FAITH, TRUST, AND REALITY

The biggest mistake is to try to have faith. We can no more make ourselves have faith than we can make ourselves fall in love with someone, or make ourselves feel what we do not feel. We can convince ourselves that we feel it, and we can open our minds to the possibility, so that we do not block it. So that we recognise it when it happens. But we cannot plan to be spontaneous.

So it does help to tell people about having faith. Someone who may never have experienced faith, or know that it exists, can be assisted by having the cognitive groundwork laid. The relationship between what we feel and what we think is essential to our sanity. We create that relationship when we recognise what we are feeling. It takes time for an infant to recognise that what it is feeling is thirst, and time for a teenage to recognise that water satisfies thirst, Coca-Cola satisfies pleasure. So, if you are thirsty, drink some water. If you still feel like it, have a Coke for pleasure. But imbibing sugar will only increase your thirst. You need to understand what is going on inside in order to take appropriate action outside.

It does help to explain to people that what they are feeling is sadness, because they may be thinking it is anger at the person they hold responsible for their sadness. People do not automatically recognise their own feelings. They do not always have the courage to take the responsibility of acknowledging them. They may know they want to break something or hurt someone, and they may think that is an expression of anger. Sometimes it is. But feeling your anger is a whole different experience and once you have learnt to do that, you no longer indulge in destructive behaviour. But you have to have discovered how to recognise that feeling. You have to have discovered what it really means to feel a feeling – without having to externalise or express it. Hitting pillows and shouting as is sometimes done in therapy sessions, is a teaching process, to enable the person to learn to make the connection. But it is not the end of the process, but the process itself.

So where does faith come in? Faith, like recognising your feelings, occurs after the fact. First you have faith, then you recognise that you have it. Faith arises from knowledge. A person who knows his science, has faith that the experiment will prove his theory. If his knowledge is insufficient or faulty, the experiment will show this. But if he really knows what he knows, he has faith. Einstein was asked what he would have done, had a crucial experiment not validated his theory. He replied that the experiment would have to be repeated because the experimenters had made an error. And he was right.

When does knowledge become arrogance, when does faith become insanity? We have constantly to judge our own grasp of reality for ourselves. Occasionally, the universe nudges us back to reality when, for example, we reverse our car into a pole that was not there. But one of the things we are doing in this life is learning to recognise what is our imagination, and what is the underlying reality. When a doctor tells you that you only have one month to live, do you make your will and prepare to die, or do you ‘…not go gentle into that good night, Fight, fight, against the dying of the light’ as Dylan Thomas wrote to his father? Sometimes the doctor is right. Sometimes the will to live can change the outcome.

A study done in New York showed that there was a drop in the average rate of deaths of old Chinese people prior to an important annual festival. It was followed by an increase in the rate of deaths after the festival so that overall, the average was maintained. The theory they were testing was that people could influence their time of death by their will to be present at this important festival.

This is where the active influence of faith comes in. As I have said, we cannot try to have faith, and it is pointless fooling ourselves into thinking what we do not feel. On the other hand, if our knowledge of how things work is sufficient and accurate, the cognitive recognition of what is already the case, does reinforce it. Once we begin to discover that we are actually in a universe that is on our side, we can gradually open our minds to recognise the events in our lives that confirm this. That is when we begin to trust.

Trust is not an abdication of will or of responsibility. Trust requires will and responsibility. But it is a change in the ground rules. It is a recognition that changes the relationship, just as it changes our personal relationships. If you do not know what it means to trust another person, that is a place to start to find out what trust means. Then, by analogy, you can begin to recognise a trusting relationship with, let us say, the universe, or the higher self, or the unconscious. Whatever it may be, it is a trusting relationship with something beyond our most limited perception of our mundane experience.

It takes courage to trust because, once we begin to question the taboo on looking beyond the sensory existence, we court insanity. It is possible to become completely deluded, so out of line with the material world that we keep on bumping into things that are not there. And this is the risk we have to take to move beyond the limitations of our mundane world.

A baby elephant is traditionally hobbled with a rope on its foreleg. Eventually it learns to accept this restriction. As an adult, it is as effectively hobbled by a piece of string which it could easily break. Or experience of life from infancy structures our world, often for the good. And sometimes we outgrow those experiences. This can be simple, or more extensive. We might have been bitten by a dog, and believe that all dogs are fierce. We can challenge that taboo and learn to distinguish between those that are fierce and those that are friendly. This is a step towards a clearer perception of reality. It requires suspending our belief in what we are sure of. All learning does so. If that taboo was a mistaken belief, there might be others. But there is no certainty in choosing between them. Only gradually, can we start to build up our knowledge of a universe that we can trust, of a reality that exists prior to, and beyond our experience to date, of a mystery which is constantly available to reveal itself, as soon as we are available to receive it.

Trust is the foundation. Once you can gain the insight that allows you to trust the universe, and recognise that there is, both psychologically and psychically, an unforced tendency towards health, just as the body tends towards healing itself, then you can begin to look toward faith. Not faith in this or that. That would be to introduce restriction, rather than release the constraints. But faith that moves your whole body and being into the light. When you have faith, there is a cognitive reinforcement of the trust. Your mind is now predisposed to recognising the new insights into reality, as the mystery reveals itself, whereas before, you looked to send them away. Naturally, as an inevitable consequence of faith, comes joy and love as you begin to feel the positive nature of the universe. There is still adversity, there are still challenges to overcome, there is still work to be done. We eat when hungry and sleep when tired. But the context is different. It is like a move from winter to spring. Rain in spring feels different from a rainy day in winter.

Once we have trust and are developing faith, we can begin to look at the way in which we perceive reality. After all, underlying everything is reality. Who knows what reality is? We all do. Of necessity. If we exist at all, we exist in reality. Even if we do not exist, then that conclusion is the reality. But we are arrogant if we think we know everything about reality. We only have to look back to the seventeenth century, when people were beginning to get excited about the physical sciences and discover that blood circulated within the body, and that planets orbited on predictable paths, to see that we have a long way to go before we can say that everything has been invented that can be invented, and that everything has been discovered that there is to discover. That reality might extend beyond what we now know about it is as simple and true a proposition now as it was in the 17th century, as it ever was.

What is important now is to develop the trust, and grow the faith, to loosen our hold on the brilliant discoveries of the past, and have the courage to learn to recognise new aspects, to develop new concepts, of reality, ourselves, on a daily basis.


A note on time.
It is consistent with this view, and consistent with our doubts about an unknown universe, that the future might reliably be predicted. People who do predict future events reliably generally say that ‘time is different on the other side’. There is a logic to this which is quite simple.

Our experience of time is sequential. Someone once compared it to watching a movie frame by frame, even though the whole movie had already been recorded. If anyone were to be able to ‘experience’ the future in the present, their whole sense of temporal sequence, time as we know it, must have been suspended. To be able to jump ahead in time, you have to be free of the constraints of time. That is why, though they can tell you what will happen, they cannot reliably tell you when it will happen. You cannot have time outside the constraints of time.
© John Mitchell 02 06 08