By default, we are creatures of faith.
We don’t, for instance, worry that we won’t be able to breathe in the next moment or the next day (unless we are in danger of drowning, say). Or that we won’t be walking in the next moment or the next day. Or that we won’t be able to speak or eat or go to the toilet or have a home to go to…
Admittedly, that’s not true for every person on the planet today…those who are homeless, starving, sick, physically disabled or caught in the fury of a cyclone…But it is true for the vast majority of us the vast majority of the time.
And yet, I don’t think that most of us think of ourselves as creatures or people of faith. That’s probably because the word ‘faith’ has become entangled with religion and for those of us who’ve fallen out of religion in a bad way, ‘faith’ is not a go-to state or place.
Neither is it for those of us who’ve been schooled in a scientific paradigm as I was. For us, ‘faith’ may be something we don’t want to be associated with since faith neither requires nor yields to empirical testing or proof.
By default, we are creatures of faith
So what is faith? And beyond having faith in such mundane, recurring events like our ability to walk, talk, eat, drink, breathe, find shelter, is there a case to be made for having faith? For being people of faith in all things and at all times and not just some?
A few years ago, I was in Ho Chi Minh, a city with 6 million motorbikes and goodness knows how many cars and other vehicles all hooting and honking endlessly, running red lights and ignoring pedestrian crossings, rare as these are over there .
For someone from a city like Brisbane, the traffic in Ho Chi Minh can feel like a nightmare, at least until you begin to slide into its relatively harmless groove underlying the apparent chaos and sense-blitzing frenzy. In truth, it is neither chaos nor frenzy. Drivers and riders are really just alerting each other of their presence when they hoot and honk in Ho Chi Minh.
That’s distinctly different to their intent in a city like Brisbane where it is, at best, a little impatient nudge from the driver behind telling you that the green light or arrow has come on and that you should drive on or turn and not hold up the vehicles behind you. At worst, it’s the equivalent of the aggressive finger to you for not driving fast enough or for crossing into someone’s lane unsafely or for some other form of dangerous driving.
So, here I was in Ho Chi Minh one late afternoon. I’d just spent a couple of hours at the war museum and was aware of how little time I had left in the city before traveling on to Hanoi the next day.
It had also been raining heavily and when the rain finally subsided, I started walking down toward the Reunification Palace. Along the way, a motorbike taxi ‘driver’ pulled up and asked if I’d like a tour of the city. He seemed like a decent guy and after negotiating a price, I hopped on the back of his bike.
I was excited and really looking forward to a nice, relaxing ride especially since I’d spent most of the day and the days before walking. Besides, where I got on the motorbike taxi just outside Reunification Palace, there was hardly any traffic and certainly no cacophony of bleating horns and rumbling motors.
In retrospect, this was the bliss of ignorance for my excitement was almost instantly eclipsed by terror as I found myself in the thick of Ho Chi Minh’s peak hour traffic. At that stage of my life in Ho Chi Minh (all of two days), I was still interpreting the honking and hooting as a sign of aggression and danger as I would have done in Australia.
This preconception, coupled with the dense maze and relentless noise of moving traffic through which my driver was swiftly ducking and diving killed my momentary bliss – a violent death by fear which assailed me in such an immediate and visceral way, I could hardly breathe. I thought I would go insane. I wanted to scream.
What was I thinking riding on a bloody motorbike in peak hour traffic??? I’d never do it in Australia. What madness possessed me to attempt it in Ho Chi Minh of all cities??? I don’t want to die in this city. How will my kids and family find out?? No one will know. What if I don’t die but suffer an injury that leaves me disabled? How will I get back to Australia??
And so my thoughts raced for what seemed like a tormenting eternity. Until, something interrupted them…My habit of mindfulness…
I took a few deep breaths. I shut my eyes. I focused on what was happening in my body…
Then, a moment of reason…
This is crazy. Either I enjoy this ride or I get off right now. A ride of terror is not what I’d ordered and not what I was paying for. But how do I get off..???
The catastrophizing resumed but this time I wasn’t going to let it run away with me.
More deep breaths, eyes still closed, more noticing what was happening in my body. I kept my eyes shut.
Never mind if I don’t see the rest of the city. At least I’ll spare myself the visual terror of the traffic. I can stay a little calmer with my eyes closed…
More reason…
This man has been doing this for years. He’s still alive and in good nick. What reason do I have to think that because I’m on his bike, he’s going to have an accident and it will be disastrous for both of us or at least for me?
It was then that I realized that I had a choice. I could trust my driver and enjoy this ride or I could refuse to trust and continue to ride a nightmare.
