Essay #32:  From Faith to Mindfulness

The sky which seems so far and vast
That only what my mind reflects
Should be to me the first and last
Reality that God collects,–

What is the purpose of religion?  Should it be only to lead the mind again and again through the same sacrosanct articles of belief?  Should it be to constrict the awareness by means of comfortable (if sometimes dull) familiarity behind fences of disinterest in a broader psychological and spiritual awareness?

What does religion promise?  Does it promise personal transformation and social change upon the premise of an unverifiable and unassailable faith?  Does it promise good works rushed out ahead of an essential interior confrontation that religion itself has neither the patience nor the skill to carry out?

Here we are speaking of the religion of what we will call “common church.”  It does not matter much what the particular denomination is.  Common church can regularly be found among Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and even Buddhist groups and denominations.  Some of its salient features include weekly meeting hours, established liturgical practices, set prayers, repeated songs, broad but generally shallow social interaction, and a sense of gravitas that seems manufactured by the subtle tones of a kind of psychological Hinterwerk or “back organ” made to play as soon as one walks into the building.  Such gravitas issues less from psychological introspection than from an unchallenged psychological assumption. This assumption is that common church has deep, lasting, and redeeming value.  Even under the weight of sometimes massive personal dissatisfaction and discouragement carried back and forth to church week after week, this Hinterwerk plays on.  It is pumped and encouraged by calls to faith.  It is kept out of view by the distracting parade of workers who have done good by and for the church, much as the old silent film stars became surprisingly animated with a theater organ playing lively but unconsciously in the background.  Such is the essential nature of common church that its liveliness and flair—and its effectiveness, too—depend on an unchallenged or unconscious assumption.

Sometimes when we are watching a silent film and the improviser at the organ misses a cue we come alert and sense the disharmony between the characters we are seeing and the music playing.  A similar sense of disharmony may arise in those who carry massive burdens back and forth to church each week.  The weight of personal trials, family conflicts, mental confusions, or physical ailments may at length define the characters in such a way that music and liturgy seem to “slip out of sync” with them. The familiar calls to faith may at last come to seem like replays of an old score now set to a different movie that doesn’t fit it.  We may then find ourselves at the threshold of a “crisis of faith” and a difficult interior confrontation.  What if this were also an opening to a new opportunity for discovery beyond the edges of our comfortable sense of church and our place within it?  What if the very edges of our discomfort now so keenly felt were a prompt not to settle any longer for the hypnotic tones of a psychological Hinterwerk–a promise of faith, a belief in an institution—and an invitation to investigate further?  Could we take a new, deeper look at the characters on the screen without the organ playing?  What fuller awareness might we discover about ourselves and others if we did step out from behind the fences of faith and disinterest we were previously too dull to perceive?

Of course the defender of common church will rush to counter that faith is not something to step out from behind but something to remain steeped in.  And he may take offense at the equivalency implied here between faith and disinterest.  To this there is no response we can give except to point again to evidentiary awareness itself as it dawns in one for whom faith is becoming an ever shallower substitute for a true encounter with what is.  Trials and difficulties often put us out of joint with what we believed before.  Likewise anything can do this that fosters a keener awareness in us whether it be a shock that jars us into sharper focus or a creeping dissatisfaction with the status quo or just a natural curiosity raising greater interest in the true nature of things.  Any of these may awaken us to a state of mind rooted firmly in an encounter with the present moment and eschewing all hopes and appeals to the future or the past as well as symbols both authoritarian and doctrinaire that combine to make up the “experience of faith.”

