PRAGMYTHIC   BELIEFCRAFT

The 2005 Convention Keynote Address to The Academy of Religion and Psychical Research

                     by Alan Nordstrom, Professor of English, Rollins College                                                       anordstrom@rollins.edu

Preamble

Many of you can claim to know more than I do in matters both religious and psychical.  And for all I know you do know more, not only in the academic way of having studied, researched, and learned a body of knowledge, but in the more direct and personal ways of having arrived at immediate comprehension of things I only speculate about--such as the existence of spirits, of angels, of God; as well as of purpose, of destiny, and of eternity.  These things that I struggle to find ways to be believe, you may have come to take as self-evident and certain truths beyond the domain of fluctuating faith.

Therefore, I ask for your generous indulgence tonight as you listen to my personal agonizing over the idea of belief.  You who have made it to the other side of the abyss of doubt and uncertainty, either by a trusting leap or by the direct transport of visionary insight, please forgive the yearning skepticism or the skeptical yearnings of one who hesitates and may be lost, of one who hopes to see more than he can, but one constrained by science as he understand it, demanding evidence and proof, leery of phantasms, delusions, and over-eager imaginations such as are excited by hope, fear, and desperation.

Nonetheless, I can go beyond the empiricist adage that seeing is believing to acknowledge that sometimes believing is seeing, and that sometimes the mind and heart must ready themselves to receive some kinds of knowledge that our sense, intellect, and instruments cannot appprehend.  I am open to the notion of intuitive knowledge, vague though that concept may be, and as readily dismissible by rational empiricists.  I think I have indeed experienced intuitions of truths about love and goodness in my heart or my soul, however, metaphorical those words may be.

My Basic Questions

• How does belief relate to knowing?

• How much of what we think we know about reality do we only believe?

• How much do our beliefs about reality shape our perception of it?

• Can we change and intentionally modify our beliefs about reality and therefore alter our perception of it?

• Can what we believe reality to be alter reality itself, not just our perception of it?

• What are the worthiest and most fruitful beliefs that I/we may choose to espouse?

My Pragmythic Premise

That what we believe to be real (beyond what we know to be real) very largely shapes and defines reality as we perceive it.

• Therefore, to the extent that we can change our beliefs about what is so, so shall the world as we see it change.

• And since our beliefs affect and alter our perception of reality profoundly, we are responsible for the mental world we inhabit and for the consequences of our mental constructions in the public arena.

• Therefore, learning how to recognize, alter, and control our beliefs is a vital skill upon which depends both personal and societal happiness.

My Thesis

My basic thesis is that we need to study the human phenomenon of belief because belief is the basis of most, if not all, or our decisions and actions.  Though we might prefer that solid knowledge and rational reckoning underlie our decisions and actions, that is so only partially and in degrees.  In fact, most of what we do proceeds from trust, not certainty; proceeds from assurance and conviction, not positive proof.  And as questions and issues grow more speculative and existential, the less susceptible they are to scientific methodology, and the more their answers depend on persuasion rather than material evidence.  We proceed in our lives not so much by rational calculation as by intuitive conviction.  Therefore conviction, assurance, belief need to be examined:  When and how much do we depend on beliefs?  How do we form them, test them, change them, and validate them?  What is the power of belief, the extent of its influence and effects?  And how much of what we regard as reality derives from our beliefs?  The more we understand the phenomenon of belief, the ore clearly we'll know ourselves.

Introduction

In looking for a way to present my topic of belief as a proper keynote by which to harmonize what might seem the disparate subjects of this conference--"Mythology, After-Death Communication, and the Soul"--I came to realize that belief supports and connects them all.

• Mythologies are stories expressing systems of belief about invisible forces and beings that impinge upon human experience.

• After-Death Communication may or may not be factual and evidential, but the presumed evidence for it appears more readily not to skeptics and scoffers but to believers.

• And The Soul is notoriously elusive, intangible and immeasurable.  "Soul" is our word for that mysterious animating force that holds bodies together as living, sentient, conscious beings, a fragile, extinguishable force that suddenly vanishes at death.  Does it pass on, pass away, depart for elsewhere?  More than anything else, most of  us want that to be so, we want to believe it's true, and most of us do.  To believe otherwise proves too daunting and dismaying.

We yearn to believe in a universe that's meaningful, and we prefer this meaning to be kindly toward us.  We yearn to be the beloved creatures of an all-loving Creator and yearn for a cosmic story that explains to us where we came from, why we're here, and where we go when we die.  We also need to know why this mortal life involves such suffering, calamity, and soul-searing tragedy as it does, and such disparities of good and bad fortune, such injustice.  Because we do not know by an scientific reckoning the answers to these questions, we devise stories to make sense of these mysteries: mythologies to console us when we invest them with our belief.

