Power of Belief

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

It is common wisdom that if someone really believes that he or she can accomplish something he or she will move confidently towards achieving the goal. But if he or she believes something is impossible, no amount of nudging, coaching, or encouragement is going to convince him or her to take one step forward. All of us have beliefs that serve us as resources as well as beliefs that limit us.

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, “If cells are in a healthy environment, they are healthy. If they’re in an unhealthy environment, they get sick.” Dr. Lipton goes on to explain that the chemistry of blood determines the nature of the environment of the cells within you. The blood’s chemistry is largely impacted by the chemicals emitted from your brain. The brain chemistry adjusts the composition of the blood based upon your perceptions of life. This means your perception of any given thing, at any given moment, can influence the brain chemistry, which, in turn, affects the environment where your cells reside and control their fate. In other words, your thoughts and perceptions have a direct and overwhelming significant effect on the cells of the body.

According to Dr. Lipton, “The function of the mind is to create coherence between our beliefs and the reality we experience.” What that means is that your mind will adjust the body’s biology and behavior to fit your beliefs. If you have been told you will die in six months and your mind believes it, you are more likely to die in six months. That’s called the nocebo effect: the result of a negative thought causing a negative result. This is the opposite of the placebo effect, where a positive effect mediates healing.

Since most of the beliefs operate outside our awareness, we don’t see their impact on our daily life. Therefore, we don’t see ourselves incapacitating our own lives and take responsibility for the lives we lead.

Beliefs: can empower us or imprison us

When a baby elephant is caught from the forest and brought to the city to perform in a circus, the baby elephant tries his best to break the chain that has him chained to a pole. After repeated attempts to break the iron chain, finally, the baby elephant realizes that the chain is just not possible to break. After many years, the baby elephant grows to an adult, and his human master just throws the chain around the legs. He does not even bother to tie that chain to a pole. He knows that the elephant would not even try to move away from the chain because now the elephant believes that he won’t be able to break free.

“Belief has been the most powerful component of human nature that has somewhat been neglected,” says Peter Halligan, a psychologist at Cardiff University. “But it has been capitalized on by marketing agents, politics, and religion for the best part of two millennia.”

Beliefs vs. reality

What you believe can be completely detached from actual, objective reality. How do we come to believe things that are absurd, self-destructive, wrong and has no basis in reality? Perfectly normal and reasonable people believe all kinds of bizarre things. The feeling of certainty has nothing to do with ground reality. Beliefs have nothing to do with rationality or reasoning, but more to do with emotionality.

The nature of beliefs

Scientist thinks in terms of probabilities. Normal people want to believe in absolutes because probabilities can be confusing. The nature of belief is certainty.

British Psychologist William Sargent suggested that beliefs largely stem from an accident in our environment rather than being personally worked out and adopted. The accepted dogmas and prevailing beliefs in the environment that we are born into are injected into us right from our childhood. Belief and knowledge might look the same. But they are very different. Belief has a feeling of certainty, and because a belief feels strong, we assume it must be true. Example: Indigenous people believing that a plane is another big bird.

We can create false beliefs through generalizations from a single incident in life or just a few incidents. A little boy who is called ugly by a friend, teacher or aunt might develop a belief that he is ugly, and he may carry this belief throughout his life with a sense of certainty just because one person in his childhood called him ugly. Thereafter, any comments that go with him being ugly is received and any comments that showers appreciation on him being handsome is discarded and he ponders the ulterior motive of the person who is showering appreciation about his looks.
When you begin to look at the nature of beliefs itself, rather than just the content of your beliefs, you start to become more objective not only about yourself but also about the environment in which you find yourself.

The role of emotions in belief formation

Beliefs have to do more with your emotional state than your intelligence. Intentionally and successfully introducing or implanting a belief in another person requires an impact at the emotional level, where their feelings are stirred rather than a calm, reasoned argument. Once a belief is introduced in the mind of a person, that person will come up with reasons and logic in favor of his or her beliefs, which is called “rationalization.” Emotion is the glue in which beliefs stick.
Unless you do away with the emotions that hold a belief, there is no way you can change a self-destructive belief. Believing something with all your heart does not necessarily mean that it is true. There are beliefs that are based on facts, which have empirical foundations. And there are beliefs that have no factual basis. It is difficult to change beliefs because it is the absolute truth for the person, which is emotionally felt with a sense of certainty. Hence, beliefs are hard to shift.

