Faith

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

The future exists only in our imaginations. Despite our best predictive efforts, we cannot truly know what the quality of the next moment will be. There is no actual future, thus future circumstances can be neither true nor false. This is where faith comes in.

Have you ever heard someone suggest to you that the way you think creates your world? Perhaps this idea is an important part of your life, or perhaps it is new to you and you are just now reading about it for the first time. Often referred to as the Law of Attraction, the idea is that you will attract into your reality the kinds of things that you focus on in your thoughts. While there is a great deal more nuance to this than one might first suppose, the basic gist of it is that if you focus on the unpleasant things, the struggle and strife, then your life will be full of struggle and strife. If you stay focused on the glorious and beautiful things, your life will be a thing of great beauty. Now, in this post, I am not going to go in-depth into analyzing this theory, but it is certainly not lacking in basis. The workshops I teach go more into its application, and you can read an entry where I explore the mechanics of the power of conscious direction of thought here. My reason for bringing it up now is to suggest that there is an artistry to our conscious experience in this world. The way we think about things is indeed important, and it has repercussions. The Buddha contemplates this when in the Dvedhavitakka he says, "Whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind."

The type of thinking I am going to explore here can be expressed as a set of questions: What happens when we have the sense that our future is secure? What happens when we tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason? What happens when we say we are exactly where we are meant to be at this moment? What happens when we have faith?

When I was a student in a Tae Kwon Do dojo, I considered becoming an instructor at one point. Our master once told those of us assembled in an instructor training course that from his perspective, having us be responsible for teaching newer students is like taking a gamble--except the dice are loaded because he knows who we are. He knew the deck he was playing with. Thus, he said, it is not actually a gamble, because it is not left to pure chance.

In the modern way of speaking, faith is typically defined as "complete confidence or trust in something for which there is no proof or evidence." An interesting thing about faith is that while it is a disposition situated in the present, faith also regards the future. The thing about the future is that it is not a thing that we have any evidence for, since it is not a thing that has happened. The root of the word "faith" comes from the Proto-Indo-European "*bheidh," which means "to trust, confide, persuade." Faith is indeed a kind of trusting. That sense of "trusting" is what people have in mind when they say to "have faith in yourself." The greatest faith is a pervasive faith, which trusts in everything. Faith is not necessarily involved with religion, and in fact, an atheist could participate in faith just as well as a devout fundamentalist. Atheism and fundamentalism are both examples of beliefs, and faith is quite a different thing from belief.

I think it would be apt to differentiate faith from belief, as nowadays faith is often associated with belief, even though this is not a necessary association. Belief is an acceptance that something is true. If we look at the etymology of the word "belief," we find it is connected, through Old High German "*galaub," meaning "dear, esteemed," to the Proto-Indo-European root "*leubh," which means "to care, desire, love." It looks like this very old concept out of which our word "belief" evolved still has some relevance today; for indeed, if you look at the intense reaction most people have when their beliefs come into question, it seems quite apparent that they hold these beliefs in very high esteem. Many of us are attached to our beliefs--especially the deep-seated ones.

It looks like while faith and belief both have something to do with trust, they differ in their implications. Belief is trust or confidence that things are a certain way--it is confidence in the truth of a proposition. Faith, on the other hand, is trusting in the way things are, and thus, in the way things will go, and it has nothing to do with what is true or false. But there does seem to be something of love in both faith and belief, for a key feature of love is the way in which it accepts the beloved. The believer fully accepts as true the subject of the belief. The acceptance of the faithful is not necessarily in regard to what is true or false. Faith accepts the unknowable forthcoming future. There is a place for both faith and belief in our lives, but I find that faith is a much more profound and enlightening thing to engage with. Indeed, faith is itself lighter by nature, because it is open to all of possibility. A lover must by definition have a beloved: and so, we might identify the beloved of the believer as truth. The beloved of the faithful is fate. Belief is a singular and focused "yes" to a claim that something is true. Faith is an open and universal "Yes" to life--a life which incudes fate. Love of fate, amor fati, is the disposition Nietzsche reflects about in the quote with which I open this post. (Nietzsche is not talking about faith in the above quote, but it seems to me that his attitude was faithful when writing it.) Faith is not a belief in things being a certain way; but rather, it is a sense of things playing out in a perfect way.

