THEY ARE JUST SYMBOLS Unplugging Buttons and Opening the Mind

In writing about a Strategy for Defeating Book Burning (Meta Reflection #44), I mostly got emails about the spelling of Koran (Quran) but also three that questioned my comment about holy books and flags and the like being “just symbols.” Only one disagreed; the other two asked how could that be and what did I mean. Two others asked about beliefs and especially beliefs- about-beliefs. So here goes.

We are all believers. I am. You are. We all have to believe in things. You have beliefs about yourself, about others, about school, about money, about work, about emotions, about where you came from, about the source of the universe, about what happens after you die, about intelligence, and a thousand other beliefs. You cannot be human and not a believer. The only question is: What do you believe in? And you can’t escape this even by not believing in things because your not-belief is a belief! To believe “there is no God” is a belief. That’s what you believe!

So, first, we all have to believe. And believing simply refers to the fact that you have taken some of your thoughts and confirmed them. You made a meta-move to a higher level to establish a frame about your thought, “This is real, true, and the way it is.” It is this confirmation that transforms a mere thought into a gestalted meta-state that we call a “belief.”

What is a belief made out of? Thoughts, ideas, and understandings and a level of confirmation. And it is the level of confirmation that distinguishes a belief from just a mere “thought.” Now you believe in something and that makes it operate as a “command to the nervous system” which in turn, sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy so that you become organized around your beliefs. Now you will see and hear and experience the world through the color of your beliefs. If you have ever tried to “argue” someone out of his or her beliefs, then you know that doing that only makes their beliefs stronger!

As a meta-state structure, beliefs are strong, resilient, and self-organizing. So what happens when a person creates a belief-in-a-belief? Well, that’s an entirely different story from a belief. When you believe in your belief, you end the discovering, you stop the exploration, you close shop, you stop your openness to new information, and you become a fundamentalist! A fanatic. Now you act as if you “know” something. Now you stop recognizing it as a belief and you treat it as unquestionable fact.

Now the belief that any book (religious or otherwise) is not just a book but more, that it is the “reality,” confuses map and territory. It confuses what the book speaks about and refers to — that is, to the territory beyond the book, to the reality which is not words or sentences or ink or paper. As this belief confuses and over-identifies a person’s map about something and the territory, it violates a basic epistemological understanding— “The map is not the territory.” (“The menu is not the meal.”)

Interesting enough there’s a passage in the Bible that speaks to this, distinguishing “the book” from the reality. The context was a debate with the religious leaders, the Pharisees and so to them Jesus said, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them is eternal life, but they are they which testify of me.” (John 5:39). Now whether you agree or disagree with the content of that statement, he at least distinguished from the means that delivered the message, the book, the scriptures, and what the writings referred to— that which they pointed to outside of the text itself. Maybe there’s something similar in the Koran, I don’t know because I’m unfamiliar with that text. It would be nice if those scriptures also distinguished between the map / territory.

[Another verse in Romans says that the “letter of the law kills, but the spirit (the intention) gives life.”]

Now you know why one of the chief problems in our world (if not the chief problem) is fundamentalism: a belief-in-a-belief and how this creates fanatics! They close their mind, they look for no new evidence, they can’t be talked to, they are on a mission to convert everyone to their way of thinking. This is true of every form of fundamentalists, even atheistic fundamentalists, or the fundamentalists of scientism. The belief has become an -ism and that’s what makes it dangerous. Now they believe they have a mandate to do anything to force others into their way of thinking, believing, and acting. And that’s what gives them the green light to become dictators!

[That might explain why Dr. Bob Bodenhamer writes fundamentalists as “funDAMentalists!” I like that. My thought is: If only they would have more fun there’d be less damnation going on!]

“But this book is more than just a book!” That’s what a fanatical “true believer” (Eric Hoffer) or fundamentalist believes. In terms of human cognitive and emotional development, this reflects the “magical thinking” stage of childhood wherein a child believes that things can be magically powerful and so they go through the superstitious stage.

Yet in the end, a book is just a book— any book, Koran, the Bible, Book of Mormon, Torah, etc. It is not a magical item dropped out of the heavens. And as a “map” about spiritual things, it offers various ideas about a great many things. And as a “map” is it not the territory. So burn them or kiss them, toss them away or read them daily— know what you have in your hands, a symbol ... full of symbols ... and not the reality. If you believe in the reality behind it all, then that reality is so much more than paper and ink! Or is that your god? Provocatively Yours