Belief bridges the gap, the chasm, the abyss, between knowing and assurance.  Belief is the tenuous, swaying bridge of ropes and slats by which we traverse from physical proof to metaphysical certitude.  Rather than taking a blind leap of faith across the abyss of knowing to land on solid certainty, most of us would rather, like spiders, shoot forth hopeful strands, seeking to anchor them across the chasm.  We send our beliefs ahead of us and test their sturdiness before committing our full weight to them and risking the passage.  First we make beliefs, then we rely on them to reach the surety we seek.  Surety and certitude are not the knowledge that proof provides, but in the parascientific realm of Mystery, in the realm of Ultimate Questions, assurance serves us well enough:  it's the conviction we crave.

Patching Life's Potholes

Because life presents us with profound mysteries that thinking cannot fathom, and because our need for comprehension and certainty is urgent, we regularly substitute beliefs of various sorts to fill in for what knowledge we lack, hoping thereby to patch over the potholes in the road of life.  Happily, many of our stop-gap beliefs actually do bring relief, filing empty places and smoothing our way on life's journey.  More than anything else, we humans need to make sense of our experience; we need for our lives to be meaningful or we cannot be happy.  In that quest for meaning, belief serves us, whether it be belief in science, philosophy, religion or superstition, all of of which offer premises and promises to help us make sense and understand the Way Things Are.

Ultimately, we have two choices in this regard:  either that things do make sense and are meaningful, or that they are absurd.  To opt for meaning is to opt for belief of some kind since empirical and rational knowing cannot, by definition, fathom mystery.  Much of what once seemed mysterious has since opened to the probings of science, which grow evermore sophisticated and penetrating; however, in ultimate matters of purpose, intent, and design (the Why questions as opposed to the How questions, science is mute, and only belief speaks up to gratify us as we hope to be gratified, with such answers as, "It's God's will" and "God loves you and wants only what is good for you," and "God works in mysterious ways," and "God does not give you what you want but what you need," and "Trust in God."  Something like this we crave hearing from the universe, just as we did as children from our parents.  We crave hearing that life is not meaningless and that our lives are not for naught.

Even if some cannot believe in God, they may believe positively in the welfare and progress of humanity and commit themselves to the betterment of life on Earth and life even beyond Earth's biosphere.  They can believe in sustaining the miracle of life's presence in the universe and the blessings of consciousness and self-consciousness.  They can believe in the continued unfolding and evolution of human consciousness and capability placed in the service of expanding goodness, virtue, valor, worth and dignity--in the quest of the heroic in human deeds.

We need a good myth to live by lest we become desolate and despairing souls.  Either a religious or a humanistic myth can serve as a belief system to save us from the despondency of absurdity when we can find no meaning in the Mystery.  And belief, not science, provides it.  Belief is not knowledge but the hope of knowing, which may be enough to fill our potholes.  Nonetheless, beliefs and myths must be evaluated by their effects on our lives and in the world.  They must be judged pragmythically, according to how well they fill the potholes on life's highway and keep our lives moving smoothly and meaningfully.  Many a belief and belief system cause crack-ups because they are not robust enough to sustain us in hard times.  We break through the surface losing courage, hope, and purpose as we plunge into the void of absurdity.  We then may hear Job's wife exhorting us:  "Despair and die!"  But an ennobling myth can lift us up, infuse us with purpose and meaning and speed us along life's highway.

Pragmythic beliefcraft, then, is a learned skill more vital than any other.  It is a survival skill for the soul.  What could be more important to thriving as a human being than the ability to make good sense of your life by devising dear and durable ideals to live by, conceiving an ennobling  myth to live up to?  To crave such elevation and distinction seems instinctive in our nature (unless it is crushed by despair).  So, given that we cannot live be the bread of knowledge alone, and that our spirits crave uplifting beliefs to sustain our souls, our challenge in life is to craft beliefs that serve us best, that make for the happiest of lives.

While many of our spirit-sustaining beliefs have been handed down to us by custom and tradition, even inculcated in us before we understood we were being indoctrinated by the culture of our family and society, ultimately we choose what we believe.  As we mature, our choice of beliefs becomes more conscious, considered, and intentional.  We exercise more free will in deciding and selecting what to believe, choices based largely on the expected consequences and the trials and errors of our experience.  The pragmythic attitude is that of trying out and testing one or another belief to discover how well it serves, individually and societally, one and all.

