The people once asked Buddha who they should believe.
They were confused by all the different wise men, and all the different teachings.
This was Buddha’s answer:
“Do not believe anything simply because someone has told you it.
Do not believe in traditions merely because they have been handed down by many generations in many places.
Do not believe anything on account of rumours or because people talk about it.
Do not believe anything because you are shown the written testimony of some ancient sage.
Do not believe anything merely because presumption is in its favour, or because the custom of many years inclines you to take it as true.
Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and priests.
But whatever, after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience, as conducive to the good of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true, and shape your life in accordance with it.”
Buddha wasn’t telling anyone what to believe.
He was saying that ‘belief’ itself is wrong.
Because ‘belief’ is unquestioning.
‘Belief’ is blind acceptance.
So it isn’t whatever you believe that is wrong.
It’s that you believe at all that is wrong.
In other words, don’t ‘believe’ anything, work it out for yourself.
Use your brain.
Isn’t this the opposite of what we do at present?
We don’t use our brains, we don’t think for ourselves.
We believe.
We believe that jargon represents knowledge.
Whatever jargon is fashionable.
We believe people that use long complicated words must know what they’re talking about.
We believe all the awards schemes must truly be for better work.
And that they are infallible.
We believe unquestioningly in awards.
And we believe that whatever’s new must be better than whatever went before.
Whatever the latest gimmick is.
And we believe we must read lots of books on case histories to tell us what to believe.
We believe that merely having read those books will make us better.
We believe all this because it means we don’t have to think.
Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu were all great thinkers.
They wanted people to think for themselves.
But people don’t want to think for themselves.
That takes too much work.
So after Jesus, Buddha, and Lao Tzu died, they were turned into religions.
So people didn’t have to think.
They could learn the words like a parrot, and go on autopilot.
Just going through the motions would replace the difficult work of thinking.
And the philosophy became superstition.
Which is all religion is.
Which is what Buddha was saying.
When you start believing, you stop thinking.
Hallo Dave
Your blog ends with “When you start believing, you stop thinking.”
It starts with “Do not believe anything simply because someone has told you it.”
Not to split hairs, but when you say “believe” I wonder if you mean ‘temporary acceptance’ – a working assumption
I say this because if we do not accept something temporarily, then we cannot proceed
If a lawyer never believes his client or the accusations against his clients, then I don’t think he would be in another position to make any case
So, just as you say ‘start believing = stop thinking”, I wonder if “never believing = never thinking”
Some time back, a suit and I had an argument over the British spelling of l ‘recognize’
She asserted it should be ‘recognise’, that only Americans use ‘recognize’
But the Oxford Writer’s Dictionary and The Economist Style Guide both say it should be ‘recognize’
So I emailed Oxford University and a language expert said ‘revognize’ was preferred because of the French origin
Thing is, when I told the suit, she simply said, ‘I don’t believe what you say’
When shown the books and email, she said, ‘I don’t accept it’
Her mind was so made up that she just refused to accept anything else
That, to me, is the other risk – that we do not believe because we don’t want to think
Robin. - 2 April 2012 11:03 am
There’s a great scene in Good Will Hunting where a college scholar quotes a load of text to Matt Damon. Damon goes on to point out that anyone can read, learn and regurgitate text, but to have your own independent thought is a sign of true intelligence.
George - 2 April 2012 1:49 pm
Appropriation is key, wouldn’t you say?
john p woods - 2 April 2012 4:50 pm
Hello Dave,
As a child I learnt the words of my faith as a parrot.
Then as I began to grow up I began to ask questions.
Before I went to Saudi Arabia I had no idea of the humility of Islam.
It is a grossly misunderstood faith and a desert for western cultural mentality.
As a Catholic, I had to get my head around it all
as Saudi Arabia is a highly restrictive and closed country
it is one of the very few places left in the world
where it’s own culture is unquestionable
where everything I had learnt seemed irrelevant.
