New Age Fallacy #4: "Believe it is true, and it is"

Another common new age philosophy is the belief that believing something to be true can actually make it true.  Like so many other beliefs, there is a precious spiritual principle embedded in ambiguous language which can lead to tremendous suffering.

Let's first look at the spiritual truth that is here.  There are many situations where our perception of the world is largely formed by beliefs and stories we have about it, and about ourselves, and assumptions about what is possible and what is not.  Changing our perception of the world can change our experience of it.

At one point in my life I believed that people were basically cruel and out to hurt others.  The result was I approached strangers defended and cautious, causing them to be suspicious of me or defensive themselves.  The result was the creation of the illusion that the world was exactly as I suspected it was - people were not friendly, people didn't like me, and the world was not a very nice place.  I was completely unaware that my own presuppositions were creating the experiences that justified my view of the world.

When my belief about the world changed, the world changed along with it.  Once I believed in and expected a friendlier world, suddenly, people felt my energy and responded accordingly.  So when I believed the world was kinder, lo and behold, it was! Of course, what really happened was my shift in attitude not only allowed me to see the kindness that had always been there; it also altered how people responded to me.  My belief did indeed change the world around me.

However, the statement "Believe it is true, and it is" can also be horribly misleading, and cause untold misery if the spiritual principle underneath it is not understood.  A good friend of mine has been trying but unable to clear clutter from her house for years.  I have heard her countless times say, "Today I am going to do it!  Today it will be easy, there will be no problems, and I will make progress with ease!"  She is attempting to set her own attitude in the hopes that the statement will magically come true.  Of course, it never happens, and each time she gets discouraged and beats up on herself, because she believes she "should" have been able to do it.  That is what this philosophy claims, and she naively believes that if she makes the declaration and believes it, it will happen.  How horrible to be encouraged to believe that it will be that easy, only to fail again and again.  This shows no respect for the psychological complexity of the feelings that keep her blocked, nor the need to explore and understand them before the mystery will be unlocked and she will be freed.

What is the problem here?  In our attempt to empower people, we encourage them to believe they can do things that they are actually unable to.  The resulting failure only leads to self-condemnation.  The fact is, *sometimes* it is a matter of will and perspective, and sometimes it is not.  Sometimes the thing that prevents us from success is mysterious and doesn't yield to simple analysis.  The world is not made up of our perception of it.  The world exists and acts independently of our will, our consciousness, and our desires.

It's a dance. Reality as we experience it is a mixture of the objective world and our interpretations of it. And in any given situation, it takes wisdom to know which partner needs to move or whether both need to move. So, yes, by all means, see if you are imposing a reality on the world that doesn't need to be there, but if the world answers back "This is the way it is," then yield to it and find your place in the scheme of things.

Enshrining the Free

There are some songs that capture my heart by the freedom and innocence they express. "By My Side" from Godspell is one of those. The odd wandering harmony coming in and out, the words that paint vague images, and yet the passion it expresses, all enthrall me.

Recently, a friend and I decided to practice this song with the eventual goal of performing it somewhere. The irony struck me today how carefully I studied each note to be sure I had it just as it was on the recording. I know perfectly well that recordings capture but one iteration of many, and often those iterations are all different, following the mood of the singer on that day - yet we were treating the recording as gospel, not to be messed with, not to be varied at all, lest we lose its inherent sense of freedom. Thus we locked ourselves into the slavery of doing it exactly right, following a predetermined script, not allowing ourselves one iota of flexibility to do it differently than this random recording of a living moving thing. In our practice, we systematically eliminated every possible experience of personal freedom in order to enshrine the recording's freedom to preserve this thing of beauty for others.

In the National Museum of the American Indian, I remember staring at a small handmade boat, crude, primitive, beautiful, up on a stand, surrounded by a modern unbreakable plexiglass case, small engraved signs explaining its origins and construction. The protective materials, the efforts at preservation, the signs, the space, showed our great honor for this primitive boat. And I imagined the builder of the boat coming to the museum and looking incredulously at the fuss made over his primitive craft and the efforts to preserve it. Why, if his boat had been crushed, he would simply have made another one - why the big fuss over his humble construction of one of probably many experiments to be able to cross the river? Why would thousands of people stare at his small craft with awe and longing for a simpler day? The enshrining of his small act of creation betrays something missing in our lives. Yet again, we worship something that was commonplace to its creator.

