BELIEF IS THE ENEMY

                          Belief IS the enemy

                          The Power of Belief

Studying the fantastic powers of the mind isn't just for Forteans
anymore. Other "respectable" scientists have begun to look at the
mind's amazing capabilities. Medical researchers have found that
through biofeedback, people can control their own body temperature,
pulse rate, or even sensations of pain. Psychoneuroimmunology has
begun to examine the interfaces between the mind and the immune
system's resistance to disease. Hypnosis has proven to be an effective
tool to counteract smoking, obesity, and other problems through
autosuggestion. Many disorders, such as warts, impotence, and
headaches, are now known to be psychosomatic, that is, mind-caused.
The placebo effect, which is based on nothing other than the perceived
authority of medicine, appears to provide genuine benefit to the sick.
Surgeons have found that talking negatively about patients under
anaesthesia reduces their recovery and recuperation rate. Some "wild
talents" such as lightning calculation, eidetic (photographic) memory,
and rapid learning, appear to make use of parts of the brain that many
of us leave dormant. Properly trained, our minds can "script" our
nightly dreams through "lucid dreaming" or even alter our physical
condition by re-creating our body image. But when dysfunctional, they
can also trap us with obsessive compulsions or delusions which seem
real.

It is apparent that if you can convince the mind of something, then
the body considers it to be true. Subliminal persuasion can convince
you that you're hungry, and your stomach will begin to secrete gastric
acid, regardless of your actual 'physical' need for nutrients. The
success of the pornography industry lies in the fact that people can
become sexually aroused by representations of the sexual act, in lieu
of the real thing. Fantasizing is not just limited to the sexual
realm; it appears to be the key to creativity for artists and writers.
About 4 % of us are Fantasy-Prone Personalities, meaning that our
active imaginations are capable of creating alternate worlds of equal
vividness and complexity to "this" one; and such FPPs dwell in those
worlds a good part of their lives. If soldiers are told that they have
marched for three times the distance that they have 'really' marched,
their bodies often display three times the normal level of fatigue.
Many people laugh over pop psychology pablum concerning the "power of
positive thinking. " But studies show that confidence and
concentration are often the primary keys in athletic success- not
brawn, power, or musculature. If this is the case, it may be true that
many of our limitations are self-imposed, and often what inhibits us
is nothing other than the automatic belief that we'll fail.

In the non-Western world, this stuff is old hat. Some of the lamas of
Tibet have so much mastery of mind over body that they can survive
through freezing cold, go without food or water for amazing periods of
time, suspend vital functions (such as heartbeat) for hours, or negate
bleeding or injury. Islamic religious mystics are so "enraptured" that
they pierce their flesh with hooks and lie on sword blades;
"possessed" Haitian voudou houngans chew glass and razor blades;
"ecstatic" Fijians walk across blazing hot coals; and all do this
without pain or injury. Christian mystics have a long history of self-
inflicted pain, but a much lesser record of avoiding injury or death
(hence the high number of Christian martyrs.) Some, like the Welsh
Revivalists of 1905, have done some amazing things, like slam each
other with sledgehammers or mauls, to little effect. When the mystics
are asked how they perform such feats, they claim that they empty
their mind of all thoughts except one, which is usually their key
concept of the Divine or sacred. Sufi dervishes dance endlessly
without fatigue, claiming they are so "filled with G-d" that they
cannot feel anything, not even exhaustion. Martial arists in the
Orient fill their mind with their characteristic yell, which allows
them to focus ch'i to do the unthinkable, such as shattering brick.
The Tibetan lamas claim that when the mind concentrates properly on
its own Buddha-nature  (mantras, yantras, mandalas, breathing, and
yoga are all important techniques), all the Siddhas are possible,
including the creation of thought-forms (tulpas) with a reality of
their own.