John Vervaeke, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, seems to agree with me insofar as defining faith as a sense of things, rooted in the present, which regards the future. In his lecture series, "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis", he says, "In ancient israel, faith didn't mean "believing ridiculous things for which there is no evidence. That is a recent idea. That is not what it meant"..."Faith was your sense that you're in this reciprocal realization--you're in course. You're on course. You're involved and evolving with things. It's your sense [sic] 'ah! I'm on course', or even 'ah! this is the turning point! I know what to do! I know who I need to change in to. I know how to turn myself in things.''" I think the way he describes it brings some nice clarity, as the word is indeed nowadays often bogged down by associations with religion and belief that take away from its real value and significance. When you say that "everything happens for a reason," you are agreeing to participate in a reciprocal realization. You are accepting that each moment offers an opportunity to evolve into the person you are. The idea of being on course is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of becoming.

Our capability of predicting the future is entirely based on our knowledge in the present. The place we find ourselves now is a product of fate and our concerted efforts. Intentions develop into actions, and actions are a part of our reality--but not the whole of it. However much we may know of what cards are in the deck, there still remains the unknowable nature of the hand that is dealt. There are those who believe that a supreme being is dealing these cards, there are those who believe that these cards are dealt entirely at random, and there is a whole spectrum of people believing something in-between. Faith is a sense that the hand that we will be dealt is the hand that is right for us, whoever or whatever the dealer may be. As I have indicated above, faith is closely intertwined with fate. Our fate is the lot we are dealt. The fact that you were born where you were born, and that you cannot change that fact, is an example of fate.

The current usage of the word fate denotes "the development of events outside a person's control." Fate is often associated with a supernatural power or entity, such as God or gods. But whether you believe in God or not, what is true is that there is some aspect of our lives that we do not have any control over. This is our fate. The etymology of the word "fate" is really quite fascinating. From Latin "fata" we find the meaning of "one's lot or destiny." Yet this is a modification of an older and more pure Latin word, "fatum," which is a "prophetic declaration of what must be," and in a literal sense, "a thing spoken by the gods." The farthest back we can trace the meaning of this word is to the Proto-Indo-European root "*bha," which means "to speak." The association often made nowadays between fate and "the will of God" is not a new one, and it seems to me that it is no coincidence--all we need to do to see this is look past the Latin to the older Greek language. Homer, when writing about fate, at times associated it with the work of the gods. The ancient greek word "μόρος" (pronounced "moros"), that we translate as fate, came from the word "μείρομαι" ("pronounced "meíromai"), meaning "to receive as one's portion." μόρος also can be translated as "death," which has been seen since time immemorial as the inescapable fate of every mortal being. In Hesiod's mythology, Moros is the brother of the three Fates. The New Testament was written by Greeks, and surely its authors were influenced by earlier Greek cultural ideas connecting fate with the work of the divine when they conceived of things as being part of some sort of divine order. The first line of the Gospel according to John in the New Testament goes "In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

And yet, as a word may be spoken by "God," so may we speak a word in response. If someone does not like the place they were born, they can typically move somewhere else. If someone does not like the name they were given, they can typically change their name. But someone falling off of a cliffside probably cannot stop falling in mid-air and choose to start floating up instead--at least not in any normal circumstances. The response that accepts the uncontrollable is faith. Now this is not to say that faith is rolling over and accepting all that may come. For we have a great deal of power and influence over the present. Faith is not giving up all power; but rather, it is the disposition where, upon recognizing the limits of our vast power, we keep our eyes open and smile. Que sera, sera: What will be, will be.

Trust and confidence ought not to be given foolishly, but with an awareness of what is. When trusting in this way, the greater our awareness of the present, the greater becomes our faith, and the greater becomes the power behind it. In this same vein, when my Tae Kwon Do Master trusted in us, this faith of his was well-placed, because he knew that in which he was trusting. I may not have gone on to be a Tae Kwon Do instructor, but my master's words have stuck with me to this day. One might say I was meant to be there.

It is a curious proposition to say "I am exactly where I am meant to be right now," and yet saying such a thing with sincerity can provoke a deep feeling of serenity. When saying something was meant to happen, or things are the way they should be, it need not be thought of as a literal statement of fact or belief. Rather, such a statement expresses a feeling of faith. When faced with reality, we can certainly act within our capabilities to move things in the direction we seek, but even in exerting our will, it is still possible to do so with the faithful disposition. 

