On Belief

A member of a web community I participate in posted the following:

Belief stems from fear of not knowing. In lack of sufficient knowledge, beliefs are imposed by the Ego in order to escape the insecurity of not knowing. This results in self limiting, as the beliefs prevent other possibilities from being explored by the mind. Beliefs are soothing to the Ego, and creates a dysfunctional mentality. Instead of accepting that you don't know, beliefs are created to fool you into thinking you DO know. Belief and fear walk hand in hand, being interdependent of each other. Destroy one, destroy the other. To achieve perfect enlightenment, eradicate fear through dispelling of beliefs. It takes guts to realize you basically know nothing.

I wanted to cross post my response to From Ashes:

I feel that some of this is true, or perhaps, I believe some of this to be true, but some of this I don’t believe.

I don’t believe, for instance, that all beliefs stem from a fear of not knowing. I think it is possible, and likely, that some beliefs stem from this sort of fear, but I feel that most of our beliefs do not. Indeed, it seems to me that much of our beliefs arise out of what it is we think we know. For instance, the fact that I believe, as likely do many of you, that ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true has little to do with fear, but much more of our understanding and acceptance of a system of rules, of a way of speaking about things. Further, beliefs that we hold about facts of the matter also seem to have little to do with fear, and more extend from what we feel we know about these same facts of a given matter. That I believe that there is beer in the fridge, for instance, has to do with several interconnected observations, a primary one includes the observation that the last time I got a beer from the fridge there was still more beer in the fridge, coupled with the knowledge that I had placed several beers in the fridge in the first place! It seems to me that much of the beliefs we use to navigate our lives are based on what we have observed: these observations form the knowledge base from which we create many of our beliefs about the world.

Given this partial disagreement, however, I am compelled to agree that all beliefs—whether formulated from that which we feel we know or from that need “…to escape the insecurity of not knowing”—are indeed limiting factors which “…prevent other possibilities from being explored by the mind.” It doesn’t matter how we have come to form our beliefs—through knowledge or through ignorance—all beliefs serve to define what we feel to be reality, and in this determination some set of possibilities are taken to be actualities at the expense of some other (likely larger) set of possibilities which necessarily go unexamined and unexplored, and thus, undifferentiated and unactualized.

Also, it seems to me that, yes, enlightenment (whatever that may actually be) requires a dispelling of fear—I don’t see how we would experience an enlightened state of being that was also a fearful state of being; although, perhaps there is something to be said for experiencing some state of fear in relation to enlightenment (here with respect to the notion of mysterium tremendum et fascinans). Further, I tend to agree that experiencing enlightenment also requires that we abandon beliefs. With regards to the notion of the nominous mentioned in the previous link, I feel that there is an interdependence between experience of the “wholly other” and the experience of enlightenment. Perhaps this interdependence might be regarded as the absorption of ego into the wholly other and the identification of the Other with the Self, which together preclude some sense of enlightenment. It seems to me that in order to accomplish this we must abandon beliefs as whatever the wholly other may be, it is necessarily not what we believe it to be otherwise it wouldn’t be wholly other, i.e., entirely different from what we know and feel. In this sense, I feel it is less that we are required to “destroy” fear and belief, but perhaps more to merely accept them as transitory and imperfect: perhaps as veils which hide and distort an enlightened state of being.

In the end, I agree that it takes a lot of courage to realize that basically we know nothing—or not much of anything, anyway. There seems to be a feedback/forward loop where beliefs about our world come to form what we take as knowledge, and this same knowledge then constitutes grounds for our beliefs about the world: a self-referencing, self-perpetuating network of illusions which allows us to dwell in the castles we’ve built in the air. Indeed, it “takes guts” to jump into the void with hope of hitting some sort of ground.