Unconscious Beliefs

I’ve been meaning to give some background on how I’m planning to use the word belief. This pertains to the (difficult) question on what the substrate of the mind is, or, if you will, what an ego is made out of. I think this deserves some thought.

The normal use of the word belief is “things I stand for”. A quick Google search tells us that belief is basically a synonym for “conviction”. I think often people use this to indicate convictions they are identified with. But all of us also hold a myriad of unconscious beliefs or convictions that we enact in lots of subtle and some not so subtle ways without noticing. Frequently this shows up very clearly in our body language and often it’s more apparent to others than from the inside. (Pretty frustrating.) We can make a big step towards self-awareness by learning to access more and more of these unconscious beliefs. 

Having, and acting out, convictions that one hasn’t chosen and that may be in obvious contradiction to one’s self-image can be a hard pill to swallow. Modernity is built around the idea that we have control over who we are. I have a hypothesis that much of the current polarization stems from the breakdown of this myth. Society is in a transition and it does not yet have a new way to assign responsibility that doesn’t rely on the assertion that people are in control of who they are.

But besides being externally contentious, gaining awareness of all the unconscious enacted and embodied belief is also usually disruptive to the sense of internal cohesion painstakingly built up throughout one’s maturation process. I think a good part of what’s driving the Kegan four to Kegan five transition is that the view of self morphs from a monolithic self with a cohesive principled world view to a view of self as a looser coalition of parts. 

Is there something that helps us deal with this?  I think the underlying practice is to unconflate one's theory of how the self works (and the resulting expectation of how this theory manifests in the world) from what we actually observe of ourselves. In particular, one has to break the illusion that control over enacted beliefs is necessary for being/feeling internally in control and being externally trustworthy. I think the general form looks something like this:

“If I’m not in control of what convictions I enact then I’ll be out of control and can’t trust myself and others can’t trust me.”

But in fact you’ll be the exact degree of “out of control” you already are, you’ll just be able to notice how it actually works. Most of the out-of-control-ness is already priced in as things you do that don't make sense. You'll stay the same, just your interpretation of how you work changes.

And you’ll be able to trust yourself roughly to the same degree you can currently trust yourself.

More about this particular world view shift elsewhere. For the scope of this post I mostly want to focus on pointing to how many, if not most, of the convictions driving our actions (in particular the small scale actions, like our body language) are by default unconscious. This drives everything, from the places where we act out in ways that we later can’t make sense of, to the conflicts we have with other people that don’t make sense, to moods that don’t make sense, to things like body tension and chronic pain that don’t make sense. Basically the explanation for anything about ourselves that bothers us and doesn’t make sense is unconscious beliefs. Well, and actually the explanation for anything about others and the world that bothers us and doesn’t make sense is also unconscious beliefs (often, usually, our own). 

In these posts I use the word “belief” to mean both convictions you identify with (or know about) and convictions you unconsciously embody and enact. Sometimes I highlight this distinction but often I treat them both the same way. This is notably different from how the word belief is used in other discourse and thus worth explaining. 

I use it like this because it seems to me that conscious and unconscious belief have something important in common (their “belief-nature”) and from the viewpoint of this writing the commonality is more important than the other distinction. So what is this “belief-nature” that is important? A belief is an encoded description of how things are. It’s part of a representational layer of your being that goes deeper than your sense of self, but has some overlap with it. It’s encoded in what Gendlin calls the body of felt senses. These descriptions form through interaction with reality but they aren’t necessarily accurate. In fact they can be distorted in various ways and the distortions form patterns that can be observed. The formation of the patterns itself has regularities, which can be described. “Laws of psychology”, if you will, similar to “laws of physics” (but less established and proven). 

The layer of beliefs is a deeper layer than the sense of self, but it’s still an intermediate layer that one can learn to go underneath. What’s underneath has various names in the different spiritual traditions: the Soul, True Nature, Self, Big Self, No Self, etc. It’s a layer of experience underneath conceptualization and therefore hard to describe in words. Part of why it’s worth studying beliefs is that the distortions in the belief layer distort the interactions between true nature and world and between true nature and sense of self. And this is the cause of much suffering. In many traditions it is believed to be the root cause of all suffering.