Kit-Cat Club: What if the chosen belief were along the lines of, "My happiness is important but I'm not the centre of the universe" and the goal of the belief is to have a happy life in which you respect others? Or, “I will define my beliefs as my current best thinking and update them in the light of whatever I learn about the world,” in which the goal is to create an internal reality that appears to the individual to be the most accurate map available to them given their life experience?
Of course, you're absolutely right: even in those examples, believing what you want to believe may well open people up to self-delusion. If any decent magical or psychological practise contains elements of rigorous self-examination, motive and ecology checking, is the self-delusion a risk of the technique of belief change or a risk inherent in the person changing the belief?
As far as believing that the new beliefs you have decided upon are true: do you believe that about your current beliefs? That they’re any more true just because they’re already present and you haven’t consciously done work to change them? For example, have you ever experienced believing something outside of consciousness, bringing that unconscious belief to the surface, then realising that it manifests as a fragment of internal dialogue that sounds exactly like your mother or father? Is that interjected belief their truth or is it your truth? My answer would be yes: currently it is both their truth and your truth in your way of seeing the world, although they may have changed it since it became interjected, and you may choose to change it yourself so that it is no longer true for you. Modifying, rejecting it, or returning it respectfully to where it came from may leave a gap that needs to be filled with something else - how do you feel about the belief modification that arises from this kind of psychic spring-cleaning?
I’m very interested in the people who have reservations about whether they would want to believe anything they had chosen to believe. As in, what motivations do they have for believing that they may not necessarily want to believe the things they choose to believe? What do they want to achieve through the belief of not wanting to believe a belief that they have chosen? At the risk of presumption, it seems to me that you want to avoid deluding yourself through choosing to believe things that may or may not accurately reflect your past or current experience (it’s harder to anticipate future experience, although you could have a meta-belief that all your beliefs must be subject to change). There’s nothing wrong with that as a motive as far as I can see. If you successfully avoided self-delusion, what positive thing would that do for you?
Is there any way of honouring that motive with a belief that acted as an internal check to other beliefs? What if we asked the question: “If I could believe anything about my current beliefs, what would I want that meta-belief to do for me?”
I hope this thread is starting to reflect the complexity of the question, and the complexity of our belief systems. It’s easy to suppose that if we start pulling at threads our whole lives could unravel. What else could you choose to believe about belief work instead of the risks? Or as well as the risks?
One last question: taking an extreme example, we’ve probably all heard miraculous stories of people recovering from fatal disease from the power of a placebo, or a self-chosen belief. Is there a danger of disempowering ourselves if we don’t believe what we want to believe? That we’ll be sidelined as passive observers of our life, resigned to live with the beliefs that we’ve unconsciously taken on and never consciously questioned or updated? Is there anything necessarily wrong with living the lives we want, as much as we’re able to live them? |
