A Rambling Reflection on Faith & Understanding
On seeing the value of coming into our own understanding of the world and on some challenges that we all face in walking this path.
Another word for Faith is Confidence Certainly, a great athlete Does not know if they will win But they must have confidence that they will For this confidence provides energy Energy that improves their odds Their odds of winning A "great" athlete (or artist or doer of any thing) earns their confidence And with confidence, they become even "greater" But it requires that the person Be on the true path towards being "great" For that is the fertile soil That allows the seeds of confidence To blossom and grow A seedling will die without sunshine No matter how great its confidence So to is the nature of faith When we find ourselves Walking on the Right Path The path towards our well-being The path towards our aims It enhances our faith And in turn, our growing faith Gives us greater energy To walk the right path It is why we must not Give ourselves over to blind faith In blindness, we may find ourselves Walking down a path of suffering We may give away this energy and It may give way to our own suffering Yes, faith and confidence are matters of trust Trust in the unknowable But Right Faith, Right Confidence is possible And when we find it And when we cultivate it upon fertile ground It fills us with great energy It is a fountain of joy As if a spring that bubbles up from the very Earth That nourishes us as we walk the path
What does it mean to believe in something? To have faith in something?
We live in a time where we tend to think of how groups of people believe, what different groups have faith in. It would not be strange to hear things like, “Christians believe that Jesus is the son of God, but Jewish people don’t believe that”.
As a child, I actually remember hearing this exact idea being expressed many times. I remember not really knowing who Jesus or God was, but I knew that I was Jewish so I figured I must not believe that Jesus is the son of God. I didn’t really know what it could’ve even meant to be the son of God.
As a curious Jewish child, it wouldn’t have been too odd for me to have asked, “Then what do we believe in?” and it wouldn’t have been too odd for me to have been told that “Jewish people believe in the Torah.”
See, there is a certain kind of comfort in being told what we believe in, whether we are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, conservative, liberal, progressive - there is a great comfort in simply knowing that whatever we that we belong to, that we all believe in the same things, whatever those things might be.
As comfortable as this is, beliefs have arisen for a reason and, all too often, when we ask “but why do we believe in this?” the answer we get generally boils down “because that is what we believe in.” We find ourselves living in a world full of beliefs that we don’t understand very well.
This happens within all religious contexts, but it is very obvious in certain spaces of modern American Christianity. The belief that “Jesus is the Son of God” is so intense, that the underlying reasons this belief arose (in which Jesus understood not only his own divinity, but the divinity of all people) is all too often not present. This is exemplified by recent stories in which clergy got pushback from churchgoers because they disagreed with the sentiment in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he espouses many of his most famous teachings such as turning the other cheek.
However, I think it is wise to note that such examples of this occur within most modern group contexts. Often times, we like to cherry pick something we think is “crazy” or “ridiculous” or “hypocritical” about other groups, without acknowledging the ways similar forms of craziness, ridiculousness, and hypocriticalness arise in our own lives - Jesus also happens to speak about this in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:3).
The important thing here is the idea that, without understanding what we believe in, our beliefs will inevitably mislead us. In the Buddhist rendering, when we do not have Right View, we find ourselves off the path of well-being and peace.
When asked about Right View, the Buddha reflected: first, that for those coming to know of Right View that one comes to know “that there is a point in giving alms, offering alms, and in ceremonial offerings” (i.e., there is a reason why we do what we do); second, that those that have Right View understand the important role that “investigating phenomena” (i.e., true curiosity) plays in personal development and enlightenment (Discourse of the Great Forty).
Here, the Buddha is suggesting two steps in coming to understand what we believe in. The first is that there is, in fact, a reason why we believe what we believe. The second is that we can each discover such reasons through our own curious investigation of these reasons.
One can, perhaps, understand beliefs as being like trying to care for birds. When we believe something without understanding it, it is like keeping a migratory bird in a cage. If we keep the conditions right (the cage closed and the bird fed), we can keep the bird - yet, the longer we keep it the more it suffers, for such birds were meant to fly great distances.
However, if we understand what the bird species likes and when and where it migrates, one can cultivate a garden that will invite the birds to return each year on their journey. This is akin to understanding why one believes what they believe.
It is the nature of the human life that we are told what we believe in. A child cannot be expected to understand everything their parents believe from the get-go. No - a lot of the times, the belief must be taught and understanding will come later. This is why we have coming-of-age ceremonies in so many cultures - it is the rite in which the child transitions from solely believing towards a commitment to walk the path of understanding.
It is deeply important to our well-being that we strive to understand what we believe in - or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, it is deeply important to our present well-being that our beliefs naturally bubble up from our own understanding.