I asked myself, how will my own faith survive this?
Hands and feet get chopped off there for many things
considered a minor offence in the UK.
I had to protect myself from all my own learnt western principles
I knew I had to change my thinking.
So I told myself:
All women in black are Nuns and all men in white are Priests
as an assurance of giving everyone the maximum respect
to survive a culture I did not understand.
I decided even if I did not believe what they believed
I would respect their right to be different and say nothing.
It worked.
This way I prepared my mind to counter any potential prejudice
generated by what could be deemed to be western ideas other than advertising.
One evening I was sitting in a hotel room totally alone in Riyadh.
Even the windows had heavy steel slats on them to stop people from seeing out or in.
It was like a very nice prison cell.
Then an Immam started to sing as the sun set.
It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.
I didn’t understand a word he was singing.
It didn’t matter.
He was telling me
belief is universal
faith is eternal
I felt a tremendous sense of belonging even though I didn’t.
The heavy steel slats on the windows no longer mattered.
I was free.
Back at work in Jeddah
the whole agency would get on their knees at prayer time
often in the middle of a pitch 5 times a day for 20 minutes
except for me and a few others.
I never got annoyed.
Frustrated?
Yes, but not annoyed.
One of the nicest compliments ever paid to me was when
one of them invited me to pray with them.
I could not
because I would have felt a hippocrite praying in an ad agency.
As a westerner it would have felt very uncomfortable
and insanely abstract.
So I prayed underwater
in the sea with God’s creatures.
It never ceases to amaze me how
when man realises his own vulnerability,
skitting across the crust of our planet
like a pondskater without a care in the world,
or rushing away headlong terrified with fear
his ability to believe in his faith becomes
instantaneous without any need to think at all.
Kev - 2 April 2012 9:48 pm
What the Buddha was essentially saying is this:
Don’t believe anything or anyone you hear.
Just believe me.
This is the deception of Eastern philosophy – it encourages the debunking of all preceding thoughts/ ideas and sets itself up as the only way. If you really think about it, this is just as dogmatic as the traditions it challenges.
Because it becomes an unassailable belief itself.
By saying ‘belief itself is wrong’, the Buddha was only creating another belief.
i.e. his proposition is inconsistent and self-contradicting.
Does anyone see that?
Kim - 3 April 2012 3:37 am
Was what I was trying to say, Kim
But because I’m a writer, it didn’t come across
It’s the old ‘don’t use negatives in the headline’ admonition (why by itself is negative)
Robin. - 3 April 2012 5:40 am
@Robin:
I think the “Don’t use ‘don’t’ in the headline” is a different example because it’s a directive with regard to a specific activity. It’s not a directive about life itself.
But “Don’t believe everything you hear” is a directive about life. It expects to be treated as true. Which is why it is logically inconsistent, self-defeating and self-contradictory.
“Truth is relative” is an absolute statement.
That’s what people don’t realise.
Kim - 3 April 2012 6:38 am
Kevin,
What you wrote reminded me of a woman I heard on Desert Island Discs.
She had been a nun for years, but had quit.
The interviewer asked her how she now felt about that.
The woman said “I found my faith when I gave up my religion.”
Dave Trott - 3 April 2012 8:56 am
Where does self-belief fit in the mix?
john p woods - 3 April 2012 9:06 am
The ‘don’t use negatives in a headline’ dictum has always pissed me off. How about ‘Don’t turn your back on a starving child’ or ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’?
Rules designed for suits to stay in their comfort zone…
Tom - 3 April 2012 10:33 am
My ex-boss who figured himself a silk (QC) used to debate this a lot. I asked him ‘ow about ‘Don’t leave home without it’? Like my career, the conversation didn’t go far.
Robin. - 3 April 2012 11:02 am
There’s a lie between the be and the ve :-O
Grilla Login - 3 April 2012 3:37 pm
Dave,
Sounds like she found the Gift Of Desperation she was looking for.
