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An excerpt from "Living the Mindful Life"

by Charles T. Tart

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.

(Reader, pause a few moments now to do this.)

If you get no for an answer, bargain a little to see if it 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.

(Reader, do this if needed.)

If you still get a no, then fake going through this experiment, but do not really put your energy into it. That way you won't took 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 rows. We will read the statement aloud together, slowly

(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 others.

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.

(Reader, take at least a couple of minutes to do this. You might End it helpful to take some notes on your reactions before reading on.)

OK. It would be very valuable to spend an hour sharing our reactions and observations with each other, but since we have many other things to cover, 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 faces 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 arc what you get reinforced for; this is "rationality."

People usually report they discover that a part of them realty 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? Maybe your belief is 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, it 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 arc. 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 the 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.

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above article from Online Noetic Network newsletter

Date: September 28, 1998 9:34:53 AM

ONN 5-106 Science & Scientism: interviewing Charles Tart, with Q&A, part 3/3

/ / / / Online Noetic Network     - http://www.wisdomtalk.org

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Copyright 1998 Online Noetic Network, all rights reserved

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book: Charles T. Tart   Living the Mindful Life

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