If you take a pencil and make a fist around it, holding it tightly, there is a feeling of possessiveness; it prevents other people from taking the pencil from you. The creation of a fist can also be a sign of anger and aggression; you use a fist to hit someone or to threaten someone with something you are holding.
But if you open your hand palm up with a pencil resting on it, you are not clutching it possessively and you are not threatening anybody; you are perhaps displaying the pencil or offering it to someone. The open hand conveys a spirit of friendliness and generosity rather than aggression.
Let us call this distinction the difference between holding and having the pencil. I would make the same distinction between holding and having beliefs. You can hold beliefs in a spirit of possessiveness and aggression—“this is my belief, I won’t let go of it, and I am willing to fight for it”—or you can have beliefs, offering them to others and being willing to let go of them if you need to.
But aren’t some beliefs worth holding on to or fighting for?
Beliefs are your mind’s representations of reality, which is not the same thing as reality itself. That is what the mind does, it tries to represent reality in concepts or images, looking for the best fit for the experiences you have had and the information you have obtained from other sources. We inevitably have beliefs, but they will always be a step removed from reality, always inadequate to the task of fully and accurately representing reality.
What is worth holding on to is our quest for the truth, which if we are faithful to it will lead our mind to continually revise and update our beliefs as we have new experiences and obtain new information. This means that no matter what beliefs you have you should always be open to those beliefs being replaced by more adequate beliefs. The fidelity should be toward this openness to truth, not toward whatever particular beliefs you happen to have some point in time.
What about religious or spiritual beliefs? Religious and spiritual beliefs are handed down with the claim that they represent important truths that people should know. Shouldn’t the adherents of a tradition hold on to and defend the beliefs of that tradition?
In this case we should not assume that holding and defending our understanding of a tradition’s beliefs is holding and defending whatever truth may be conveyed in the tradition. There is more than one version of any particular tradition’s beliefs: there are Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant versions of Christianity, there are Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana versions of Buddhism, and so on, with varying versions within each of the branches of each tradition. Given the difficulty of knowing and understanding all of these variations of a tradition, it is unlikely that the version each of us holds is the best one out of all of them.
What we would be holding and defending is not the beliefs of our tradition, but our understanding of those beliefs. And beyond that, a person cannot know enough about all the different religious and spiritual traditions in the world to know for certain that the beliefs of his or her tradition are superior to the beliefs of all of the other traditions!
So the open palm having of beliefs, offering them to others in a spirit of friendliness and willing to let go when needed so that one representation of truth can be replaced by a better one as you learn and grow, is always more sensible than the closed fist holding of belief, which leads to possessiveness and conflict when people become aware of differences between their beliefs and those of others..
The tendency to hold beliefs tightly is not just based on pride in our intellectual superiority or arrogance toward others, but more fundamentally is a reflection of holding on to a sense of self. People hold a sense of who they are built around their beliefs about life, and when they defend those beliefs they are defending their sense of self.
But we are more mysterious and deeper than any of the ideas we have about ourselves. In the same way that reality is always beyond our attempts to represent it in beliefs, what we are is always beyond what we think about who we are.
It is paradoxical, but people often use religion and spirituality as a way to run away from what they are actually seeking. What they are seeking is living in the mystery of who they are, allowing themselves to be much more than they can conceive of. Instead of living in that, they construct an identity built around the beliefs they hold. Holding on to that identity becomes a way of postponing knowing yourself as who or what you really are.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at 