Modern science and psychology might be willing to accept that the mind
can conquer feelings of pain, but there is no way Cartesian science
can explain how the mind stops the flow of blood, negates damage to
the body, commands the very cellular activity of the body, or
transcends normal human limitations. The nervous system or the
hormones of the brain glands cannot "tell" the skin not to break when
pierced by a sword. It is clear that for supranormal performance, an
altered state of consciousness is necessary, whether that be "the
runner's high" or "the ecstasy of the saints." When such as ASC is
attained, the mind may have a PK-like ability to control and shape the
body, perhaps even creating the stigmata of the saints or the marks of
Buddhahood. Understanding the mechanisms of "mind over body" involved
in these processes may lead us to an understanding of other
parapsychological aspects of the mind, such as psychokinesis or
psychic healing. The Russians have focused in particular in the
bioenergetic aspects of the mind - how human emotion and cognition
change the 'bioplasma' or so-called 'Kirlian aura.' "Bioinformation"
may be relayed from the mind of one organism to another through a
previously unrecognized medium, the "elan vital" of the ancients.

The common discovery of the modern doctors and the traditional mystics
is that mind shapes reality. Psychologists are beginning to understand
how our cognitive structure - personality, attitudes, preconceptions,
worldview, socialization, enlanguagement, etc. - shapes our perception
of reality; but they are not prepared to deal with ways in which the
mind may construct, create, and transform reality 'in itself.' Some of
this work in constructivist cognitive science - how mind makes the
world - is being examined by Heinz von Foerster at MIT. Others,
approaching the nervous system as "operationally closed," (such as
Maturana and Varela) feel that the mind cannot 'directly' perceive
reality, only generate perceptions consonant with its previously
shaped cognitive structure. What we call discovery or identification
may really be processes of invention or creation. Sociologists of
knowledge, like Andew Pickering, feel that physicists are often really
"creating" many of the weird quantum entities they are studying,
rather than just "finding" them out there. (That position is reflected
by the Copenhagen Interpretation, which suggests that mind collapses
the quantum wave function and creates the properties of the observed.)


Why Belief Can Be Our Enemy

Understanding that mind makes reality, one must then understand why
belief is the enemy . Belief systems have often been created to shape
the mind into narrow reality-tunnels that exclude other modes of
perception. If you can control what people believe - as Hitler,
Stalin, and other dictators realized - you have a method of coercion
better than a thousand tanks or the death penalty. The so-called holy
wars of religion and the Inquisition were waged in the name of belief,
the idea being that either you believed in the True Religion  or you
were deserving of death. As Robert Anton Wilson points out,
convictions make convicts - rigidity of belief and ideological
dogmatism ("there is only one true way") have restrained and distorted
the human spirit for thousands of years. People will do things they
wouldn't otherwise - such as suicide bombings or kamikaze dives - in
the name of religious or nationalistic beliefs. The problem of the
human race has not been a lack of belief, it has been a surplus of it.
He who can get us to believe in an ideology has us under his power.
But ideology governs more than action or behavior.

Because of the power of the mind, those who control ideological
apparatuses can therefore control reality (an insight Marx hinted at,
then fell short of, due to his tunnel-visioned materialism.) If we
examine certain ideological precepts - norms, "morals," ideals - we do
not have to be a cynic to see that some are techniques of social
control. But more than that, they are attempts to govern discourse and
the nature and validity of truth-claims that can be made about the
world. Beliefs pertaining to authority, divine right, etc. are
particularly useful for political control; but this is likewise true
of beliefs in "the invisible hand" in the realm of economic power and
control, and in other social realms. Beliefs about the natural world,
unlike beliefs about the social world, are accorded stronger truth-
claims, due to the ideological system of naturalism. Thus, the belief
that some people are "naturally" stronger can justify certain social
arrangements. But, beliefs about the natural world may serve another
purpose: if people have a stake in certain beliefs regarding the
natural world, they will be negative toward other beliefs due to the
closure operant in most belief systems.

