"Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumour; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias toward a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher’. Kalamas, when you yourselves know: 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter into and abide in them.”

(A.N. 3.65 - Kalama Sutta)

“I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdom of ages, and from the so‑called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject‑matter for beliefs.” 

(Lo! By Charles Fort)

Why do I believe what I believe? Why do I not believe the things I reject?

Most of us if asked would surely be able to give reasons, which to our ourselves are good, for accepting or rejecting beliefs and ideas to be false or true. However, a bit of psychological digging will also reveal important factors that may be entirely unrelated to the veracity of the idea under consideration.

We tend to adopts beliefs that align with our pre-existing beliefs and reject ideas that cause us inner conflict or dissonance with them. Humans tend to like certainty and so will opt for ideas that will give us closure even if it means ignoring nuance. We tend to defer to authority and expertise, not necessarily mainstream sources; both those who by default trust mainstream authority or reject mainstream authority can behave in similar ways. In-group beliefs also play a major role since, being social creatures, we tend to avoid beliefs that will cause ostracisation which can be a danger to survival. This is all without diving into the cultural, philosophical, religious and historical influences about which tomes have been written.

What is fascinating is that there is nothing new to this knowledge. In the past, people may not have used terms such as ‘cognitive dissonance’ or ‘in-group conformity’ but our ancestors were very aware of our tendencies - the extract from the Kalama Sutta above being a case in point.

My first experience of dissonance and in-group beliefs came when I was still a small boy. I was raised Catholic in the North of England in the 1970s. Two mornings a week, the other Catholics and myself were exempted from school assembly at the local state junior school in order to attend Catholic RE lessons at the Church. Mostly, it was going through the Catholic Catechism, the statements of beliefs for all Catholics to believe. We also did a bit of history and I recall our teacher covering the reign of King Henry VIII. It was pretty clear to even my young and naive mind that he was an all-round bad sort of king! Ending England’s loyalties to Rome and making himself the equivalent of the Pope was seen as a terrible turn of events.

Shortly afterwards we covered the Tudors at school. Naturally, King Henry re-surfaced, but this time his bucking the trend and being a bit-of-a-lad and sticking one in the eye of a foreign authority was clearly a liberating move. It was pretty clear which side we were supposed to be on. Although this dissonance did create a memory that stayed with me, I cannot recall being particularly perturbed by it. However, in 2016, with the Brexit referendum, I did have a sort of echo memory of what I experienced in the microcosm of school playing out in real time around me. I instinctively knew to be careful in front of whom I should express a particular thought.

What was so evident was how quickly dissent and labelling took place. What is more, how powerful the emotional responses in me could be to something that on the surface and to a child might seem irrelevant. However, to hear my non-Catholic friends and teachers at school praise a long dead monarch might feel to me like a dig at my Catholic upbringing with which I strongly identified. Of course, in the 1970s, being a member of a minority religious group amidst a larger different group was dealt with in the ‘typical’ English way of keeping such ideas private. I could believe whatever I wanted, but do not inflict it upon others! By and large we all stuck to this rule. 

In 2016, someone in the Zen group in which I teach came to see me in a distraught state. She was a young American living in London for work purposes. She told me that she was no longer on speaking terms with her father and in fact the family had all taken this view. It turned out that he announced to his strongly Democratic family that he was going to vote for Donald Trump.

To begin with I found this reaction unfathomable, as I had grown up with a strongly Conservative middle-class father and a Liberal working-class mother. Such disputes were common and in the late 1970s and early 1980s we had the figure of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to dispute over.  I witnessed quite a few heated political discussions but it did not occur to anyone that we would not speak with each other.

However, my own experience is always by-the-by when speaking with others about deeply felt views and actions. My task is to let go and step into this other world in order to understand it. This single ability is perhaps the most powerful aspect of awareness. It is an ability to see without ‘my’ judgements and is a consciously learned skill.

The Tibetan monks have a whole spiritual practice based around this. It’s called ‘rtsod pa’. This is a form of debate between two interlocutors who will deliberately take sides in a philosophical debate and do their utmost to conjure up arguments to support their view. Then, at a pre-arranged signal, they swap views and have now to create powerful arguments to counter everything they have just said. The outcome is to create detachment from views, develop an awareness of the ‘emptiness’ of all views, and cultivate humility in setting forth even ones most earnest views.

The Zen masters were also proficient at this way of working. In this Mahayana view of the Buddha’s earliest teaching of the Middle Way, letting go of a view was seen as being necessary in order to avoid becoming swallowed by that view, with all the delusion that a narrowing of consciousness created by the rising of the passions entails. 

When a monk asked Master Joshu if a dog has Buddha nature he replied ‘No’, despite the Buddha saying all beings do indeed have the inherent Buddha nature. Even common morality could be overturned. Master Rinzai gives a sermon on how committing the Five Heinous Crimes can lead to deliverance - this is despite that injunction that these terrible crimes lead to rebirth in the deepest hells.

At the top of this article is a quote from Charles Fort, a writer and collator of anomalous data who wrote and published in the early 20th century. He advocated an attitude of ‘open minded scepticism’. This was in response to what he saw as the ‘institution of Science’ which he thought verging on a belief system rather like dogmatic religion.

"Science of today—the superstition of tomorrow. Science, like theology, has been established to oppose, not to understand, the damned.”

The ‘damned’ in this case, is data that goes against the prevailing accepted norms and views of an establishment. Given how quick the public were made to accept ‘the science’ during the recent pandemic, which over the intervening years turned out either to be much less certain or just plain wrong, it seems Fort’s words are prescient still.

In recent years, I have found myself with a tendency to become more easily swept up in the collective arguments that we encounter every day in our modern world. It is not that I think any belief or opinion should be avoided (which gives rise to a belief that they are inherently dangerous), rather to beware of the clinging that stirs up the heat. There is a middle way between belief and non-belief. This middle way must take into account the emotional tone of beliefs, not just the rational content of them. Conscious de-clutching allows the heat to quieten down enough so that the non-rational influences may be examined and kept distinct from the content of a belief. This I would call true scepticism, which is far from denialism - simply a belief that is opposite to the originating view. It is a perception that ideas live in our minds as organic entities or beings and that they feed on our attention. Again, this is not to be taken literally but as a useful way of seeing such self-beliefs as ideas within a wider eco-system of beliefs and ideas. A healthy way may be to take a break from them from time to time so that they do not end up taking over like adventitious plants in the garden of consciousness.