Belief, Truth, and Ultimate Truth

Truth is a relative matter. Everyone has something they call "the truth of my life." How does this truth get built? It is built relative to belief. Whatever is believed, to whatever degree, becomes true for that person to exactly that same degree.

Many people don't realise that truth is a relative matter. Because of this, someone can remain fixed in the same place for a lifetime. Belief and truth can be developed through inquiry and exploration. In doing so, one can move from wherever one currently stands to somewhere more developed. One can expand the range of what one is able to think and consider. One gains the ability to free oneself from rigid, conventional assumptions.

How Belief Forms

Across the journey of human civilisation to this point, various teachers have taught, as truths they themselves saw, a great variety of things. What we hear and see today is likely a synthesis of many people's ideas over time. That is an unavoidable feature of how things develop.

How, then, do these beliefs form? Several factors may contribute to how belief is built. One of them is knowledge. Ordinarily, we gain knowledge through a few particular channels: mainly, the information reaching us through our five senses. From the information reaching us through these sensory channels, dhamma-matters form within the mind. When corresponding dhamma-matters about the same subject keep forming this way, belief builds relative to them. Critical thinking and logical thinking help us turn belief, built through knowledge, into a more accurate form of truth.

But we should recognise the limited nature inherent in this process of gathering information and reasoning. If we don't, that inquiry and reasoning can become nothing more than a pleasurable pastime, within which the sense of self takes root, closing off the path toward direct realisation, and possibly leaving one wandering lost in a world of concepts.

Another way belief forms within a person is through understanding. Understanding is a more developed quality than belief built from concepts. If you have seen a particular truth for yourself, that can be called understanding. Once understanding is gained, the value one places on mere concepts also lessens. If, through understanding, something feels true, that person recognises it as a more developed level than a truth merely accepted at the conceptual level. But there can be people who have gained many different kinds of understanding this way. Such understandings can feel, to a person, like ultimate truth. Yet if one takes them as ultimate truths and builds a sense of self around that understanding, the path to direct realisation closes off for that person too.

Another way belief forms is through experience. Knowledge or understanding built up can be confirmed through experience. Likewise, knowledge and understanding can also arrive through experience. In both directions, belief is built through experience.

Doing something as a habit, over time, also increases belief in it. Take driving a vehicle, for example. What was initially practised with intense concentration later becomes something one can do with such confidence that one can think and talk about other things while doing it. That confidence is built through habit.

Attitudes built within us through various media can also give rise to various beliefs. Through elders, socially respected figures, news, inherited traditional ideas, life experiences, duties and responsibilities, sentiments, and so on, various attitudes can form within us.

For example, misunderstanding concepts such as "karma" leads many people to attribute everything to karma and become inclined toward negativity in life. Staying for a long time without changing that attitude can make these beliefs grow even stronger.

Views: The Glasses We Forget We're Wearing

There is something else that forms within the mind, called views (ditthi). Views can be constructed extremely subtly and become powerful. It is through views that we look at the world, at people, at events. They are like tinted glasses. But over time, we forget we're even wearing such glasses: that's how thoroughly belief has been built through them.

These views are, without our knowing, a powerful lens through which we unknowingly see.

When someone is searching for truth, or searching for merit, and passes through various stages, corresponding wisdom and wisdom-views become manifest to them. Through this, belief in their own spiritual path grows. This is another facet of the same process.

Mental Consciousness and the Feeling of Truth

Belief is a mental matter. Belief is built within the mind. There's another facet here connected to mano-viññana (mental consciousness). As dhamma-matters get arranged in the mind in the manner that builds belief, mano-viññana is nourished accordingly. That nourishment, in turn, further influences how dhamma-matters get constructed to match it. As this cycle continues to operate, a felt sense of truth arises within that belief. It is through this mechanism that various beliefs are said to bring about the healing of illness, or the success of decisions (the placebo effect). When physical objects are incorporated as supporting aids, it becomes easier to build this belief powerfully within mano-viññana. This is the mechanism by which some people feel there is truth in things like tree worship, statue veneration, or ritual cries.

But there is no actual connection to any physical object involved. These are things occurring purely through the workings of mano-viññana. The effect does not arise from some invisible force residing in the physical object. It is a mental matter. Belief becomes constructed as a truth, and through that, mano-viññana constructs a view. It isn't accurate to say there's no effect at all through that view. But these things stall at a certain point. They begin to break down. They are not paths that lead to direct realisation.

Once belief is strongly built within the mind, a corresponding feeling of truth or falsehood is felt relative to it. Once that feeling has been built as truth, matters begin to appear divided into evidence for it and evidence against it. If belief is built as falsehood, or if one becomes disbelieving of something as truth, then, relative to that feeling, one likewise sees matters as evidence for it and evidence against it.

Regardless, a being lives, fundamentally, within some mind-based sentiment. If someone says, "I don't believe in anything at all," that statement itself is their belief. Sometimes they don't even see this in themselves. "I'm not based on any belief at all" becomes, itself, the very foundation of their belief. That is a belief operating unconsciously.

The sense of self is also connected to the building of belief and disbelief. For someone whose sense of self has dissolved, there is no such thing as belief or disbelief at all.