The stuffed hawk over the fireplace is artfully set to look like a spontaneous moment in mid-flight. Just like the boat and the song, just like many religions worshiping a prophet or a miracle, they all express a free spirit, now captured in a dormant place, gathering dust. Are we content to live with that impractical longing? If we were as free as the things we worship, would we spend time collecting stuffed hawks or going to museums?

Accessing the Subtle

The world is filled with subtleties. By a subtlety, I mean something that is difficult to detect; something that requires patience, quietness, concentration, focus, and time. Noticing subtle differences between plants or a subtle change in the weather are things that the casual observer will miss, as well as someone highly focused on a goal to be accomplished. Accessing the subtle requires the absence of a specific goal; the only goal being to see what is there. The mind must be open so as not to miss what we did not expect.

Just like the physical world, our mind is filled with subtle knowing - what we often call wisdom. Our mind accumulates millions of tiny experiences each day, and they get stored somewhere, seemingly inaccessible. Yet, when we stop to sense those subtle feelings and experiences, we discover that a knowing arises. This knowing may create some conclusion we hadn't thought of until that moment. Through quieting ourselves, focusing, and remaining open, we can gain access to knowledge that the busy mind may never have known.

We have different ways of focusing. One such way is a masculine focus that concentrates on one thing, obliterating all else - we focus on accomplishing the goal, and we deliberately ignore all irrelevant information so that we are not distracted from our goal. This is unarguably a powerful and necessary kind of focus whose achievements serve us well. However, accessing the subtle requires a more feminine kind of focus - one that is still intense but diffused, aware of everything, setting nothing aside as irrelevant, yet allowing nothing to take center stage. This kind of focus keeps listening for something that we can't anticipate. We don't know the goal until we have found it. 

The characteristics we need in order to access the subtle are lack of anxiety, lack of urgency, calmness, a focusing over a wide range, a noticing of nuances, a willingness to hold any discovery lightly, and a continual watching and listening.  We scan over a situation and take in a lot of stimuli. 

We then begin digging inside for feelings that are relevant.  As the awareness of our feelings increase, we may discover a need to articulate the feelings. We need to articulate, not necessarily to another, but at least to ourselves. That forces our knowledge into a rational form that we can solidly grasp.  As long as it remains feeling, it is difficult to do anything with it; but when we can put it into a rational form, a sentence, then we can work with it.

Inquiry is a way of opening yourself and settling yourself to start to acquire subtle information about a given subject. A question seeks an answer; an inquiry is content with the question. What color is your shirt? Red. The answer is gotten, the question satisfied, and we can go on with our business. An inquiry, however, is a call to gather subtle information. It is like a suggestion, almost a hypnotic suggestion, to enter a different state of mind, a different relationship with the field of inquiry. That relationship is less about analyzing and more about observing, noticing, and learning.

The deepest questions of life cannot be answered by analysis; they are rather accessed through deep inquiry into the subtle.

The Intellect

The intellect is not to be used as an escape from dealing with real life, nor to be shunned as a block to spirituality, but to be embraced as a critical tool to bring us into a deeper understanding of the world.

The Greatest Commandmant

As a child growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household, I would sometimes try to piece together all the morality and rules I had been taught into one principle that could provide a foundation that would hopefully make sense of all the other "should's" and "shouldn'ts".  As an adult, having long abandoned my childhood religion, that quest has remained - a desire to find and express a basic foundation upon which to build and orient my life.

Occasionally, I have gone back to look at what my religion had claimed to be the greatest commandment - to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength - but could no longer relate to the concepts there - commandment, Lord, God.

Independently, one day, I happened upon the concept of "loving life", and it struck a deep chord within me as the answer to my quest, the original motivation for all that we consider valuable.  My mind went back to the concept of "loving God", and I started to wonder if what was meant by "God" in that verse might have been closer to what I meant when I used the word "life".  "Loving life" is more universally understandable, and does not have the pitfalls that the word "god" creates.  I decided to freely retranslate the rest of those verses, specifically Mark 12:19-21, and came out with this:

"The highest principle of all is this: Be mindful, all you living energies, that all of life is connected. And allow the love of life to fill all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your body. And the second principle is really the same thing: know that loving others is the same as loving yourself."

