seeing the consequences they have for your life. Then you
will eventually have a chance to make decisions about whether
you want to continue to believe them or to change them, rather
than just assuming that they are true.
Well, the ten minutes devoted to the experiment are up, you can
go back to your old set of beliefs.
Except, in a sense, you may not be able to go all the way back.
I hope that you will always be more sensitive to these aspects
of your belief system. One of the great "spiritual teachers" of
the world was the early American patriot Patrick Henry, who
said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." We usually
think of his statement on
a political level, but it is extremely important on a
psychological and spiritual level. Like any statement, it can
be twisted out of context, so that you start thinking paranoia
is the way to go, but let's not go that far. We have to train
ourselves to be vigilant, however, because so much of our mind
is automatized; it just runs by itself, taking away our liberty.
[/quote]
Hi Willie!
This experiment will take a bit of time...no time this A.M. to
complete it properly...but just scanning the creed I'm like,
NAH!!!! Lol...I will give it an honest shot this afternoon,
#Post#: 13529--------------------------------------------------
Re: A ""Belief Experiment (If you think you can handle
it)
By: Willie T Date: March 26, 2020, 7:40 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Nancy link=topic=855.msg13528#msg13528
date=1585225783]
Hi Willie!
This experiment will take a bit of time...no time this A.M. to
complete it properly...but just scanning the creed I'm like,
NAH!!!! Lol...I will give it an honest shot this afternoon,
[/quote]Just try to remember, as I said, this was never intended
to have you say, "Yes", these are my true beliefs (Although we
all do accept many more of them than we want to ever admit.) It
is a short, temporary way of setting our minds for awhile, using
examples that we will find easy to resist and challenge.
#Post#: 13530--------------------------------------------------
Re: A "Belief" Experiment (But. only if you think you
can handle it)
By: Willie T Date: March 26, 2020, 7:46 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Rita link=topic=855.msg13521#msg13521
date=1585202666]
Hi Willie,
I started to read the western creed and On some of them, and I
would need to give much more time to this ( I am off work to on
Friday ) the second creed I instantly knew I did not believe the
second creed, and suspect that this may be the case with any,
ut I also suspect that some I will waver with and have to
reflect on- which I presume is the whole point. When we waver it
means that deep down we are not as sure as we think we are about
what we believe.
I have a reflective personality , so that maybe why I find this
kind of thing intriguing xx
Rita
[/quote]Congrats! You seem to be the first person to approach
understanding what the whole experiment was all about.
BTW, the last six paragraphs are the really important part of
this to understand.
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