Often, I have heard the advice to have hope for the future, and I think it would be helpful right now to distinguish between hope and faith. After all, they both seem like positive outlooks, and yet they have very different implications. Hope looks to the future, and stays focused on it. It is a "trust that things will be so." Hope anticipates the hand of cards and says, "please let it be a royal flush." Hope may have some influence on our attitudes and lifestyes, but it is a mere echo of true faith, which, rooted in the present, has much more bearing on what happens now. Hope always sets us up for disappointment--however unknowable may be the potential as to whether disappointment will or will not come--because the nature of any kind of future expectation is that the ensuing reality tends to differ from it. Faith, on the other hand, protects us from disappointment, because it is an attitude that embraces what comes, whatever that may be.

Faith is one of the most powerful things we can have in our lives, because it supports a framework of reality that empowers positive creation. Hope can make us unhinged, because it looks to the future and wishes for things to be a certain way. In its yearning, hope has a propensity to cause us to be attached to possible future outcomes. Faith, on the other hand, rests in the present and senses that everything will work out the way it is meant to, and its effect is thus the opposite of attachment: true faith is letting go.

I think this attitude of letting go in the face of an unknowable future is why people often use the metaphor of "taking a leap of faith." (Artwork is "Leap of Faith" by Victor Bregeda.)

When we have faith, we become more powerful, because even the most devastating of life circumstances can be interpreted as a part of the constant unfolding of a universe that is just as it is. Think about if you were to make a major change in your life, such as a change in your career path, or asking someone to start dating. Of course, you don't know how things will go. What does it feel like if you hope things will work out? What does it feel like if you have faith that things will work out? The choices we make in how we think about things make a difference.

While hope depends on the illusion of time, (and is thus itself an illusion), through faith we can actually be freed from the bonds of temporality; because by being in faith, we no longer worry about controlling an illusory future. Now, I am not going to say we should never indulge in hope, nor do I think that hope is without its benefits. But I find hope to be dramatically inferior to faith. Hope makes a difference, but faith makes a radical difference.

Faith is not without its risks. Blind faith can be as bad as hubris. Blind faith is the extreme of putting all of one's power in the hands of fate. Hubris is the extreme of trying to change one's fate. To follow the falling off a cliff example from earlier: an example of blind faith is letting yourself go over a cliff that you could have avoided by correcting your course, because you have faith that you will fall in the way that is best for you, even if that proves to be fatal. An example of hubris is jumping off the avoidable cliff because you think you can overcome gravity by sheer force of will.

I think, rather than leaping off of a cliff, a better metaphor for engaging in faith is a dancer who trusts that their body will know what to do in the next moment. (Artwork is "Faith" by Marie Frances.)

While it is good to have a mentality that seeks to surpass limitations, when taken to an excess, this mentality can prove rather unhealthy indeed. Similarly, faith, when well-placed, is life-changing and quite liberating, but when taken to excess, can lead to unreasonable decisions.

When you say "everything happens for a reason," whether the reason was preordained by a supernatural entity or is a reason that you came up with on your own, this statement is an expression of faith. The novice faithful will need to take some effort to find the reason in certain events, especially the traumatic or unwanted ones. Those experienced in faith will see the reasons as a second nature. When truly faithful, we can be fully open to the lessons that the universe offers for us to learn, even in the most trying of times. Faith allows us to pull out of the pattern of defining circumstances as good or bad, and by breaking this cycle, we can free ourselves up to breathe new life into the reality we face. When trouble comes around, or a mighty task that demands a great deal of responsibility leers around the corner, the attitude we have is important. We can so easily give in to frustration and even despair, but what we don't often evaluate is if that kind of thinking is something we have made into a habit. I find that having faith is a much more effective and empowering train of thought to get into the habit of. It is the truly faithful who "walk with God," and to them may inspiration most readily come.

May we not roll over and be beaten about by the waves of destiny like a limp and feckless clump of seaweed. Yet let us also not struggle in vain against an overpowering current, spending all of our energy in a pointless battle. No--let us instead ride upon the waves, borne by a plank as solid as our deep-seated love. Let us ride above the current--yet ride it still with a mind to its incomprehensible power--and in this balanced dance of giving in and pushing out, we may find that space to breathe and say "Yes" to the infinity of possiblity, the reality of the world where we stand, and our boundless potential for creativity within it. Let this be our sacred "Yes."