The Dawn of Faith: How Faith Plays A Part in Meditation and Mindfulness
For many people living in developed societies there is a trend towards science and reason. This is certainly welcome news, especially for those of us who have had a taste of the reactionary and oppressive forces unleashed by organized religions. I’m inclined to agree with an argument advanced by Sam Harris in The End of Faith, that there are problems inherent in all organized religions, but these problems vary by religion and some religions are more hostile to modern values of human rights, reason and science.
However, with time I’ve come to appreciate that faith is an indispensable virtue worth cultivating. This quality has been lacking in my own life. I also notice how the absence of some sort of faith can be challenging for many friends and family that have a secular worldview. I’m certainly not lamenting the absence of blind faith or adherence to superstition, but what’s sometimes missing among highly educated secular people that I know is a basic sense of trust in life--a gut feeling that no matter what happens things will somehow work out, that we have within us the capacity to find happiness even amidst the ups and down of life.
While those subscribing to blind faith can be disempowered by believing they have no agency, those totally lacking in faith can live in a different kind of illusion: that they control circumstances around them to a sufficient degree to secure some sense of lasting happiness. But life has a way of reminding us, again and again, that we are not in control. It has a way of disrupting our happy, comfortable, secure little lives, just as life also washes away periods of grief, sadness and doubt.
What is the coronavirus here to teach us?
One lesson is the invitation to cultivate faith. Just like gratitude, joy or compassion, faith is a state of the heart-mind that we can develop through practice.
For too long I overlooked faith because my mental association with this word was strongly linked to one specific form: blind faith. Blind faith still strikes me as nonsensical at best, dangerous at worst. However, I’ve come to realize that there are different forms of faith, which I’ll discuss below. What’s ironic is that I reconnected with faith in the last place that I expected to: a Buddhist meditation retreat. Buddhism was always so appealing precisely because it seemed to not require faith, but instead it seemed highly rational and pragmatic.
From February 1st to March 13th, I sat a silent meditation retreat north of San Francisco, at an ideal place to practice insight meditation in the Theravada Buddhist tradition: Spirit Rock. Over those six weeks, there were many ups and downs. In particular, a familiar voice spoke up: doubt. It took on many forms, but what really transformed the doubt was simply seeing this voice for what it was: “this is just doubt.” Doubt is another feeling that arises and passes away within awareness, just like other feelings of sadness or happiness, or other phenomena like sounds, smells and bodily sensations.
Yet around week three of the retreat the doubt started to intensify. Searching for wisdom, in the evenings before I went to bed I started to read Faith by meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. Through Sharon’s guidance I started to appreciate deeper and more subtle dimensions of faith. For example, there is faith that comes through direct experience in Buddhism: verifiable faith. In fact, The Buddha explicitly encouraged his followers to question everything, including what he taught. He stated that knowledge would never be truly transformative if it were merely adopting the opinion of another; instead, we must discover what is true or false directly within our own experience.
This was a new understanding of faith to which I could relate. In my first two weeks I could increasingly see into more subtle layers of what The Buddha taught through my own direct experience. For example. The Buddha taught that the nature of all phenomena is impermanent; this is the first of what he called The Three Characteristics: annica (impermanence), dukkha (unsatisfactory) and anatta (not self). As you begin to see that everything is inherently impermanent, you start to let go.
The dhamra invites us to come into harmony with things as they are, instead of engaging in the futile battle to make reality constantly conform to our preferences of what we like and dislike.
This also means that negative feelings and sensations are impermanent. When you first hear this teaching and start to practice vipassana (insight) meditation, you start witnessing how this is true within your own experience. You notice feelings are always changing: the mind goes from calm to tired to boredom to hunger back to calm in just a few minutes. Or you notice the changing nature of sounds or bodily sensations. You start telling yourself a thought like “ok I get it, everything is always changing; nothing is permanent.”
On the one hand this is true: you’re really starting to see this truth in your own direct experience. But there is a subtle way in which the mind is trying to say “yeah I’ve got this.” Maybe there’s even a hidden subtext of “what’s next?” But there are so many layers to each of these Three Characteristics, starting with the first one: impermanence. This recent six week retreat taught me that there’s a certain depth of understanding of impermanence that unfolds on a longer retreat. There are richer layers of wisdom that unfold from having to witness all of phenomenal experience coming and going, including even the strongest emotions. As someone who has had ADHD since a young age, my conditioning with respect to boredom and restlessness runs very deep.
