INTRODUCTION
Beliefs don’t tend to be consciously chosen or rationally decided upon. Instead, much of our beliefs are the result of our upbringing, life experiences, environments and social contexts.
This is not to say that beliefs do not provide value, or have a purpose. Rather, beliefs play an important role in how we navigate our lives. They feel necessary: humans dislike epistemic groundlessness, and belief makes things simple and reduces cognitive load. Yet the fact that beliefs are largely involuntary raises a question: Are they necessary?
Research in psychology and cognitive science has demonstrated that our perceptions, thoughts and expectations can shape biological processes. The placebo effect, for example, is a measurable improvement driven by positive expectation, while the nocebo effect shows how fear can produce harm. Daily rituals centered around gratitude and positive affirmations have been shown to increase well-being and life satisfaction. These phenomena reveal a characteristic of the human brain-body system to co-create or enact a reality through attention, action, and expectation.
Given these examples, we can ask: Is it possible for us to navigate our lives in a spiritual or existentially meaningful way without holding confidence that something does or does not exist, or that some facts are undeniably true?
In this paper, I argue that we can. I propose that the functional benefits of spirituality do not depend on belief in metaphysical propositions, because our worldview shapes experience regardless of belief. If we replace belief with attention and experience, and substitute our natural cognitive processes for propositional belief, we can produce the same psychological and existential effects traditionally associated with spirituality. Belief is a psychological phenomenon, not a metaphysical necessity.
THE NATURE OF BELIEF
The nature of belief is psychological, not metaphysical. What we believe IN may be a metaphysical claim, but the belief itself is a cognitive orientation, a conviction, or a mental state.
Because beliefs themselves do not reflect reality “as-it-is” – a reality we may never access directly – they cannot provide a stable foundation upon which to build our understanding of what is or isn’t true.
Epistemic uncertainty is the default condition of human cognition. From a cognitive perspective, beliefs likely evolved as energy-saving shortcuts for the brain to navigate in uncertainty. If beliefs are shortcuts, what replaces them?
Some may object that belief is probabilistic – especially in Bayesian models of cognition – and thus experience is not a suitable replacement. But even when probabilistic, belief remains a propositional commitment: a claim about how the world is. Expectations, by contrast, are predictions generated by the nervous system. They are dynamic and often unconscious. They guide action without requiring truth-claims. This distinction matters because it shows that we can navigate the world through expectation and embodied readiness rather than belief-as-confidence.
If beliefs are shortcuts rather than truth-tracking mechanisms, then they are not required for understanding or for life satisfaction. This opens the door to alternative foundations for navigating life. I invite you to consider a belief-less engagement with the world, a kind of practical spirituality with an emphasis on experience, action and practice rather than propositional assertions.
THE MIND-BODY SYSTEM
According to Thompson and Varela, reality is not pre-given but enacted through the interaction between an organism and its environment. This is supported by empirical findings such as the placebo effect, in which our perceptions, thoughts and expectations can shape biological processes and in turn produce physiological changes in our bodies. Mental states are not passive, and predictive processing models of the brain reinforce this idea.
The brain is wired to anticipate, filter, and select stimuli based on our past experiences and learned patterns, as opposed to passively receiving information. This is similar to how logical proofs require assumptions, or how a hypothesis guides the outcome of an experiment: the brain relies on expectation to interpret new information. In this sense, the brain’s model of the world is a tool designed to reduce surprise, and not a mirror upon which one true reality is reflected.
If our experience is influenced by attention and prediction, then how much of our lived reality is shaped by these processes?
REALITY AND EXPERIENCE
If expectations and attention act as filters shaping what we notice and how we interpret the world, the question arises: do we have the ability to manipulate our own reality? Through experience, we can find practical ways to increase well-being regardless of how we make sense of this “external” world.
There is a difference between the world “as it is” and the world as it appears to you. So-called “independent reality” contains more information than we are equipped to process. We have to select and filter what is relationally important or useful in order to interpret a tiny fraction of it. Attention is the mechanism responsible for this. While attention is not liable to change the “external” world, it does change what you notice, remember and act on, which in turn make up the world we experience.
Our habits and rituals operate without propositional belief. In everyday life, we do not need to assert “The ground exists beneath my feet” in order to get from A to B – we just walk (unless you are a philosopher!). These non-propositional states and experiences guide our behavior and create meaning in our lives, functioning as alternatives to belief. We reshape neural pathways through living, breathing, and practice. Belief is optional; experience is not.
CONCLUSION
Spiritual transformation and life satisfaction are available through practice, attention, and a working understanding of the role that belief has historically played in spiritual traditions. There is a difference between having confidence in the truth of a claim and having a bodily, experiential understanding that guides action, emotional orientation, and decision-making.
A person who lives by process rather than proposition may be more open to new information and less attached to rigid conceptual frameworks. If one actively participates in habits, routines and states that produce meaning and provide comfort, then belief in the truth or existence of something may become less foundational.
Spiritual benefits do not require assertions of ultimate truth; experiential processes can replace belief’s functional role. You don’t need to believe anything, what is being offered in this paper is an invitation to participate in states of mind that naturally produce the benefits that belief provides for others. This is a path forward for skeptics, secular individuals, and those who cannot force themselves to accept popular claims without “proof”.
Expectations are flexible, revisable, unconscious, and probabilistic, whereas belief is propositional, explicit and rigid. The brain only needs to generate useful expectations, not actually know what is true.
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