The issue here is not whether or not to remain “steeped in faith.”  It is whether to remain asleep or to wake up.  Jesus correctly said to Thomas, “Because you have seen me, you have trusted” (John 20:29).  It was Thomas’s evidentiary awareness through his sense of sight that permitted him to trust Jesus and to know who Jesus was.  Jesus went on to say, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have trusted.”  He did not say what many misquote.  He did not say that those who have not seen and yet have trusted are more blessed than those who have seen.  He simply observed that there were multiple pathways to the evidentiary awareness of who he was.  As we discussed in Essay #23, there is a kind of knowledge or awareness that is a priori, which offers direct access to an interior experience, for example, validating who Jesus was.  Another kind of awareness is a posteriori.  It offers access from the outside, as it were, by seeing evidence “after the fact.”  That was Thomas’s path to trust as well as most of the other disciples’.  Peter at least once took the interior pathway and learned directly what Jesus was experiencing and who he was.

It is not that one pathway is evidentiary and one is not.  Both are evidentiary.  The external pathway, being indirect, may depend on a longer chain of phenomena some of which are themselves interpretations placed on other members of the chain by figures of authority or repute as well as by ourselves.  The longer and more diffuse such an evidentiary chain becomes, the less trustworthy it is by nature, for there are greater opportunities for error to enter in along the way.  Just as it would be folly to ignore any direct internal awareness of the true nature of things, it ought to be folly to ignore the quality of external phenomena put together as evidentiary chains to support any claim to truth. And as such chains become looser and more diffuse, it ought to be folly to continue to accept them on the premise of some kind of faith that takes over for evidence.  This kind of faith—whatever it is—we must indeed deem disinterested in true awareness, objections notwithstanding.  If such a faith seems easier than the dedicated and effortful investigation required to foster true awareness, then it is a lazy faith.  If it becomes ardent under the magical spell of a pastor, rabbi, imam, or politician whose delusional purposes are fueled by the fires of his mind, then it is downright dangerous.

In any case, we would do well to pay attention to Jesus’s reminder to Thomas about the blessing of the inner path to knowledge and trust.  As is typical for Jesus, he places greater importance on interior awareness than on any external path to knowledge.  Both are blessings, for even external evidence can provide recognition of an enlightened interior awareness, for example by distinguishing a true prophet from a false one:  “Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:20).  However, one ultimately must evaluate externals by the light of one’s own inner awareness.  There comes a point where one’s trust in externals must issue from some deeper wisdom that does not itself depend on perception although it may be informed by it.  This is the blessing of the interior life that Jesus reminded Thomas of.  For if it is true that we practically cannot form sound judgments of value and character without relying to some degree on external perceptions, information, and interpretation, it is equally true that without interior insight and guidance we are fundamentally unable to form sound assessments at all.¹  This was the fundamental point of Jesus’s reminder.  It was not a call away from evidentiary awareness to a kind of sightless or mindless faith.  Rather, it was the opposite:  a prompt to remember the blessing of mindfulness that precedes sight and all perception as the foundation for judgment itself.

The Buddha issued precisely the same kind of reminder.  There is a story that when the Buddha came into a certain region that had been visited by many gurus, the inhabitants came to him to inquire:  “Which of these venerable brahmans and contemplatives are speaking the truth, and which ones are lying?” (Kalama Sutta AN 3.65)

To this, the Buddha responded:

Of course you are uncertain. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’ — then you should abandon them…When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.

The Buddha did not want to make disciples through mere attraction to any external phenomena.  These could be the superficial impressions made by his talk or by himself.  They could include favorable impressions made by communal traditions, liturgy, and scripture.  They could include even sacred legends and symbols.²   Within our own framework we could include any or all of the elements we have delineated as parts of common church.  Instead, he admonished his listeners to assess all qualities by what they knew about them based on their own internal experience, especially that “when adopted and carried out” they lead either to harm and suffering or to welfare and happiness.  This is not an appeal for followers, nor a call to faith, nor to an acceptance of hearsay, nor even to abstract reasoning, logical conjecture, or understanding.  Rather it is an unmistakable invitation to draw from direct experience, mindful awareness, and an unmediated encounter with the nature of things themselves.  As such, it is an implicit repudiation of the kind of religion that first creates doubt and uncertainty and then “fixes” the problem through an appeal to faith which is a careful delimitation of mind disguised as the alpha and omega of a divine order.