If one is familiar with the power of belief, then the natural
philosophical position to take is skepticism: "accept nothing unless
proven or verified." While the Greek philosophers thought skepticism
meant suspension of belief or agnosticism (admitting that one really
did not know anything), many modern 'skeptics' are really 'debunkers'
or 'disbelievers.' That is, rather than choosing to suspend belief in
X, they choose to believe in not-X, often with a lack of criticality
that they ascribe to believers in X. While skepticism is closely
linked with empiricism - one should base all epistemological precepts
on induction, observation, and experience - the two concepts are not
identical. The skeptic realizes that both his reason and his senses
can fail him at times, so both rationalism and empiricism are
insufficient. Skepticism is based in the critical method: question and
challenge all authority and all prevailing ideas. Scientific
"skepticism" is limited in that it refuses to question its own radical
privilege over other modes of comprehending the world, or its own
possible insufficiency. The true skeptic (zetetic) has no stake in any
discourse/belief-system, religious, scientific, mythic, or otherwise,
but he may borrow from any system the concepts he chooses to
assimilate into a personal worldview. (Choosing to deny oneself a
worldview is also a doctrine, in a sense - nihilism. )


Fortean Zeteticism

Forteans should be true skeptics, always remaining in that fine point
of balance between belief and disbelief, willing to consider both
contrary and positive evidence without jumping to conclusions.
Speculations can be made from the potential truth of phenomena,
without any final decision as to their ontological validity.
Skepticism does not mean the surrender of truth altogether, only the
surrender of belief. That means all beliefs - moral, social,
religious, rational, irrational, logical, illogical, emotional, etc. -
that one cannot personally prove or verify should be surrendered.
Truth should be dealt with from a relativistic framework, with room
for multiple frames of reference, and left in a state of potentiality.
Occam's Razor should shave away all unnecessary assumptions -"they
make an ASS  out of U and ME" - regardless of their supposed basis in
the prevailing canons of thought or even "common sense. " The world is
often not what we expect it to be, nor what we take it to be. After
all, our beliefs only shape the world to a limited extent. You can
believe you are Godzilla for as long as you want to, deeply and truly,
and you will never acquire firebreathing abilities or a 200 ft
stature. That is quite verifiable. Try it for yourself.

If Fortean phenomena are approached from a framework of belief, their
reflective character creates only confusion and consternation. Look
for Martians, and lo and behold! you will find them; but beware, they
may be something else tomorrow ("airship inventors. ") True Fortean
investigators, in order to avoid catching something drawn from their
own mind, should suspend belief, and employ the objectivity and
skepticism scientists claim but usually fail to demonstrate. (The
reflexivity of Fortean phenomena is much greater than many other
scientific unknowns - much of Forteana appears to hold true to the old
adage "you see what you want to see" -but it can provide insights into
the properties of other occurences where science fails to recognize
the reflexivity at work.) Skepticism is not a denial of objective
reality, merely a sober appraisal of the ways in which beliefs can
partially alter it, and a way to get at things from a belief-free,
open-minded perspective. One need not be stoic, a tabula rasa, or
completely non-committed to any principles to be a skeptic. Rather,
one needs merely to acknowledge the potential limitations and
constraints of the beliefs they hold, since an existence where one
believes in nothing could be undesirable. Hence not taking oneself too
seriously can be an important key, as well as not being too defensive
about one's intellectual territory. Are any scientific 'skeptics'
listening?

Timothy Leary maintained that there were multiple circuits accessible
within the human brain, but only a few were active. Most academic
scientists have not progressed beyond the emotional-territorial phase:
most of their arguments are based on the perceived need (like alpha
male primates) to stake out and defend intellectual "turf" and
maintain that in various "turf wars." Few have activated the circuits
beyond the dextero-symbolic, which views the world in terms of puzzle-
solving and piece-assembling. Anyone who has read Martin Gardner's
mathematical recreations column in "Scientific American" has witnessed
the academic way of reducing the world to a mathematical problem to be
solved. But those who may have engaged their hedonic or transegoic
circuits begin to realize that it may be best to treat the world as a
Zen riddle or koan , and appreciate the qualities of subtlety, irony,
ambiguity, and unexpectedness that make the universe so precious.
Those who have made it to this stage know the inappropriateness of
belief (such as Charles Fort: "I accept no facts, concepts, or
theories, as I have no truck with something so slippery as the
products of minds") and the necessity of communicating this
understanding to others.

Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1