The Difference Between A THOUGHT And A BELIEF And Why It Matters for Calming The Monkey Circus In Your Head
What is the difference between a thought and a belief?
Actually knowing why the monkey circus in your head exists and what it’s trying to do is an important first step in trying to bring a little chill to the rock ‘n’ roll primate party in your noggin.
This article will help you to understand your mind by grokking its core components: thoughts and beliefs. We’ll explore what they are, why we have them and how to gain more freedom by integrating the survival drives that lie behind them.
First: thoughts.
A thought is a mental perception that arises in your ‘mindspace’, typically (but not always) around the forehead and eyes.
If you look at a thought closely, you’ll find that it has a particular shape, colour and size as well as a specific position in space-time.
That is to say, it’s actually a real thing that you can see.
For example, when I do some thunking I get kind of ghost-like, silvery-black wafer-slices of different words and images that typically float in a kind of semi-circle amphitheatre arrangement just in front of and a little above my eyes.
But it's different for everyone.
However, we are normally lost in our thoughts like a drunk wombat in a house of mirrors and so we overlook the actual thought perception itself.
But check it, yo: think of a big fir tree.
And don’t get lost in the content of the thought, but have a look at the actual thought-thingy that’s floating vaguely around your forehead.
Notice that you can see the actual thought just chillin’ there.
That’s what the thought actually IS. That little floaty thing.
But there’s much more to thought: thoughts are in fact more magical than Dumbledore’s lucky underpants.
Why? Because a thought is the ONLY piece of reality that can symbolise another part of reality.
So when you think of that fir tree, for example, the actual thought itself is a floaty ghost thingy around your head that is in the shape of a tree.
BUT, at the same time it symbolise an actual physical tree somewhere. And creates a similar reaction in you that the ‘original’ tree might do.
Or like when you have a thought of your boss. the floaty thought-thingy is not your actual boss. But it FEELS like it’s your boss!
This is the magic of thought.
This might seem obvious but it’s deeply profound.
How thought does this is just totally unknown and mysterious.
Yet from this head-scratchingly inexplicable mysterio-magical mindfuckery…your whole world is born!
All language. Past and future. Time and space. All relationship. All ideas of good and bad. All planning and controlling.
The sense you have of yourself and of the world is a near-infinite web of chains of mental representation…
Unspeakably wondrous, utterly simple and infinitely creative.
What is a belief?
You could say a belief is a specific kind of thought.
A ‘pure’ thought doesn’t ‘do’ anything other than represent another part of reality for functional purposes.
Like if you just think of a random fir tree.
It comes and goes without friction.
But beliefs are a little different.
A belief is a thought that is identified with as part of YOU and that, accordingly, must be PERPETUATED AND DEFENDED.
Beliefs are used to construct one’s sense of self, of others, of the world and of reality at large.
They make up the fundamental building blocks of your ‘reality tunnel’, which is the ‘lens’ through which you grok your own being and its environment.
Why do we have to defend our beliefs?
Well, the core drive of the body-mind is to survive. But you have to know what you are and what the world is in order to know how you can survive in said world.
That’s the role of beliefs: they help you triangulate yourself in reality, by creating an image of what you are and what other people are and what the world is.
This gives you a map with which to navigate reality.
These beliefs are useful, but often painful.
For example, if your Dad gets angry at you, you might decide that at that point, “I am bad”. That’s a belief you take on about yourself.
That’s a map you have created (unconsciously) to survive the world.
Why? Because as soon as you believe “I am bad” you are now in position to better navigate the angry-dad world you find yourself in.
With this belief, you are prepared to pre-empt your Dad and maybe you hide what you are doing from him (so he doesn’t have the opportunity to get mad).
Or you imagine that he is evil, so that you can avoid him in ways that wouldn’t be possible if you did not believe that.
Once you believe you are a ‘bad’ person, you can act accordingly and stay safe.
Genius!
But there’s no such thing as a free breakfast. The downside is that taking on beliefs involves doing a deal with the devil!
The deal is: I help you to survive, but you have to take on BEING that thing.
So, in our example, you might be able to escape Dad’s wrath sometimes, but now you have to go through life BELIEVING DEEP DOWN THAT YOU ARE A BAD PERSON.
Ya see? That’s the deal you made.
You may even unconsciously do things to make you appear ‘bad’ or unconsciously reject people that think you are ‘good’ so that you can keep your deal with the devil intact.
(You wouldn’t want to start acting too good now, would you? Then the devil might rescind his offer of survival!).
Once we have done this deal, that belief becomes part of who we are, almost like a part of our body.
And then threats to that belief are equivalent to physical threats to your body.
E.g. you could take the thought “I am Ben”. If I don’t identify with that thought (I may believe my name is “Fred”, say) and someone says “Ben is a crap name”, I might not care.
But if I identify with “I am Ben” and someone says “God, Ben is the worst name ever”, I might take offence and then get angry at someone.