Doubt is entangled along with these emotions, for what keeps me moving on to the next thing can be the sense that “this is not enough” or “perhaps true happiness, or more happiness, is somewhere else just around the corner.” I think most of us know what these feelings are like. Now more than ever in the modern age it’s easy to get lost in what I call “the trance of never enough.” It’s that mindset of “I’ll be happy when…”
I can see how the trance of never enough is in some ways a manifestation not only of greed, but of doubt. When we search for more happiness at some imaginary point in the future, it’s the subtle doubt that this moment does not have everything that we need to feel happy and at peace.
Faith is the antidote to this doubt.
In particular, faith that comes through directly seeing the truth of impermanence is the antidote to doubt and fear. This is an important truth to contemplate in the midst of a challenging crisis, such as COVID 19. Everything about the current situation that you might find challenging--fears of being trapped, feelings of anxiety and neuroticism, of disconnection from other human beings and from nature--none of this will last.
Now what’s also true and difficult to accept is that the positive experiences we have in life will not last. Of course the most difficult truth to accept is that all living beings, including you, will die. Birth and death are just two sides of the same coin. This is simply how things are: everything arises, everything passes away.
There is a reorientation of Being that comes from a willingness to open to these basic undeniable truths of life. There is a newfound freedom and a sense of ease when you abandon attempts to resist the ever changing currents of life, when you give up on efforts to make reality conform to uour preferences, and you simply surrender to life and step into harmony with things as they are.
As someone who finds the teachings of The Buddha helpful as a path for personal happiness and freedom, I found the dimensions of faith that Sharon Salzberg described to be very insightful. There is verifiable faith: faith that is born from being able to verify the truth of a statement directly through our own experience. But before we can do so, we also need to have another kind of faith which is a basic sense of trust: faith in the teachings and in our teachers.
This still has some element of faith that you can verify: you can research a teacher carefully before you decide if this person is qualified to guide you, you can ask critical questions before deciding to undertake study with this teacher, and you can have some degree of confidence if the teachings appear to be working for this person. For example, is this person modeling calm, kindness and compassion in their own behavior? True, you can’t know what they’re really like all the time, and you also don’t want to unconsciously slip into projecting things onto your teachers: assuming that they’ll be some sort of saint, only to find yourself perpetually disappointed when teachers don’t measure up to your impossibly high standards that you have for others and likely for yourself, even if you notice this tendency. Even the Dalai Lama says he still experiences anger. We’re all human.
But you can still have trust that this person has enough wisdom and experience to guide you on the path. You can have faith that these teachings clearly appear to have changed the lives of countless people for the better. You can have faith that the texts say do not take anything that is said to you on blind faith; question them and see for yourself what is true within your own experience. All of these are qualities that have given me faith on the Buddhist path.
The more intensively I practice and the more I’m able to verify the truth of the teachings through my own experience, the more faith grows.
While I’m profoundly grateful for and deeply inspired by the teachings of The Buddha, I have no vested interest in thinking of myself as a Buddhist. It doesn’t do anything for me in terms of my identity.
As Bruce Lee said: “Do what works; discard what doesn’t; and add what is uniquely your own.”
Two of my teachers, Kenneth Folk and Vince Horn, refer to this as Pragmatic Dharma.
So if any of the specific points made in this post, or references to Buddhist teachings, don’t do anything for you then discard those words. But if on some level you’re starting to recognize there is a small feeling inside you of doubt, discontentment, restlessness--something that is calling for a dawn of faith, then listen to that voice. Faith can be a very basic sense of trust in the universe, in a teacher or person that you look up to or admire, or, crucially, in yourself--in your own ability to change, to become a more conscious and compassionate person for the sake of those of you love and for all beings everywhere.
As you step deeper into the wisdom of impermanence, your life becomes less orientated around trying to build the perfect sand castle, only to watch the tide wash it away, again and again. Faith dawns when you start to let go, when you trust that the school of life is giving you exactly the curriculum that you need in order to awaken and to live the life that you’re supposed to be living.