I chose the first. I opened my eyes. I felt myself smiling. I settled into the back of the seat, dropped my shoulders and enjoyed the rest of my ride.
I had yielded. I had chosen to trust. I had decided to have faith.
Have you had such experiences in life, when with your back against the wall, you simply surrendered to the only thing left to trust – no thing? (Some call it ‘God’ or Love or Life or Infinite Intelligence but all agree it’s nothing you can perceive with your physical senses or capture in any language).
So, what is faith?
I think Jesus describes it best when he tells Thomas (often nicknamed the Doubter) who refused to believe that the man standing before him was the same man that had been crucified:
Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed – John 20:29
Faith is a state of consciousness where you believe something without having the evidence for what you believe. It is also the act of believing without evidence.
There are scientists who talk with much authority and such certainty about string theory and dark matter. There is no evidence for it. Not yet anyway. You might say they have ‘faith’ though they’d never accept that. And if you’re like me, you might wonder at how blinded they are to their own orthodoxy, their own tenets of theory and practice and to their agency in fulfilling their own prophecies.
You might wonder how they get away with making the propositions that they do without the ‘hard’ evidence as if conducting research and experimentation is a good enough substitute for such evidence. And of course you might wonder how arrogant they and other scientists are in their dismissal of ways of knowing that do not yield to their empirical methods.
Admittedly, there is a difference between the kind of ‘faith’ that some scientists have and the kind of ‘faith’ that I am talking about.
The former is grounded in Scientific theories and laws (which, as we now know, are not immutable i.e. some have been proven wrong or inaccurate).
The latter is grounded in PRESENCE, in Awareness, in the here and now. In fact, you could almost say if you are Present, if you are here and now, there is no need for faith. Instead, there is the dynamic, spontaneous aliveness of creation and response.
Having faith is a bit of evolutionary genius I think. Without faith, we’d just about attempt nothing. We’d probably wither and die eroded constantly by the fear of death since we’d not trust our ability to breathe or eat or digest food or remove toxins from our bodies or move or do any of the many things we take so much for granted.
You see, all these things happen effortlessly because we have done nothing to interrupt or interfere with them. We have had no reason and no inclination to question or doubt them. And, this is how things are when we are in a state of mindfulness or Presence, where our consciousness is firmly anchored in the here and now.
When you drop into a state of mindfulness, you land on ground zero. You are present with anything and everything that is showing up in your awareness. Your ruminating, catastrophizing, questioning, demanding, judging mind becomes still.
There is no reason or inclination to question or distrust anything. There is simply the state of being, of presence, of noticing. That is the state in which ‘faith’ lives. In this state, all is well. Nothing is amiss. There is nothing to fix.
This is our natural, childlike, all-knowing state. This is the state of seeing truth which also means seeing the falsehood of the distortions of ‘normal/conditioned/learned’ vision.
This is the state that requires no scripts, no tried-and-tested methods, no prior knowledge, no degrees or training.
This is the state of the dance of life, that ceaseless movement of creation and response within which there are no attachments, cravings or aversions.
This is the state of pure love, of truth, of grace, of peace, of joy, of beauty, of power, of all those wonderful, life-giving states of being that are frequencies within the bandwidth of LOVE.
When we live in our time-space, physical dimension from this reality of truth, of power, of presence, we live with FAITH. We live with a deep, unshakeable state of knowing that all is well and that there is no reason that all will not continue to be well for wellness is our true nature.
Everything else are contrivances and distortions brought about by human thinking, whereas this state, this reality of truth, of love, of power, of presence is beyond thought, beyond learning. It is the very ground of our being. It is what has always been.
Now, I realize that I have taken you from the relatable narrative of concrete, tangible, physical, sensorial human experience such as my time in Ho Chi Minh city to the nebulous, ineffable, language-elusive reality of the unscripted, the unlearned, the unconditioned. And maybe I’ve lost you in that process.
You might not understand or relate to this other state of consciousness. Perhaps it’s because you haven’t experienced it or perhaps it’s because of the inadequacy of my description. Perhaps both. And you might also be wondering what use it could possibly be to you.
I hope the following analogy will help. It’s not the best but it’s the one that springs to mind right now:
Faith is a bit like our experience of Mathematics. If you don’t understand Mathematics, you might think it’s useless to you. But in fact, you’re making use of it in some way all of the time except that you don’t think of it as Mathematics.
I mean, you do use numbers to quantify and organize or relate things in your cooking, traveling, shopping and so on. Such manipulation of numbers does come within the system of thought called Mathematics.
