I read or heard somewhere that a belief is a thought with an emotion attached. I like that. I have been working with "beliefs" for years but I really didn't have a good definition for what they were. I have taught myself two foreign languages and I noticed that the "belief" is a really fuzzy concept, which ranges from the casual, "I believe the pen is on the table," to the unshakeable "Jesus is my personal Lord and savior." The difference, of course, is the emotion attached to each. People will rarely will have a problem if you don't think there's a pen on that table, but challenge Jesus' divinity and you are bound to encounter some resistance. At first, it seems like a bad idea to have the same word cover such a wide range of significance, from the inconsequential to the fanatic, but, when you think about it, it makes a certain kind of sense. We humans like to hedge our bets, and since, throughout history, people have often lived in situations where belief on the right or wrong thing could be a matter of life or death, it's handy to have our words be a indefinite as possible, just in case we end up on the wrong side of things.
Why does matter? Some years ago I learned a technique of removing "beliefs." I have since discovered more about how belief function and expanded my techniques, but have been somewhat stymied by the fact that I didn't have a good definition of what I was talking about. What were these "things" that I was removing? I had a kind of intuitive understanding of what I was working with, but without any way to express that to other people, it has been difficult to explain what I'm doing.
What I just said may sound strange: Beliefs are not things, right? You either believe or you don't, but faith isn't just something you can just arbitrarily remove, like an appendix, or insert, like a filling in a tooth, right? Well, it turns out that beliefs are much more malleable than most people are comfortable with. Hey, people "convert" and "lose faith" every day, so clearly "faith" is subject to change.
Let me define something here. For my purposes, the concept of "Belief" can be broadly divided into two parts, Conclusion and Faith. A conclusion is usually biased on some kind of evidence and, when the evidence changes, the conclusion changes. Faith, on the other hand, usually defined as "Belief without proof," requires no evidence, and the only thing that keeps it in place is the emotion attached to it. This implies that if you could remove the emotion from beliefs, then faith would revert to conclusions and, without evidence, vanish. This turns out to be true, at least most of the time.
But why would anyone want to remove anyones faith? Wouldn't that just turn people all into materialistic zombies, believing in nothing and having no purpose other to survive at any cost? First, that's not how it works, second faith isn't just limited to lofty, meaning of life, stuff. It's also the basis of resistance to climate change, of religious, ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual, and you-name-it, discrimination, child abuse, wars, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional relationships, dysfunctional people, and, in short, pretty much of all of human misery in the present and throughout history are the result of unquestionable beliefs and the lengths that people will go to preserve those beliefs.
Right now you are probably thinking that I'm talking about religious beliefs, but not so much. While religion has it's part to play, it's, all too often, just used as a vehicle to exploit non-religious cultural and personal beliefs to some cause. Populations have been manipulated, brainwashed, throughout history, by dictators, politicians and advertisers, by playing on the unexamined beliefs that we all acquire throughout our lifetimes.
Everyone of us has hundreds, if not thousands of little unexamined "faiths," or beliefs we accept without evidence or question. Each one, by itself, is no big deal, but when taken all together they rule our lives. Like a death of a thousand cuts or Gulliver being tied down by hundreds of tiny ropes, our strength and free will are imprisoned behind walls of "shoulds" and "should nots." PTSD is an extreme example of how an unshakeable belief can rule your life.
Hundreds self-help books have been written on the subject of getting past the beliefs that sabotage you at every turn. Many use positive affirmations of different kinds to paper over negative beliefs with positive ones. Others want you to discover and confront limiting beliefs, and thus "win" over them. Both have their promoters and both have their problems. Positive affirmations "cure" self-sabatoging beliefs the same way pain pills "cure" a broken leg; they make you feel better but do nothing about the underlying problem. The "confronters" are on the right track, but they don't really understand what they are dealing with, so their long-term success rate is very poor.
Some people have good success with these books. I believe that's because they have an intuitive understanding of how beliefs work, either through their upbringing, or studies, that allow them to use what's in the books more effectively.
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