Emotional intensity is infectious: can spread like wildfire

Researchers found that young men and women find one another more physically attractive if they meet high up on a swinging rope bridge. The emotional intensity and raised heartbeat that they experience is wrongly attributed to physical attraction rather than to the precariousness of their situation.
Cult leaders whip up emotions because that’s how false beliefs can be implanted in another person. Politicians do the same. Remarkably few people look at things with objectivity. Many rely on their emotions to get a sense of right or wrong. And when they get a sense that something is absolutely right, then the belief in that “something” is hard to shake off, even though it has no grounding in facts.

We know that depression runs in families. It was long believed that it must, therefore, be genetic. However, despite occasional media hype, no actual depression gene has ever been found. Dr. Michael Yapko, a world authority on depression, shows that it is just as, if not more, likely that depressive thinking and attitudes are passed on from one generation to the next through emotional contagion. In other words, it runs in the families.

Similarly, beliefs are passed on from generation to generation through emotional contagion. It runs in the families. A grandfather who believes “poverty is a way of life, and there is no way out” will pass on these beliefs through emotional contagion. And this belief will continue to get passed on to next generation unless someone in the family wakes up and challenges this self-destructive belief system. But very rarely people awaken to false beliefs. It’s the other way that’s more common. People will go to great lengths to protect their beliefs from being assaulted.

Dr. Robert Cialdini in his book on influence describes the feeling that we are behaving consistently with our previous and publicly stated position can, for some people, become more important than discovering the real truth about something and risk as being accused of back-pedaling by others. Many people also value consistency over accuracy. Admitting that you are wrong can be too much for some people. People, families, and communities are more likely to stick on to their beliefs even if they don’t make sense.

Awakening to self-destructive beliefs

When a person is dreaming, he totally believes that the dream is real. The dreamer has no idea that he is dreaming, he completes believes that dream is actual objective reality. And when this person wakes up, he or she realizes that the dream was just fantasy and has no connection with reality. Similarly, it is necessary to awaken to false beliefs that we carry in our head as absolute truth with certainty.
A belief is something through which we perceive the world around us. It is our recognition that some idea or thing is true and valid. Just because we see something a certain way does not necessarily mean that it actually is the reality. For thousands of years, it was a widespread belief that the earth was flat and that if you were to go to the edge of it, you would fall off.

“When Columbus lived, people thought that the earth was flat. They believed the Atlantic Ocean to be filled with monsters large enough to devour their ships, and with fearful waterfalls over which their frail vessels would plunge to destruction. Columbus had to fight these foolish beliefs in order to get men to sail with him.”

—Emma Miler Bolenius, American Schoolbook Author, 1919

Every culture holds certain beliefs. Some of it is grounded in reality, and some of it is illusions just like our dreams. We must not equate the intensity of our feeling of certainty as indicative of accuracy or truth.

Beliefs can be infectious. If many people believe in something, you too are more likely to end up believing the same. Societies are founded on certain belief systems, they function and sustain on these belief systems. They may perish as well holding on to these belief systems. Conflicts between the groups, including war, may be defined as a battle between beliefs systems. Symbols emerge strongly in such conflicts. They may be revered objects like stones, writings, buildings, flags, or badges. Whatever they may be, they symbolize the central core of belief system of a particular community.
Discovering a new you

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his greatest surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do. —Henry Ford.

Beliefs are as necessary to us as air and water. We cannot live without them. We need beliefs to make sense of what is happening in life. One could never be without beliefs, nor would you want to be. What you do want is to have beliefs that work for you just like a leader on an important mission would like to recruit people who are positive, talented, and capable of producing results.
Maybe, your past experience must have led to a belief that “you are worthless, that people will trample on you because you deserve it.” You are not at the mercy of this belief. You are free to break away from this belief.

Maybe, your past experience must have led to a belief that you just don’t have in you to be a leader. That you can do a job assigned to you, but you can never lead people. You might have even created a belief that it is very stressful to be a leader and not worth it. But you are not at the mercy of this belief. You are free to break away from this belief.

Maybe, your past experience must have led to a belief that health issues are a part of life—that you cannot be completely healthy. There is something inherently wrong with your body. This could be your conviction and belief, but you are not at the mercy of this belief. You are free to break away from this belief.

Maybe, your past experience must have led to a belief that you can never stick to a goal—that you have a wavering mind. Consistency is not in you. Setting a goal and changing your mind prematurely before the goal is achieved is who you are and that’s how life is going to be. That could be your conviction and your belief, but you are not at the mercy of this belief. You are free to break away from this belief.

When you change your belief, you change everything. Your life is forever being molded and created from your beliefs. You hold within your beliefs your own destiny. Change your beliefs and change your future.

Manoj Keshav