Then we are responsible for our choices and their effects.  Quite likely we'll choose badly, unwisely, not having calculated well the consequences.  As with suicide, often.  Or, to make the example worse, consider the current plague of suicide bombings in the Middle East.  Surely they demonstrate the power of belief.  To override the fundamental survival instinct in a human being must take immense power, and yet a belief in self-righteousness and heavenly rewards for martyrdom appears to generate that power.  Belief can move mountains, as the building of the Hoover Dam fabulously demonstrated, or the erection of the ancient pyramids.  "If you can imagine it," the slogan goes, "you can do it."  Whether or not that saying proves absolutely true, it points to the faith we put in faith--in the power of imagining, dreaming, and conceiving of ideas and ideals to believe in and then attempt to realize.  Yet for what we so dream we are responsible.  We answer for the consequences of our beliefs..

Choosing to Believe

I know what I know, but much of what I think I know, I only believe, which is something I have chosen to do, either consciously or unconsciously.

That is to say, I think I know lots more than I really do know, and I act upon that "knowledge" as if it were so, even though much of what I assume to be true is only what I believe to be true--what I have taken on trust instead of on verified confirmation.

We all walk about in the world relying on lots of assumptions that the strength of our belief turns (in our minds) into certainties.  We believe we are walking on solid sidewalks instead of the rickety rope bridges slung over chasms that our beliefs amount to.  Yes, these beliefs may sustain us for a while, even all our lives, but they remain beliefs and assumptions that may prove fallible.  We may fall through to the abyss.

The question then is whether we can live by fact alone, or live as well without belief (if that is even possible) as those live who allow themselves to entertain beliefs beyond what science certifies.

Since I believe belief is unavoidable for human beings, and that we cannot live (or live as well) by fact alone, then it behooves us to choose our beliefs consciously and discerningly rather than haphazardly and ignorantly.  We need good criteria for judging our beliefs and our belief systems.

I'm saying that we can consciously and intentionally choose, subscribe to, and commit to specific beliefs just as to a partner in marriage.  We can become wedded to certain beliefs, vowing fidelity to them and trusting them to be faithful in return: which implies that if what we believe in does not support and sustain us, we may choose to divorce it and remarrry a more suitable assumption.

A belief then is like an hypothesis you're rooting for rather than trying to prove wrong.  It's an heuristic notion that pays off, a speculation that comes through, a surmise that works.  Or if it doesn't , you dump it. You move on.  You seek for a more robust belief.

To make this abstract discussion more concrete, consider choosing to believe in the prospect of a thriving world.

Toward a Thriving World

When you explore the fundamental question of how people's beliefs affect and even shape their lives, you come to the deeper question of what each of us may believe (or simply assume unconsciously) about what kind of future we are heading for globally.  Is your idea of the future optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or fearful?  Whichever way you believe affects how you live now, and it affects the decisions and plans you make now.

But because "The Future" is so nebulous and  uncertain a concept, it's likely that you avoid thinking about it consciously.  It's too big to deal with.  It's too scary.  Just pondering and planning for your personal future over the next year or two within your private sphere of studies, work, and personal relationships is hard enough.

Would you not be happier, though, if you held a strong hope that, despite all the evident and terrifying troubles in our world, a better world is both conceivable and possible?  Imagine that human history is truly progressive, and our species is learning (however painfully and slowly) to live within social, economic, political, technological, and ecological systems that will produce a saner, more human population.  Would not such a vision be uplifting and inspiring?

Though you cannot know The Future or confidently predict how the world will go during your lifetime and beyond, you can imagine it one way or another.  You can also wish it to be as you desire--saner and more humane, let's say.  then if you combine what you imagine and wish, you can develop a dream and a scheme to believe in and bring into being.  This procedure for turning fantasies into realities has long been at work in the world.  Nowadays some call it "imagineering," the hooking up of imagination and engineering.  I call the process "pragmythic," the conversion of make-believe into reality:  Dream it, Believe it, Make it so.

If hopeful imagination supplies the vision, and clever ingenuity designs the machinery to make that dream real, then belief provides the willpower to run the machinery and produce a future that fulfills hope's vision, making the dream come true.