Now, if you were more conscious about how you manipulate numbers for certain purposes, you might be willing to learn how to make your manipulations more efficient, more easy and more applicable to even more situations.
In other words, you might want to seriously practice Mathematics in a more conscious and deliberate way so that you get that much more out of it.
In a similar way, Faith is something that you already ‘use’. Most of the time, you ‘use’ or rely on it unconsciously as say, in knowing that you’ll still be breathing in the next moment and the next day or walking or digesting food that you’ve eaten.
But every now and again, you find yourself in a situation, such as my Ho Chi Minh experience, which might be unfamiliar in surface details such as when, where, who with and how, but quite familiar with respect to the emotional states that it plunges you into – fear, helplessness, despair and so on.
Faith is something you already know, something you already ‘do’, something you already rely on, something you already demonstrate, just not in conscious and deliberate ways.
When you experience such emotional states at high levels of intensity or for long periods as say, in depression, you may find that your usual coping mechanisms, your tried and tested ways of handling such situations are no longer effective. Even long standing habits of escapism (such as addictions) are unable to give you the relief and safety that you so desperately seek.
In such moments, consciously or unconsciously, you may resort to ‘faith’, that inevitable and staunchly-resisted yielding to another state of consciousness, another quality of mind, a disturbingly familiar yet vague inner voice, a way of being that feels true and certain and, perhaps for just these reasons, also feels so very strange.
Faith is something you already know, something you already ‘do’, something you already rely on, something you already demonstrate, just not in a conscious and deliberate way. At least that’s true for most of us most of the time.
But imagine if we did use or rely on faith more consciously and more consistently. Would our lives be easier? Would we be less afraid or traumatized by sudden and unfamiliar events? Would we be less likely to bully ourselves with will power?
Having faith does not turn us into mechanistic, deterministic blobs of organic matter unable to make intelligent choices and take wise action. And it certainly doesn’t free us of responsibility. On the contrary, it shows us what it really means to be responsible i.e. response-able, being able to respond.
Would we be more responsive and less reactive? Would we be more natural, more relaxed, more gentle, more sure, more powerful, more efficient, more compassionate, more accepting, more free, more flexible, in all our relationships including our relationship with ourselves?
Would we be less constrained by the limitations of our time-space reality and more willing to let our imagination lure us into the field of infinite possibilities? Would we be able to see, smell, hear, taste and touch like never before? Would we become creators of different realities?
Paradoxically, it would seem to some of us, the response that we are called to make in any and all situations, the response that arises from faith, is the response of Presence.
Based on my ongoing practice of relying on ‘faith’, I can tell you that my answer to all these questions is an unequivocal, gleeful ‘Yes’.
Now, some people, especially those who are not deliberate or conscious faith practitioners often object to such reliance on faith assuming that it absolves us of any kind or action or responsibility. I’d like to say something about this:
Having faith does not turn us into mechanistic, deterministic blobs of organic matter unable to make intelligent choices and take wise action. And it certainly doesn’t free us of responsibility. On the contrary, it shows us what it really means to be responsible i.e. response-able, being able to respond in the moment, in and with Presence,
In the ongoing cosmic dance of creation and response or manifestation and response, response is critical to the dance, to the dynamic of Life for creation cannot happen without response nor response without creation. (This dance of interdependence is captured in the familiar symbol of the Tao, commonly referred to as ‘Yin and Yang’.)
But the nature and quality of response that arises from faith is so very different to that which arises from fear (which is the state of NOT being present) and its conditioned patterns of being.
In this dance, Presence is critical and the state of presence ensures that the perfect response, fresh and alive as it is, is allowed and not violently willed or helplessly re-acted.
Such response only delivers what is whole and good. Such response vibrates within the bandwidth of Love, of Life, of God, of Truth.
Paradoxically, it would seem to some of us, the response that we are called to make in any and all situations, the response that arises from faith, is the response of Presence.
The shape and form and timing of such response may be familiar to us, such as the use of familiar words or familiar strategies or familiar actions. Or it may be completely novel, out of the ordinary, miraculous even, as some may describe it. But it will always be whole and good.
It will always result in better, more peaceful, more free, more open, more loving, more powerful, more truthful outcomes.
It will always enable us to transcend the perceived limitations of what we have thus far accepted as ‘given’, as ‘reality’ and we already have plenty of such examples in human history such as the ability to fly, to communicate across the boundaries of time and space and to heal spontaneously.
We shouldn’t expect to be anything we are not. But we are creatures of faith. So why not become conscious, deliberate and constant creatures of faith?
Truly I tell you that if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and has no doubt in his heart but believes that it will happen, it will be done for him – Mark 11:23
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