For years I wanted to know why when in Dad’s Army “Were all doomed!” situations
God turns up like the Cavalry at the end of a Spaghetti Western!
Then I read this little poster about Jesus in a Church Hall.
It read:-
“If you never feared anything I would never have
the opportunity to show you how much I love you”.
Kev - 3 April 2012 9:13 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu3I9uUn6nE&feature=related
Kev - 3 April 2012 10:56 pm
Been a while since I posted a comment, Dave. I like that sometimes you appear contradictory to a previous post. Nothing wrong with that, of course; that sort of tension is good.
“And we believe that whatever’s new must be better than whatever went before.
Whatever the latest gimmick is.”
Is the “we” you and me? Is it Helmut “If you can look at something and say ‘I like it’ then it isn’t new” Krone?
From my favourite, oft-repeated(regurgitated)-Dave-Trott-post? “It never clicks that feeling uncomfortable means it’s a new experience.
And new experience means growth”
No worries, still love your work and get your slightly reductive point here. Thinking for one’s own self still requires empirical research along the way, mind; reading blogs n’ stuff. LOL
I’d counter that your use of the word knowledge in the post-title is misleading. Knowledge and belief are quite separate – like what I know to be true and what I believe to be true – one is akin to dreaming, the other to being awake (there I go regurgitating again – Rene Descartes).
I hope the use of the words reductive and empirical is not frowned upon. I simply understand what both mean and feel that they are both more appropriate than any other words in the context they exist within here. Not complicated nor very long (at nine letters, both would make a countdown conundrum).
I believe I know what I’m talking about ;o)
(ps – question – Would you be thinking all these thinky thoughts without Buddha having thunk ‘em first?)
james - 5 April 2012 12:15 am
Hi James,
I agree with everything you say of course.
The problem is people confuse belief with knowledge.
IMHO belief is what you have when you don’t have knowledge, so belief is more like superstition.
You say I’m inconsistent, probaibly so on the micro level.
But that’s like looking at a single pixel.
I have lots of different views, none of which is absolutly definitive on its own, but all of which add up when you stand back and view them together.
Kind of like pointillism.
To save repeating it here, try this post and see what you think:
http://davetrott.campaignlive.co.uk/2012/02/14/deductive-v-inductive-reasoning/
As you say, of course I wouldn’t have thought any of the without Buddha.
He said “Question everything, even me.”
If we accept there is never an absolute truth, we are much more likely to be released from the grip of our minds.
Dave Trott - 5 April 2012 8:46 am
Great stuff, Dave. As a son of Edinburgh myself, we are expected to know the great empiricist, Hume. I get what you’re saying. You could not rely on a logical, rational empiricist to dream up a creative brief through inductive thinking could you?! Love it.
That’s why we have a whole industry for whom the sentence “creative creatives creating creative creative” makes perfect sense. I think Hume would have frowned upon such a sentence.
Interesting that later on in the same day as our original exchange John Lanchester, author of recent book “Capital”, published this essay in the Easter edition of the London Review of Books. He kicks it off with some background to Marx’s view that deductive empiricism can be just as opaque as any other method and, like you, questions Mr. Hume’s and my own advocacy of empiricism as the ultimate authority.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193
Ps Dave – I have you down as an ESFP under Myerrs-Briggs-Jung-Freud
James - 8 April 2012 11:10 am
Dave,
I’ve just caught up on the last month of your blogs.
All are though provoking and amuse in equal measure.
This one reminded me of a conversation
with a colleague who is ex-military.
It goes along the lines of
Process is for the governance of wise men and the instruction of fools.
For me, you could replace ‘process’ with ‘belief’ and it would still make sense.
I reckon they’d be a lot less war if people didn’t follow religion by rote or by following belief, process and instructions.
Cheers
jb
Jeremy - 8 April 2012 11:15 am