I spend a lot of time thinking–perhaps too much time. One of my pet theories is that doubt is very healthy. Don’t get me wrong, I also believe that being decisive with making decisions is very healthy. What I mean is that I believe it to be a bit arrogant to believe we know much at all. I suspect that maybe less than 20% of what we believe to be true, actually is true and that the majority of what we currently believe is incorrect. I realize this sounds like a bizarre statement to make, but I would encourage you to consider some thoughts I’ve written in this blog.
Some Examples of Common Past Beliefs
The World is Flat… Don’t Fall off the Edge!
Think back just a few hundred years. Almost everyone accepted the world was flat. If you went far enough, you’d fall off the edge. This was the norm and believe as an absolute truth among the most intelligent scientists and government leaders of the day. Today we look back on this and shake our heads. We can comprehend how they could believe that, but still, it seems so incredibly wrong compared to what we believe now about the circular globe we call our planet Earth.
Blood Letting
For many years the most advanced medical doctors and experts would use leeches to suck out bad poisoned blood from a patient. This was common practice in medicine for about 2,000 years (Wikipedia). It has been around for a long, long time! “Today it is well established that bloodletting is not effective for most diseases. Indeed it is mostly harmful, since it can weaken the patient and facilitate infections. Bloodletting is used today in the treatment of a few diseases, including hemochromatosis and polycythemia; however, these rare diseases were unknown and undiagnosable before the advent of scientific medicine. ” (Wikipedia)
Age of the Earth
The Earth is about six thousand years old. This is and still is a common belief among the Judeo-Christian groups. The primary source of this belief is the Bible. Some modern Christians and Jews do not take the timeline of the age of the Earth as being literal and accept that scribes writing these passages described past events in terms of “a long time ago” by just using big numbers which were never intended to be taken for exact figures.
I’m sure there are many more examples like these and I’ll add them to this blog as I stumble on them. Feel free to comment below if you can think of any which should be listed here.
Recommending Doubt
Cartesian Doubt
I’m not the first one to come up with the idea to doubt things around us. Many famous people before me have pushed this concept out there with various degrees of acceptance or rejection. One of the more famous individuals in closer to our own time period was René Descartes (1596-1650). Granted that is a few hundred years ago, but he is the most noted for pushing doubt in philosophy as a healthy approach to how we view reality.
Cartesian doubt is a systematic process of being skeptical about (or doubting) the truth of one’s beliefs, which has become a characteristic method in philosophy. This method of doubt was largely popularized in Western philosophy by René Descartes (1596-1650), who sought to doubt the truth of all his beliefs in order to determine which beliefs he could be certain were true. (Wikipedia)
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
One of my favorite allegories is from Plato, appropriately called the “Allegory of the Cave.” The story illustrates how people in general are looking at shadows of reality and not really seeing what is real.
Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato’s Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. (Wikipedia)
“Life is a Dream” in Hinduism and Buddhism
One of the famous sayings in Buddhism is “Life is a Dream.” The word is sanskrit is maya, which is loosely translated as “illusion.” (Wikipedia). Most Buddhist believe that their primary goal is to wake up from this dream of life and to truly understand the nature of reality. The word Buddha isn’t really a person’s name but rather a title of a person who has “awakened” from the dream and the person we commonly called Buddha was among the first to provide a path or method to “awake” from the illusion of life and our false sense of reality to “awake” to understand what is really happening around us.
The First Matrix Movie
Even if you have never studied philosophy or Buddhism, many sci-fi movie fans have seen the first film in the Matrix movie trilogy. Even those who haven’t actually seen the entire movie have heard of the has a very famous scene were Nero, played by Keanu Reeves, is asked to choose a red or blue pill. Choosing the red pill resulted in Nero waking from reality. When he awoke he was inside a liquid filled cocoon with dozens of wires and hoses attached to him; shortly thereafter he learned that what he had believed was reality for the last 20 years was actually a computer generated world known as the “matrix” but the real world was actually quite different and he had been plugged into his cocoon asleep for 20 years in a computer generated dream world. The creators of the Matrix movie admit they pulled many of their ideas from Buddhism and other eastern philosophies about our world being a dream and what it would be like to wake up from it. Typical to hollywood they were able to put a sci-fi spin on the idea, adding in a few million dollars in special effects to make a fascinating story. It does make one think, “what is reality?” and “are we really asleep?”
Zen Meditation
Recently I attending a Zen meditation training session and practice while living in Hong Kong. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Zen meditation is where a Master walks around the room whacking people with a big wood British cricket bat. That part really made me raise my eyebrows. However, the part that I did adopt into my own mediation practice is a form of breathing during meditation. During breathing they encourage those meditating to silently repeat the words “no idea, no idea, no idea” and while exhaling to repeat “clear mind, clear mind, clear mind.” The thought here is that when you are breathing in, you are also taking in various sensations from the world around you as well as new thoughts entering into our minds. As these new thoughts and sensations enter, we should doubt them by telling our selves we “have no idea if they are true, false, or misleading.” I modified this a bit for my own personal meditation. Instead of “no idea” I repeat “maybe so, maybe so, maybe so” or “perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.” I believe this approach is a bit more neutral and allows for the possibility of truth or falsehood rather than using the negative words “don’t know” for everything. I prefer “perhaps” something may or may not be true rather than saying “don’t know.”
Conclusion
I’m not the first to suggest that most of us may have an incorrect view of reality and I doubt I’ll be the last. I agree with Descartes and Plato that we are seeing shadows cast by reality and it is healthy to question what we believe to be real. I have no idea how much of what I believe to be reality is indeed correct and believe it arrogant to believe my world view is any better than anyone else’s.
