Beliefs, Bodies, Minds, and Behavior

A Facebook friend of mine recently started a new blog. He says his aim with the blog is to encourage people to share how their religious or other beliefs positively affect their behavior.

He doesn’t want anyone questioning or challenging what he posts or what others comment there, because he thinks this would scare people away or close them off to the kind of open-hearted sharing that could nurture mutual understanding leading to human connectedness.

Moreover, he says, or I interpret him to say, that he sees no value in examining the beliefs themselves, because if they don’t change one’s behavior for the better, they don’t matter, and if they do positively impact one’s behavior, who cares what they are?  

And, if I understand him correctly, he isn’t keen on the idea of discussing how someone’s beliefs impact them physiologically or psychologically in terms of such variables as amount of stress or anxiety; the kinds of emotions and attitudes; or the degree of happiness they experience as a consequence of their beliefs. He only wants to discuss how beliefs positively affect behavior.

I’ve asked him about this. I’ve suggested to him that the interior effects of beliefs can be as or more important than their exterior effects on behavior.

For example, believing that we should always act like a perfect Christian-style saint could be a recipe for unwholesome repression of thoughts, emotions, desires, and behaviors, and of unhappiness and even physical and psychological pathology.

Think, for instance, of people whose religious or other beliefs cause them to chronically suppress behavior or repress emotions when this generates mounting stress that eventually causes or exacerbates cancer or cardiovascular disease.

Of course, someone might argue that one’s conscious beliefs themselves probably don’t cause these deleterious “interior” conditions, but that the beliefs and accompanying interior conditions arise from something deeper or more fundamental in the person’s psyche, genetic makeup, or overall nature. So, to borrow a previous example, someone doesn’t pathologically repress emotions, thoughts, or desires because of his religious beliefs. Rather, something in his psyche and/or genetic complement and/or overall makeup causes him to adopt the religious beliefs he harbors and also causes him to develop cancer or suffer a heart attack while repressing emotions, thoughts, or desires that happen to conflict with his beliefs.

But if that’s true, wouldn’t it be equally plausible to argue that our beliefs themselves don’t cause our exterior behavior so much as deeper psychological and/or biological factors cause us to believe what we believe and to act how we act? If so, shouldn’t we largely forget about sharing how our beliefs impact what we do or how we feel and try instead to figure out what’s causing us to believe what we believe, feel what we feel, and do what we do?

I don’t think so, and I doubt that my aforementioned Facebook friend thinks so either. I think we both are of the opinion that even if our beliefs, feelings, and actions stem from underlying biological and mental conditions, our beliefs nevertheless play an important role in how we feel and in what we do, even if my friend seems to want to ignore feeling and focus only on behavior while I want to give feeling and behavior equal weight.

Besides, even if our beliefs and their concomitant feelings and behaviors stem from deeper, unconscious factors rooted in our biology or psychology, isn’t it also the case that changing our beliefs can change our underlying biology and psychology? The ancient Stoics thought and modern cognitive-behavioral psychotherapists certainly think that changing unrealistic, irrational, or unreasonable beliefs to realistic, rational, or reasonable ones can positively impact body, mind, and behavior in profound ways.

In other words, don’t beliefs actually matter in every respect, and doesn’t that make them eminently worthy of conscientious examination?

And if beliefs matter and deserve close examination, shouldn’t we examine them to discern whether they’re good beliefs or bad ones? True or at least reasonable beliefs, or false or at least unreasonable ones?

My friend doesn’t want to examine the beliefs themselves but just share them in an unwaveringly happy place where every belief allegedly leading to positive behavior is benignly accepted and even praised by the participants. But what if some of those beliefs are bad beliefs whose behavioral, physiological, and psychological consequences may not be as salubrious as the person sharing them blithely assumes?