Where do beliefs come from? They come from our understanding - they come from someone’s understanding, that is. And what does it mean to understand? It means to investigate the world around us with a curious mind, to let our experiences inform what we know, such that our beliefs are born from us as a natural extension of our understanding of reality.
A lot of times our attachment to group-beliefs prevent us from engaging with the great practice of understanding. What do I mean? When we place too much faith in beliefs that aren’t grounded in understanding, it closes us off from coming into true understanding.
As one example, many older people hold the belief that younger people are lazy and entitled. Yet, do such older people understand younger people? When we believe that someone is lazy and entitled, then when we see them, we will see a lazy and entitled person. When we do this, we will not notice the ways in which said person is not lazy and is not entitled - we will only notice the things that reinforce our own beliefs.
See, to believe something, to have faith in something, is a great source of energy. I’m a musician - before I go on stage, I must have faith in myself to perform well. If I have this faith, then I will be able to enjoy the performance. If I don’t have this faith, then I will be very nervous and anxious and I will not only not enjoy performing, but the performance will be more difficult and harder. Having faith is sort of like the Secret Sauce that brings everything together.
When we have faith, we are able to cut away all the anxieties and uncertainties that can make life so challenging. And we all have faith in many things - whether we have faith in God watching over us or we have faith in ibuprofen curing our headaches. Faith is grounding and allows us to focus on the present moment before us. There is a reason why we all gravitate towards faith, even when we don’t understand the roots of our faith (i.e., do you even know what ibuprofen is, what it does, how it works, where it comes from?! does it even matter?)
When we believe something without understanding why, we close ourselves off from ever understanding. It can be very unpleasant to let go of our beliefs. Once we begin the journey of understanding things for ourselves, we may discover that our initial beliefs were wrong. It can be very unpleasant to release our initial beliefs - it is usually easier to simply not understand than to encounter the need to shift our faith.
There is a Buddhist idea that one cannot truly witness a flower if they believe they know what a “flower” is. What does this mean? Say you are walking in a park and your child asks “what is that?” and you say “that’s a flower” and then you keep walking. Your child, though, stops and looks at the flower and notices it has five pedals, periwinkle petals with navy polka dots, and yellow beads of pollen on its protruding stamen. A bee lands on it, collects pollen, and flies off.
In this case, who taught the child what a flower was? Was it the parent or was it the flower? Many of us learned to believe things based on what we were told - but to learn this way does not offer understanding. We can only truly understand what a flower is by making the flower the object of our conscious mind, by truly witnessing it, by learning from it. More broadly, we learn to understand by being present.
This is true for other people as well. Many people hold the prejudiced belief that “Jewish people are greedy”. They say these words to their children, to their friends and all of the sudden many people start believing this - often without ever meeting a Jewish person. Now, let us say someone meets me, a Jewish man, and they project this idea onto me - they assume that I must be a greedy person. By believing something about me, they have no hope of ever understanding who I actually am.
This is true for all kinds of stereotypes, whether they be explicitly negative or positive - when we believe something about a person whom we do not personally understand, our belief will blind us from ever understanding.
We might believe that “men don’t cry” and this will prevent us from ever understanding why a man would and does cry. Well, what this means is that if I - a man - hold the belief that “men don’t cry”, then I am closing myself off from ever understanding my own self. For example, if I believe “men don’t cry”, when I get the feeling that I need to cry, instead of trying to witness and understand it, I will reject it. By doing so, I reject myself.
When we hold beliefs that we do not understand, we reject reality and we fail to understand things as they are. This includes rejecting ourselves, failing to understand our own selves. When we do this, we suffer.
Now, one could easily interpret this as suggesting we ought not to believe in anything. One could interpret these ideas as suggesting a certain form of nihilism - however, nihilism is built on the belief that nothing means anything. Such a belief can be just as trapping. If someone believes that nothing matters, they won’t take time to see the flower for what it is or another person for who they are - they won’t take time to understand.
No - instead, what I wish to say is this - we must learn to recognize when our beliefs are not grounded in our own understanding. Such beliefs have a certain feeling to them, the more we pay attention to them the more we will notice them. Maybe we catch ourselves repeating a new headline we read as if we were actually on the ground, witnessing the events in question. Maybe we catch ourselves saying that someone else is a bad person as if we actually understand everything about them.
We live in a world where we are constantly being bombarded with things we cannot actually observe for ourselves. Many of our beliefs come to us through our televisions and phone screens. These are often beliefs we cannot confirm for ourselves and therefore cannot readily observe to understand for ourselves.