Many people succeed in realizing their personal and family dreams--the cliched American Dream of domestic comfort and financial security.  And many do not, to their despair.  Some who manage to achieve their private dreams then decide to enlarge their dreams to include the needs of others and even of the world at large:  ecosystems, environmental sustainability, the biosphere.  Or they dream at an intermediate level:  politics and economics in local, national, and international arenas

The most exalted people, I would say, the ones most worthy of our esteem and the ones who feel most inspired, are the bigger dreamers, those who work intentionally to bring about, in ways they are best suited to do, a better world, according the their vision of what that means.  (On the downside, though, might not Hitler, Mao, and Osama bin Laden think of themselves as big dreamers, visionaries intending to institute ideal societies that we would call totalitarian, fanatical, and inhumane?)

Nevertheless, human intelligence is slowly figuring out how human beings thrive and how the web of planetary life we're woven into thrives as well.  Any viable dream of a good society must be based on sound understanding of how we thrive in  the context of a thriving biosphere.  A commitment to promoting that thriving is, "I believe, the basis of personal happiness.  Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" is a start, but a more proactive commitment to promoting the thriving of life is called for.  Can anyone be truly happy who is not contributing to the well-being and the better-being of others?

The dream to dream, then, the dream to commit yourself to--to believe in with mind, heart, and soul--is the dream of thriving to the fullest.  though most of our modern efforts in that direction have focused on material plenty, as if that were all it takes to thrive, we have much more to understand and practice in the ways of mental, emotional, and spiritual thriving---and that's a quest worth our commitment.

So ask:  "How do I thrive, fully thrive?"  Then ask:  "What do others need to thrive?"  Then ask:  "What does the world need for its thriving that I can contribute to, in however small a way?"  Then commit yourself to thriving in all these ways.  See if that doesn't make you happy.  Now that, I would say, is a robust and viable belief, one worth espousing.

Conclusion

What finally matters is what we do with our beliefs and what comes of them.  The worth of our beliefs and their power will ultimately be judged by the benefits they bring into the world.  How True they are depends on how Good they are, for others and ourselves.  Ask this of a belief:  Does it lead to greater health, wholeness and happiness?  Does it promote love, care, kindness and compassion?  Does it bring gratifying insight to moral and ethical perplexities?  Does it not contradict but rather complement or transcend other strong claims to knowledge and truth, such as those of science?  These are pragmythic questions inquiring into the values of our beliefs, into the values by which our beliefs themselves are evaluated.  For finally any true belief will lead us to our ultimate value--wisdom.

Coda

                                    True Beliefs--A Sestina

                        "In dreams begin responsibilities"

        If  I'm responsible for what I dream,

        Then all the more am I for my belief

        In this or that.  Though life is not a play.

        Still, what's at play inside my head will work

        To shape the seeming world in which I live,

         And my beliefs could use a little help.

Though many say belief in God can help

With everything, some say that's just a dream,

A comforting illusion kept alive

By wish and hope and fear, a dead belief

Debunked by science long ago, the work

Of superstitious minds--or rather play.

And yet I much admire the mind at play

I think that what we do in play can help

Us live more happily and even work

To rectify our wretched  days, as dream

Can pacify our fretful nights.  Belief

Is but a kind of dream by which we live.

You think we live by fact alone?  We live

By so much more than what we know.  We play

At knowing, being scientists.  Belief

Is the hypothesis we form to help

Imagine what is real.  It is a dream

Conceived in hopes to show how things might work.

By such-like suppositions, which may work

Or not, we stumble on and learn to live

By our approximations, though we dream

Of finding truth.  Meanwhile, we mostly play

With our As-Ifs and call them real.  They help

Us through the night.  We'd die without belief.

And we'd do best to cultivate belief,

To choose beliefs that serve us well, that work

To energize our deeds.  Belief can help

Us struggle against odds, and help us live

into reality what first was play:

We are responsible for what we dream.

What first we dream evolves into belief

Which, put in hopeful play proves it can work

To let us live and thrive.  Belief does help.

     Envoy

          I figure that at this point, after all my ruminations about the general nature of belief, you'd just like to hear straight out what I believe.

That is, however, a topic for another time.  Rather, I'm here now to listen to what you believe, what you think it's important to believe, and to find out whether you can persuade me that your beliefs are ones it would be well for me to espouse.  I'm all ears.

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                "No matter what your age, the only legitimate fear in your life should be that maybe you're living the wrong story, leaning your ladder against the wrong wall.  To succeed in a story not your own is failure."

                                                                                --Rabbi Marc Gafni

                  "...it does feel (now) as if I had spent my years sweeping out a horizon of beliefs, soap-bubble thin, that I could live in."

                                                                                --Huston Smith

                "Man is what he believes."

                                                                                --Anton Chekov         

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