Suppose, for instance, that someone harbors dubious religious beliefs that lead to her not drinking as much as before, or to stop engaging in promiscuous sex, or to be nicer to people, but she also feels like a miserable sinner wracked with excruciating shame and guilt over the fact that she still falls abysmally short of the righteousness she believes God demands and expects of her, and she worries about burning forever in hell after she dies. Or suppose that her religious beliefs cause her to turn her back on her gay son or sibling even though they also cause her to volunteer in a food kitchen for the homeless. If this person were to examine her beliefs more closely and develop more reasonable ones, might she not only feel better about herself but also change her behavior in even more positive ways while abandoning the negative behaviors resulting from her prior dubious or unreasonable beliefs?

Converse to the person whose beliefs lead her to act better in all or some ways but to feel worse, imagine a recent convert’s religious beliefs causing him to feel happier than he’s ever felt now that he’s found his life’s purpose in loving and serving God or Krishna, but he acts like an insufferably self-righteous prick railing against sinners and incessantly browbeating wayward souls to “come to Jesus.” And maybe he even turns away from his family and runs off to join some fanatical cult.

While most people don’t go to these undesirable psychological and behavioral extremes as a result of their beliefs, they might still be adversely impacted in their behavior or mental states to some degree by harboring false or unreasonable beliefs, and a thorough examination of those beliefs could result in their realization of how false, unreasonable, or dubious those beliefs are and, consequently, in their changing for the better in how they feel and/or behave. This is a hallmark approach of Stoic philosophy and of cognitive-behavioral therapy to which I alluded previously.

So even if one thinks that beliefs, whether true or false, are unimportant in themselves but only in relation to their impact on one’s psyche and/or behavior, I think a cogent case can be made that it’s important to examine beliefs in order to optimize one’s body, mind, and behavior. It’s all fine and good if my friend doesn’t want to do that on his blog. But I’m not keen on participating in any forum dedicated to discussion of religious or spiritual concerns that disallows respectful and substantive discussion and evaluation of beliefs proper.

But what I am keen on doing is finding a better way to do this that doesn’t end up in the customary fashion of people angrily debating and disparaging one another and clinging resolutely to their own views and failing dismally to arrive at a fuller understanding and appreciation of and respect for differing beliefs and of and for the people espousing those beliefs. I can’t say that I’ve made a lot of progress in that direction so far, but I’m working on it, and I think I’ve made at least a little progress now that I’m more intent than ever on doing so.

Meditation or Philosophy?

"The gate to spiritual practice begins with the visceral insight that everything is going to vanish, including me." ~ Lewis Richmond, Soto Zen Priest

I just finished reading a Tricycle magazine interview with Lewis Richmond about using spiritual practice to make the most, or, depending on how you look at it, the least of aging. Lewis contends that the older we get, the more we tend to experience physical deterioration and psychological awareness of our impermanence that opens a door to serious spiritual practice that may have been closed earlier in life, and that while meditation and other spiritual practices don't stop us from aging, thinking about our mortality, and dying, they can attune us more deeply to our moment-to-moment experience so that we see and accept it for what it is without wishing it were something else. He goes on to say that meditation and other spiritual practices won't necessarily make life wonderful, but they can still "make a big difference" in our life. In this way, aging can be welcomed as an opportunity for positive change instead of perceived and dreaded as a curse.

Two things came primarily to mind as I read this. First of all, I wonder if I wasn't right when I wrote years ago that spiritual practice may be vastly overrated in terms of the benefits it can deliver to the practitioner and to those in his or her orbit. 

Second, I wondered if there aren't psychologically or philosophically oriented practices that might generate more fulfilling bang for the buck than would sitting countless hours on a mediation cushion. Of course, one could do both, and this multifaceted approach to personal development is, indeed, part of what has been variously called "integral transformative practice" and "integral life practice." But might one be better off spending the time one would have spent meditating reading about and practicing CBT or stoicism instead? Or would meditation make CBT and/or stoicism work better and vice versa?

My inclination is to think that, at my age and given my temperament, my time would be better spent psychologizing and philosophizing my way to wherever it is I want to go than trying to mediate myself there. But what do I really know of such things, and what can I realistically hope to accomplish with any approach?