So we act to perpetuate and defend our beliefs by using the full armoury of psychological defence mechanisms: denial, (self-)deception, repression, manipulation, lying and so forth as well as core survival instincts like fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
We lie to ourselves about the fact that we made a deal. We become arrogant to avoid listening to what others are saying. We repress parts of ourselves that might threaten our self-image. We present ourselves inauthentically to others. And a million other innocent strategies.
Important note: we do this innocently and unconsciously. It’s not bad or wrong. It simply is :).
And the more deeply held a belief is (i.e. the more fundamental it is to the structure of your psychological self), the more powerfully it will be defended and the more potent will be the defence mechanisms deployed!
The problem is that as time goes on the deal we made can become less functional in the world.
If someone is acting in a bizarre or obviously counterproductive way then you know what’s happening: they are holding on to a belief they took on long ago about how they need to be to survive.
If you think you’re a badger on the moon when, in fact, you’re a human being in an office, you might find your attempts to survive (i.e. keep your job) are compromised.
(No one wants to be aggressively snarled at by someone moon-hopping through the break room on all fours, let’s be honest).
Because once a belief is established as a survival pattern it takes a HELL OF A LOT to shift it.
This is why changing other people or ourselves can seem so impossible: our early experiences in the world told us that we need to be a certain way to survive and, even when that way becomes dysfunctional, it’s feels like an existential threat to let go of that particular way of being (which is nothing more than a belief about how I need to be to survive).
So to summarise the key difference between thoughts and beliefs:
A thought is a perception that symbolises another perception. And a belief is when this faculty is used to create a kind of (apparently) permanent reality-tunnel of ME and YOU and THE WORLD that becomes part of the project of survival and is backed up by a host of powerful emotions and survival responses.
Why Is Any Of This A Problem?
The thing is that needing to survive as a specific thing or in a particular static way is about as comfortable as listening to an orchestra of nails on chalkboards performing the Flight of the Bumblebee.
All our energy goes into maintaining and defending that self-structure (e.g. being ‘bad’), which leaves no energy left for things like joy, love or connecting authentically to others.
And many of our beliefs require constant defending, meaning we get stuck in core survival states like fight or flight and this becomes our default mode.
It’s like trying to be a flower that needs to have its petals at a certain angle and can only bend in one direction, regardless of the time of day or the weather or the season.
Whatever the wind is doing you’re like, “nope, I’m gonna face THIS way, because that’s what I AM: a flower that only faces north” (or whatever it might be). Or “I’m not gonna bloom because I am (and need to be!) a bad flower!”.
And you spend your whole life fighting your environment: you have to get pissed off at people who disagree with your beliefs, you have to judge people who live life differently, you have to look a certain way and make sure everyone knows that you’re smart or cool or whatever…and you have to do it all day, every day!
Pretty knackering stuff.
Yet a flower is meant to open and close and bend and move!
So how can we help ourselves out here?
How To Get Out Of Your Deal With The Devil
The cool thing is that when you know this, you can see the route for gaining freedom from beliefs, by ‘returning’ them to their original status as thoughts.
That way, you are giving up your need to survive as a particular thing (‘bad’ or ‘good’ or whatever) and gain your freedom from the devil in return!
The result is a lighter, freer self-structure that is more spontaneous and authentic. Not to mention less suffering, because you are now a flower that is more able to flow freely with the changing winds :).
The trick is to get to the root of the survival fear/response at the core of any given belief or web of beliefs.
There are two useful inquiries from the Kiloby inquiries that are helpful for this:
Boomerang Inquiry: take a thought, memory or image and ask “what does this mean about who I am?”
So, for example, I might bring up thoughts of kids who bullied me at school and ask this question and immediately my mind says: I am weak.
Bam, that’s the core belief I am identifying with. That’s the way I believe I need to be to survive.
Utility inquiry: take any thought/belief and consider what you GAIN from believing that thought, even if it is painful in certain ways.
For example, if we take the belief “I am weak” I can see that what I gain from believing that is that it helps me to hide from others so I feel safe. If I didn’t believe that I am weak, I might act like I am strong and get into conflict with people who could hurt me. So I believe I am weak, hide from others, and stay safe!
Once you’ve seen this, you can start to tap into the FEAR that is behind all of that feeling weak and needing to hide. That is then the root feeling driving the whole thing.
Try to discern that fear in your direct experience of your body: maybe that fear is a tightness in the chest. Or a powerful knot deep in the belly. Maybe it’s an anxious tension that wants to shake in terror.
Slowly, we can open up to these core feelings, acknowledging, validating and feeling them as best we can.
When we have the capacity to discern and feel that fear and integrate this part of our self, then the beliefs associated with it tend to fall away over time.
Our beliefs start to feel just like thoughts of a fir tree. Light and unproblematic.
We no longer feel like we are that.
And THAT is the freedom.
That’s in part what I help people to do: to dive within themselves and discern the fear and sadness and anger and shame that is holding their core beliefs in place and supporting them to feel and integrate them.