We all hold many beliefs that do not come from our own understanding. These beliefs prevent us from understanding things as they are. Many of us are very protective of our beliefs and, in order to protect certain beliefs, we avoid understanding the truth. Sometimes understanding would reveal to us that we only believe something because it’s is what we think we are supposed to believe. Just like how we might believe “men don’t cry” - when we come to understand that it is good for any person to cry at the appropriate times, this belief can longer survive in us.
In today’s science-driven world, we have a tendency to equate faith with religion and knowledge with science. The idea of faith can feel hokey and antiquated to many people. Yet, many ancient religions (whether it be Buddhism, Judaism, or Christianity) at their core advocate for a very scientific relationship with faith.
By this I mean that within so many spiritual traditions is the emphasis on personal discovery, on spiritual empiricism. The doctrines across religion teach the importance of studying divinity for one’s self, of walking the path - that is why the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony is an invitation for a child to begin to study the Torah in earnest. It is the invitation to embark on the empirical journey of self-discovery through Torah study.
If someone says that they “believe in God”, it isn’t really possible to know if they understand precisely what that belief entails. I described beliefs in two categories: those built on understanding and those that are not - it is not particularly worthwhile to wonder if other people understand their beliefs. It is far more relevant to each of us to engage with our own understanding in relation to our own beliefs. When we come into our own understanding of things, we can usually sense when someone else also understands or does not.
Faith is built upon understanding. When we try to put a box around what we believe in, we prevent ourselves from coming closer to understanding it. Faith in “God” must be built on an understanding of whatever God truly is. In order to understand God, we must put on our lab coats and dawn our role as spiritual scientists, allowing ourselves to be open to experiences and to letting our beliefs evolve as our own understanding grows.
In other words, if you believe that God does not exist, you will not find him even if he flicks you in the nose. Or, a verse I believe I read in a recounting from Ram Dass: “if a pick-pocket encounters a sage, he will only see pockets.”
Since I have started this blog, I have been asked on many occasions - “do you believe in God?” I have found this question hard to answer. There are things I feel I understand about reality that the word “God” may fit best. My understanding continues to grow, as a river gets stronger as the snow continues to melt in the spring season.
If we take naming what we understand too seriously, though, we fall into the trap of believing things we don’t understand. When we name something as if we truly understand it, we once again prevent ourselves from understanding more. This is why in many traditions, including the Jewish one, we generally don’t say God’s name. I understand why we don’t say God’s “true name” - part of my understanding of “God” is that “God” is not fully comprehendible and a name might suggest such comprehension is possible.
However, if we take not naming something too seriously, this can also prevent us from walking the path of understanding. If a child senses that adults are afraid to say God’s name, then the child might grow up to be afraid to try to understand aspects of God. I understand, as well, why it is important to say God’s “true name” - when we name the indescribable, we make it tangible. It is as if we live at the bottom of a pit and God’s name is a rope dropped down so that we may climb out. Without the rope we are stuck and without the idea of God we never know there is “something more”. (I actually wrote a post recently about God’s “true name” in the Torah, see below).
I will start to conclude by saying this: many of the holy doctrines of humanity, from Judaism to Buddhism, grew from peoples’ understanding of the world. There is a great deal of wisdom contained within the teachings of Moses, of Jesus, of Muhammad, of the Buddha. When we believe that “only Jewish people study Moses”, “only Christians study Christ”, “only Muslims study Muhammad”, or that “only Buddhists study the Buddha” we close ourselves off to understanding why anybody studies any of these things at all.
One billion people could mis-interpret and fail to understand the teachings of Christ and that would not diminish the depth of wisdom contained within his teachings. The Torah could be lost and forgotten for ten-thousand years, yet the people who find it will be able to discover great truths by reading it (assuming they can translate it, of course). These texts have been carried on to help us in our empirical quest to understand ourselves and to understand the truth. It is up to each of us to walk these paths towards understanding for ourselves. There are many right paths to take and they each go by different names.
So, what does it mean to believe in something? What does it mean to have faith?
Our beliefs and our faith are a manifestation of our understanding, of what we know and who we are. The more we understand, the closer our faith draws to the truth. We come to understand more by stepping into the present and accepting our experiences for what they are. Our beliefs and our faith will always grow and evolve because, in the end, the truth is beyond our full comprehension. This means there is plenty of space for our understanding to grow into it.
And so, if this essay is meant to be anything let it be this - let it be an invitation to be curious; an invitation to wrestle with our beliefs just as Jacob wrestled with that angel; an invitation to let our beliefs melt away as our understanding of things changes and grows; an invitation to look at our own selves and at others as we each are, not through the lens of our beliefs.
Let it be an invitation to be the child who lets himself be consumed being present with the flower. For when we come to understand the world, we are filled with faith, we are filled with confidence, we are filled with vitality. Just as flowers spring forth from gardens, so to does a bed of faith emerge from the soil of our understanding.