The Buddha was not “hostile to faith.”  Hostility is neither effective nor necessary toward something that can be exposed as wanting by a penetrating awareness.  In this case, the thought-form known as “faith” can be seen directly to be an aggregate of many of the qualities we have already been naming:  conjecture, hope, legend, symbol, scripture, liturgy, and so forth.  Added to these are often further emotional qualities such as reverence, gravity, compassion, love, and forgiveness.  What is wanting in faith has nothing to do with the individual qualities themselves but rather with the ways that religion organizes and packages them.  It places them into a kind of urgent array fueled from below by a suppressed or unconscious uncertainty.  Religion presents faith as an answer but an answer to unanswerable questions or mysteries whose unassailable nature amounts to a formidable set of limitations levied against the mind.  It is not that the mind is capable of answering all questions it encounters and of dissolving all mysteries.  The answer to the problem of uncertainty—or of faith—is not, as the Buddha adroitly notes, inference, logical conjecture, or analogy.  In other words, the answer is not some form of reason or rationality.  It does not lie with some rational faculty of the mind.  The situation is more subtle than that.

The real problem with faith and with much religion in general is not that it is not rational, nor that it is “super-rational.”  The problem, as we are saying, is that it artificially organizes its various qualities and aggregates according to one or another relatively arbitrary schema.  Such schema may have an historical or scriptural basis, or they may be culturally determined by what the church has often referred to as “signs of the times.”  An example of the former within Christianity would be the schema of the atonement consisting of “original sin,” the divinity of Jesus, and the divine sacrifice whereby mankind is redeemed from sin.  An example of the latter would be the schema of the priesthood by which divine authority is passed from Jesus himself to the apostles and down through the higher prelates to male priests and finally to women.  We are witnessing the evolution of the latter schema in our own era whereby many Christian denominations have come to see the assumption of the priesthood by women as a sign of the times and the ones who are holding out are struggling internally against this Zeitgeist at great cost to themselves.

These schemas are only examples of much broader embankments along which faith and religion hem in the mind.  The issue lies not so much in the formation of beliefs and opinions themselves as in the unassailable quality that accrues to beliefs when they become protected by the notion that God has collected them into a canon.  Religious opinions and beliefs reside in the mind as do any other thought-forms.  What distinguishes many of them, however, is how they are shielded from scrutiny by the very same additional thought-form which is taken as a sign or guarantee of their validity.  The divine appellation applied to beliefs at one and the same time instantiates them both as members of a protected class of thoughts considered redemptive and as impediments to a level of scrutiny through which the mind may move beyond the alpha and omega of its limited view of reality.

Indulgence in the thought-form of beliefs might have sufficed to address the so-called “great mysteries” of life if mind were not able to see deeper.  But it is.  The allure of faith is that it purports to answer or address the great questions.  Its enormous liability is that it fills up the space around these questions–which true mindfulness can occupy–with something lesser that is more palliative and restrictive than veridical.  Unlike true mindfulness, it addresses questioning by surrounding it with a set of entrenched responses, a circle of wagons, as it were, that is loath to admit strange visitors.  Nevertheless, doubt arises within its midst because it has created the conditions for it in the absence of mindfulness.  And as the Buddha keenly observed, “When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born.”  Therefore faith is plagued with uncertainty.  Its response is typically to claim uncertainty as one of its virtues, as if those caught behind the wagon train were to claim that slow starvation was the honest price they had to pay to keep from being marauded by Indians.  Mindfulness is akin to opening up the circle, looking out, and discovering just who the “Indians” really are.  It is about aerating stale opinions, letting in new light, and discovering that old “wagons” cast long shadows which are hidden repositories of the minds judgments.  Mindfulness is about confronting what is just as it is without any preconceptions about where it begins and ends.  The sky remains far and vast because it is far and vast.  True mindfulness makes no attempt to collect it into neat divisions defined by “first” and “last,” whether based on faith, reasoning, scripture, tradition, prejudice, attachment, or any other artifice or faculty.