I think there is a disservice we do to all sacred texts: we assume they have some mystery that is not already inside of us. We assume that we are missing something, we are incomplete, and we have to search outside of ourselves to find wholeness, rather than searching deeper within ourselves and our direct experience of life. If we assume that all scripture is saying something that is universal and not new, something we already know and have access to, it gives us a greater freedom to take that internal core knowing as the true representation of the universal principles that religions have struggled to express.

Completing our stories

Many of the wounds I have from childhood are from incomplete stories. A simple example: my mother used to punish me severely for things that I had no idea were “wrong”. Not only did I go through physical pain, but I was tormented by the abrupt withdrawal of love, and the horrible confusion over what had happened and why.

In a vain attempt to complete my story and make sense out of it, I concluded at various times that I must be bad and must have deserved the punishment; that the world was a dangerous place where I could never predict what would make someone angry and hurt me, that I was incapable of trusting my insides to tell me if something was right or wrong.

Incomplete stories carry a deep passionate energy to try to make sense out of them, an allure to bring them to some kind of resolution. And in our attempts to make sense of them, we recreate a scene, set it up with characters from the present without their permission, and start to act out the roles, looking for answers. Thus, those battered as children tend to unconsciously recreate the drama by becoming involved with someone where the feelings of being battered are present once again - hoping this time to do it differently, to find a happy ending. They hope to finally get mother to love them, or to be good enough this time, or to not be weak, or not be strong, and maybe this time they will get what they really needed.

The process to try to complete my story went on unconsciously in my adult life in forms of vague feelings and irrational beliefs. I did not have the benefit of the conscious mind to guide me, with its logic, accumulated experience of the real world, wisdom we have accumulated about relationships. Instead, the unconscious mind tries the old child-like solutions once again - we are bad, they are bad, life is unfair, don’t do anything to anger anyone, get them before they get you.

Today, I now see that the story was not complete. There were many pieces to the puzzle I did not know as a child. My mother was unhappy and lonely, having a husband who could not talk about feelings any more than her own father had been able to. In her world, men were incapable of bonding, and she desperately wanted a girl to share her life with. Being the last of two sons, I became her last hope for the family she wanted to badly - and thus a disappointment.

Another piece to the puzzle came from studying the harsh child-rearing system popular at the time, and espoused by the church, which she was devoted to. She believed that harsh punishment was the best thing to do, and unwittingly injected me with fear of anger and violence that hinders me to this day.

As I have worked through understand my past and its effect on my present, and applying adult knowledge and reason to it, the story starts to make sense. Instead of the story illustrating how dangerous the world is, or about how bad I am, the story illustrates the tragedy of lack of self-awareness, and the pathos of destruction and pain wrought by it. It is about a mother who make horrible mistakes in raising her child, and how her disappointment at having a son transformed into abusive anger, that caused unmeasurable pain throughout her son’s adult life. The story is a greek tragedy, not a good-guy, bad-guy story - it is not there to teach simplistic moralistic lessons. Instead, it is the tale of human weakness and ignorance, and the harm that can come from it. It is there so we can fully absorb the pathos of tragedy, to feel again our own pain, and ultimately to know that it is just a story.

Today, rather than continually questioning if I am okay, I grieve over the tragedy of our family. Today, rather than the insecurity of the unanswerable, there is peace after a good cry.

Regret vs. Shame

Shame has to do with giving authority to other people's opinions, and believing we are bad because someone else has that opinion. However, there is another kind of shame that we experience when we violate our own values, and it is important to see the difference between the two. When we find we have acted contrary to our own values, rather than the opinions of others, we may feel shame for lack of integrity. However, the deeper feeling is regret.

Regret is the acknowledgment that we have acted contrary to our values. We may also have shame, fearing that we will be judged for having acted contrary to the values of others.

It is easy to not recognize our regret, and become distracted by shame instead, and then become defensive. If we do this, we lose the most important point - an awareness of our own values and how much we are in integrity with them. For it is in living consistent with our own values that ultimately brings satisfaction, not living consistent with the values of those around us.