Beyond Believing

I was asked a profound question following my remarks “Beyond Polarities” given at the Annual General Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland in April 2017. That question, though I answered it as best I could then, has lived with me since and given rise to the thoughts that follow. The point of my remarks in April was that belief systems operating in the name of truth have actually come to imprison us, and thus isolate us within the broader culture. This separation has hardened into a seemingly impassable polarity. The question was a challenging one: What do I do if I meet someone whose belief system is opposed to mine? What might I do to be able to have a conversation regardless of the result? Of course, this is the essential and hard question—extremely practical and full of opportunity.

My response at the time had two parts. The first was to encourage work in the realm of self-knowledge to understand our own beliefs and how they are formed and inform us. Then, further to know what values are woven into them, and if they are internally consistent. Taking on this work makes it easier to see that each one of us has developed beliefs and a belief system. It then also makes it possible to make our own inner process visible to others and to support others as they explore their own beliefs. One result is the opportunity, given permission and willingness, of sharing insights from each person’s inquiry instead of arguing over the results.

The second part of the response was more focused on the heart forces of forgiveness. If we can be forgiving of ourselves on the path of self-knowledge, then that practice can invite forgiveness for others in theirs. This inner gesture makes it possible to recognize the humanity and dignity in others even if they are denying the same to me. Understand that this is hard work. And, understand that the face of evil is visible when a person’s humanity and dignity are denied.

My response at the time seemed sufficient for the circumstances. But, the original question has become an extended inquiry for me.

In the geography of human experience, beliefs can be considered bedrock, the fundament upon which each person builds meaning. Each person’s belief system governs what they see and what they create into the future. Since a belief is an inner construct, it does not really require an origination in physical or evidential reality. In fact, there is a term “presuppositionalism” to describe the primacy of belief over evidence. (1) This is hard to understand for those of us who have absorbed “science” as the arbiter of reality. And easier to understand if, for example, the Bible is the source for one’s world view.

To move beyond the polarity between belief-predictsevidence and evidence-predicts-belief, we need to accept the value of both and the reality that we are guided as much by inclinations and emotion as by rational thought. These factors contribute to the evolution of human understanding, an understanding that needs to be free of an assumption of rightness, and the notion that anyone can own truth any more than they can weigh and measure an idea in anything other than metaphorical terms. Though of course ideas have a power all their own separate from how they might be corralled as intellectual property.

If you doubt each of us carries within us a belief system, try to answer the question of how we discern truth. This challenge is not just about a polarity between the factual and the poetic, the material and the spiritual, or different belief systems, it is rather about that which is unique to the human being. Namely, the capacity for self-knowledge which would allow us the possibility of seeing into and through our own belief systems to understand their origins, whether inherited, conditioned, or from some other less identifiable source tied to our identity. Without engaging in this depth of exploration, it is hard to arrive at a trust of inner knowing. That is the moral ground on which each of us stands and upon which each of us depends for a sense of integrity. I would venture to say that if one does not travel this path in the freedom of inquiry, then that integrity has been shaped by some other external source—for better or worse. In an over-mediated commercially-driven world, which some have come to call post-truth, the competition is on to be that external source. The consequence of this competition is the sacrifice of freedom, the very freedom referred to in the quote from the John Gospel Ch. 8: verse 32, “The Truth shall make you free.” And really, whose truth? Or, as a dear friend asked me when we were addressing issues of money and race, “Whose rules govern here?” It takes profound reflection and engagement with self-knowledge to be able to answer both of these questions. Thomas Merton, in a letter to Steve Eisner put it in the following way: “God asks of us, first of all, sincerity and truth… Since He has made us for the truth, it stands to reason that we have to be true in order to know the truth.” (2)

Belief systems are indicators of our consciousness, a condition of soul. We create them. We can let them dissipate, even if they recrystallize as they were. The exercise has value if just to gain visibility into the belief’s deeper structure, to gain insight into how we construct that which we think is true. Reconciling truth to some absolute is an extraordinarily difficult philosophical, and I would say spiritual, undertaking. To do so one has to work through the history of consciousness. Further, one would have to develop a capacity of thinking able to reach a place where one can observe with a measure of objectivity one’s own thinking. It is in this realm where the morality of truth shows itself, the realm in which truth, beauty, and goodness play as Aristotle articulated. Such a state would look at a relativist view of truth as simply a practice of laziness—an avoidance of having to discern beyond the contextual analysis that established something is true based upon individualized experience. The absolutist views the relativist view as true, but not universal. This sets up the logic of two irreconcilable truths, but only one deserving of capital T “Truth.” Something changes when one is seen as nestled within the other. They are then no longer in conflict but rather subject to understanding on one hand (Truth of truth) and affirmation of the seemingly unknown on the other (truth of Truth).

Humans are capable of this kind of consciousness; such challenges of knowing are the gift given to human beings. One could ask why arguments about the nature of truth have come to be, rarefied as they seem in the face of day-to-day reality for which we require food, shelter, warmth, and safety. How these basic needs are provided falls directly into a different but equally important polarity. Is it each person’s responsibility to meet their needs out of self-interest, or is there some shared sense of responsibility that falls to the body social out of interest in the wellbeing of others? I raise this not to be problematic but simply to point out that the relativist view tends to land back at self-interest because it is so tied to the individual. The absolutist view would posit that there is something of a universal human—not that we are the same. Quite the opposite is true. Rather, from the perspective of how we stand in the world, our need for love, a need to be recognized as valuable, and the powerful capacities of offering to meet those needs for and with others, such qualities of experience are only possible through association with other human beings. While the relative view is meaningful, the absolute is the meaning—an indicator of the universal in human connections.

Working toward such discernment is a life task and it requires the awakening of the heart as the arbiter. Our thoughts are of course both the object and subject of our thinking, but the recognition of other human beings and their reality calls on a different capacity—that of moving past our “thinking” in order to access our capacity of feeling as centered in the heart. This capacity, actually a complex of senses, makes it possible to connect through the heart’s intelligence the being of another—what is rightly called compassion. The heart can hold both difference and unity in its energetic field, which embodies the operative principle of love. In this field, the meaning of “Truth shall set you free” rings true, so that we can live beyond polarity and willingly in the complexity of life embedded in relationships. We need each other to make and test this ever-changing reality. While our minds are busy making experience meaningful, our hearts are forming the essence of meaning. It is in this frame that we can move beyond belief systems toward heart-to-heart conversation.

John Bloom (john.bloom@anthroposophy.org) is General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America and vice president for corporate culture of RSF Social Finance in San Francisco.

Notes:

1 See Molly Worthen, “The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society,” Sunday Review, New York Times, April 13, 2017, for a fuller discussion of how the scientific and religious threads play out in contemporary thought. In the article she refers to a school of thought called Presuppositionalism.

2 Found in "Quote, Unquote", Jonathan Willliams, p. 116. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, 1989