Jesus himself attempted to conflate such artificial divisions when he said, “The first shall be last and the last first” (Matthew 20:16).  According to Jesus, the kingdom of heaven itself is like the landowner who pays all workers “whatever is right” and pays them the same whether they have worked only one hour or “borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.”  In other words, heaven looks equally upon those who have worked little or much and rewards them all with an open-handed generosity that precedes divisions into “first” and “last.”  We recall that Jesus told this parable as a response to Peter’s concern that those who had given up all their possessions to follow Jesus should gain some special benefit from it.  The striking irony is that, according to this very parable, they gain no more benefit than anyone else.  However, the benefit available to all is the insight that the expanse and bounty of heaven itself makes unnecessary the very parting and parceling that Peter thought he needed to get ahead of.  In essence, since everyone gets a ticket to enter for the price of only one denarius, there need be no scrambling to be first.  The rich young ruler alike with the poor disciple will enter side by side.  What is required of both equally is that they give up delimiters upon mind, whether born of material attachments or tenets of faith and open to the awareness of heaven itself symbolized by a Father who “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).

Jesus pointedly asks, “If you love only those who love you, what reward will you get?  Are not even the tax collectors doing that?”  The faithful might respond that the reward they will get is the mutual love and security afforded by a community that shares a proper view of the goods and ills of the world and interacts according to sound moral precepts.  These traits should more than distinguish them from mere tax collectors.  The fact that Jesus groups with tax collectors anyone who does less than love their enemies as well as their friends clearly implies a much more radical view of community than the one the faithful could respond with here.  It is a “no holds barred” view of community that admits both faithful and unfaithful, friends and enemies, tax collectors and pagans alike.  For to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” means to do not only as the tax collectors do, but to do more.  It means to do not only as the pagans do, but to do more.  It implies an unlimited, heavenly view of all the Earth, that is, welcoming, trusting, and boundlessly inquisitive.  The openness of such an awareness—or its “no holds barred” character—does not expose the mind to all manner of chaos, nor to a moral attitude of “anything goes,” nor to injury from enemies like the proverbial Indians breaking through the circle of wagons.  Rather it delivers the mind back to the Earth—the whole Earth—with radical trust.  In a sense it delivers through expansiveness what traditional faith seeks through a narrow passageway and cannot find.  For faith is not content to take the whole Earth just as it is but insists on dividing it in the process of winnowing the wheat from the chaff.  It prays for what it assumes to be good rather than seeking awareness of the goodness in all people and things.  It steers and beckons toward certain imagined outcomes rather than fostering awareness that any outcome may be perceived as beneficial insofar as all outcomes are inherently capable of promoting wisdom and stirring original nature to reveal its inherent compassion.

In terms of the confrontation with mystery and uncertainty raised above, again faith typically affirms mystery as it positions itself as the one and only mode of addressing it.   At the same time, it solidifies uncertainty through its highly selective navigation through the phenomena of mystery themselves.  These include, of course, the goods and outcomes upon which it fixates as well as that which it hopes to avoid.  Typically faith fosters uncertainty through its refusal to accept all just as it is and its insistence on mapping many phenomena onto its schematic re-representations of reality.  As we noted, this may occur through reliance on historical or scriptural narratives and it may be shaped by cultural forces.  In general, traditional faith is shaped to a far greater extent by the attention it pays to the past and the future than by any attention it gives to the present, for faith and religion are typically preoccupied if not obsessed with both the future and the past.  By contrast, mindfulness addresses so-called “mysteries” without in any way fostering uncertainty.  Doubt and uncertainty arise precisely in the absence of mindfulness, as when certain phenomena are kept from clear investigation by being made to conform to some preconceived schema of the understanding or of faith.  Because mindfulness sees everything through the present moment, it takes it just as it is, and there is no uncertainty under such awareness about what it is or might be.  Further questions may arise.  These are investigated under the same light of open awareness that makes room for every quality to reveal itself fully just as it is.  There is no attempt made to see any particular quality or thing a certain way, whether in conformity to some judgment imposed on them, or out of a desire to “make sense of them” according to some platform of understanding or faith. Rather mindfulness takes bare awareness of the present moment as the most dependable source of truth.  Thus it offers a more unimpeded access to mysteries–as to all phenomena–than faith and religion with their various preoccupations beyond phenomena.

