It’s All Right: Less Justification By Faith than Faith Without Justification
“Everything is okay” or “It’s all right” is something we feel at the core of who we are. My interest has been in how we go about noticing this place in ourselves rather than trying to prove that everything is OK or how and why it might be that it’s OK. The fact that our own nature makes this statement needs no proof because it can be directly experienced.
We seem to think that faith must be predicated on something outside the terms of our experience – that something else must justify it. If we know profound trust, then there must be reasons for it. If we hope, then there must be grounds for it.
Faith is the ground. The ground is bottomless.
Faith is love walking on water.
Faith is how we experience the full circumference of ourselves in the act of crossing a threshold. Faith is the illumination of the bright corona of who we are in the moment of the total eclipse of the self as we have known it.
Excerpted from Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You
We seem to think that faith must be predicated on something outside the terms of our experience – that something else must justify it. If we know profound trust, then there must be reasons for it. If we hope, then there must be grounds for it.
Faith is the ground. The ground is bottomless.
Faith is love walking on water.
Faith is how we experience the full circumference of ourselves in the act of crossing a threshold. Faith is the illumination of the bright corona of who we are in the moment of the total eclipse of the self as we have known it.
Excerpted from Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You
Posted by Paul at 11:33 AM Permalink
21 Comments:
It's a feeling, not a belief. Of course we try to explain things, and that's when beliefs arise.
ciao,
Raymond
LarryG – Can you elaborate a bit? I’m not certain I understand…
Unconvinced indeed.
Our existential situation: an animal who is going to die and who knows it.
The more we insist that we know things for sure, the more the underlying fear. The more we trust our ability to be uncertain, the less the underlying fear.
I don't think we can get rid of all our existential angst. But we sure can get rid of enough to have a quite enjoyable life.
the following from The Faith to Doubt, Stephen Batchelor, page 40:
"The more pervasive is calculation in our lives, the more is the mysterious banished. And as the sense of life's mystery becomes dimmer and more remote, so our ability to meditate diminishes-- to the point where meditation is exiled to the very margins of existence.
"But the mysterious lies at the heart of our lives, not at the periphery. And its presence is only felt to the extent that a meditative attitude still lives within us. Unlike a problem, a mystery can never be solved. A mystery can only be penetrated. A problem once solved ceases to be a problem; the penetration of a mystery does not make it any less mysterious. The more intimate one is with a mystery, the greater shines the aura of its secret. The intensification of a mystery leads not to frustration (as does the increasing of a problem) but to release.”
ciao,
Raymond
"Faith is how we experience the full circumference of ourselves in the act of crossing a threshold." --what an amazing sentence.
This thing referred to by Paul, which I recognize in myself too (as of course do millions), whilst I label it a feeling, is very easily distinguished from a gut feeling, which as you ably point out (cain&abely point out) can mislead, and needs to be verified, in this complicated world, by reason and conscience. We are not entirely creatures of instinct.
The "everything is OK" feeling sits at the core and doesn't relate directly to action in this world. You can't use it to make successful bets, for example. (Though some new age charlatans may claim you can)
"needs to be verified"
Why does it? And can it be?
ciao,
Raymond
If you have a gut feeling that someone is following you down the street, you need to look round to confirm it.
As opposed to Paul's core a priori feeling that everything's OK.
If I right now sense that everything is fundamentally as good as it can be, no matter what is now happening, do I need to verify that?
ciao,
Raymond
Raymond, you write
"If I right now sense that everything is fundamentally as good as it can be, no matter what is now happening, do I need to verify that?"
This may just be a language thing, but to me "as good as it can be" and "no matter what is now happening" suggest feelings and judgments about moral matters. And one’s moral views are, if not verifiable, perspectives that we advance citing evidence and reasons.
But that sense of rock-bottom unconditional faith in the big picture and our place in it that I refer to here is a sense of trust that is directly experienced. Having this experience of “I feel okay about what I’m doing here, I am aware of having faith in the greatest and ultimate context of our lives” does not depend on pointing to or citing anything beyond itself.
Firebird – I appreciate it. That sentence and paragraph is one of those things you write and afterward go “Where did that come from??” – because it comes all in a rush and not as something that you figure out or stitch together.
Jan – That’s basically what I’m getting at although I’d add one caveat: when we elaborate or express faith as a system of beliefs, a metaphysic, a theology, we begin to invite the question of how much we’re still talking direct experience and how much we’re talking interpretation of and extrapolation from experience - in other words, points we may want to make and things we believe that cross over into the realm where evidence and reason may apply.
Words are tricky, especially on a tricky subject. I am not talking morality and so I will change it a bit to clarify:
from: "If I right now sense that everything is fundamentally as good as it can be, no matter what is now happening, do I need to verify that?"
To:
"If I right now sense that everything is fundamentally going down as well as it can be, no matter what is now happening, do I need to verify that?"
This is Zhuangzi's "Where could the maker of things send me that would not be fundamentally okay?"
ciao,
Raymond
Hi Vincent
We seem to be on the same page.
ciao,
Raymond
Thanks for the insight!
Kaushik – Many religion/spirituality words can confuse more than clarify. They often have certain meanings for some people that they don’t for others.
For many people faith has a necessary connection to belief in specific supernatural/divine forces or entities, but here I’m speaking of trust in the biggest picture, the greatest context, whether we think of it as including supernatural/divine aspects or all-natural, i.e., yogurt.
Never mind the yogurt, but seriously:
“Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do…”
Is the understanding here that every detail of what happens in human life and history is predetermined and beneficent? No such thing as randomness? Senseless violence? Exactly what happens when necessarily represents optimal conditions, "the best of all possible worlds?" This would be something I’d question.
In my understanding of the universe, Paul, I don't go that far. The distinction between randomness and order remains a mystery. Chaos theory (which finds an order within clouds and eddies, and constructs fractals of infinite complexity from the simplest formula) merely scratches the surface of that mystery.
Every day I discover anew that my own perceptions have no special value over anyone else's. But my perceptions do show me a beneficent aspect to all that happens within my direct experience - no further. When senseless violence is reported in the news it's conveyed through the perceptions of others, who project their own slant on to it. The trail of understanding is trampled thereby & I cannot see the pattern. Same with history, but more so.
Good question. This is where Byron Katie’s dogma does not work for me.
Once I observed a child suffering in a village in Northern Ghana, vomiting and screaming in her mother’s arms; I realized there was a good chance this child, as well as many others, would die soon, and die in pain. For this child, there was nothing beneficial about what was happening, as far as I can tell. The child was much too young to learn how to realize deliverance (moksha). To me (I may be wrong) deliverance only works for those who have learned how to realize it. Laozi: “Heaven is impartial. It favors those who are adept at it (dao, deliverance)”
Vincent – I was intending to speak to what Raymond mentions in the comment following yours. That is, clearly there are very dark clouds with minimal to zero silver linings that arise in human events, even if life overall or in the fullness of time (or, who knows, perhaps in the transcendence of time) are ultimately headed for “that one far-off divine event to which creation moves.”
Raymond – Yes… “God never gives us more than we can handle” and “There’s a (good) reason for everything” fly in the face of an abundance of brutal facts to the contrary.
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