In general, the Buddha cautioned against reports, traditions, scripture, and historical narratives.  Likewise he parried conjecture, inference, analogy, and statements of probability related to the future.  He did not say to avoid these altogether, for he knew that would neither be possible nor advisable.  In fact, he advised us to seek those qualities which are “praised by the wise,” so he was well aware of the role that a posteriori knowledge must play.  But in regard to all these external ways of knowing he counseled us “not to go by them” alone.  Instead he recommended bringing a spacious awareness to all qualities themselves so as to experience directly whether they are skillful, blameless, and promoting of welfare and happiness.  This was not a call to faith in things which can neither be seen nor known.  It was a strong endorsement of the faculty of the mind for knowing its own awareness and the objects of its awareness directly.³  It was the most powerful affirmation possible of the inherent goodness in all things,⁴ and the inherent wisdom and compassion to be found in awareness unbridled by faith, by prejudice, by judgment, by greed, by fear, by ignorance or any other of the obstacles which might occlude the sun-drenched view of the Earth from above.  The Buddha and Jesus both knew what little the mind reflects of that view, which it tends to evaluate as “all there is.”  But the wealth of a denarius is supplanted more than a thousandfold by the bounty of the view that heaven takes.  Both the Buddha and Jesus knew that the mind could escape from its penned in view.  And both knew that such egress could deliver it back to its birthright of harmony, balance, and plenitude which are all part of the generosity of the Earth as seen from heaven.

 

Notes:

1.Here we are not talking about judgments forged in the three fires of the mind, of craving, aversion, and ignorance. That is, we are not talking about the kinds of judgments we discussed earlier, which form the shadow of the mind. Rather, we are talking about conscious assessments of the nature, structure, and interrelationships of the elements that form the universe including the thought-forms and emotional patterns that delineate “character.”

2.The pierced hands of Jesus represent both a literal and a symbolic representation of who Jesus was. For Thomas they were literal evidence of an event that occurred within his lifetime. For those who came later—and for ourselves—they became a symbol of humanity in divinity and in particular for a divine sacrifice made to atone for an inherently sinful human nature.

3. Compare this to the highly-mediated way that faith typically apprehends its object.  Qualities and aggregates apprehended by faith are usually seen in light of a host of other mediating qualities including but not limited to those contained in religious symbols, historical narratives, sectarian doctrines, and scriptural prophesies.  Such mediating qualities may operate consciously or unconsciously.  In any case, they deflect awareness from knowing its object directly by stirring up thought-forms that bear a more or less artificial connection to the object.  For example, a feeling of aversion towards persons identified as members of a certain group may be connected to a particular Biblical passage or interpretation of the same whose qualities then mediate any awareness of the original feeling and shine a light of validity upon it.  Or again, a feeling of “universal love” may be connected to certain images of a particular divine personage and become mediated by the qualities of those images in such as way as to refract the original into something less than universal.  We may have experienced instances where the “universal love” professed by one congregation or denomination strangely did not transfer to members of other denominations let alone to groups whose sentiments or actions are openly anti-religious. All mediating qualities act as impediments to bare attention and therefore obstruct the faculty of pure mindfulness.

4. Compare this to the selective and largely imaginary goodness to which faith attaches itself.