On Faith

Belief is a slippery fish, and faith is but to grasp it firmly.
--Me (or at least I can't think of anyone who's said it before me)

First off, let me apologize for being so quiet on the blog front over the last month, because there have been excellent blog entries that were in my head but never made it to the keyboard due to all sorts of reasons of excuses, from being too tired, to having too much work to do, to watching too much TV or playing Civ 3 too much or reading OTHER people's blogs -- tonight I spent 2 hours reading entries, and would have continued with the self-delusion of 'once I'm done, I'll write my own blog entry'... yeah right. So, I have stopped to give myself enough mental energy to get this entry out to yous all. It's a deep thought I had today, and let's hope I can articulate it with any justice

Today is Rosh Hashanah (yesterday now, due to the time it took me to write this entry) -- the Jewish new year (the birthday of the world), and I spent the day in temple with Julie contemplating the lessons of the day, and spending a good time in introspection, trying to wrap my mind around my own belief structure, and my take on faith in general. It's interesting how concepts in Judaism directly wire up with my own experience of the world and my own spiritual quest, and yet I still find existential friction inside that keeps me from saying 'yes, this is the religion for me', mostly because I have a difficulty deciding whether or not I have belief or faith in any spiritual doctrine or religion. Thus, the internal debate and discussion of the day ensues.

The question of faith... I find that I go back and forth on this idea all the time. When asked what religion I am by anyone, I usually respond 'philosophical', because I don't know how else to answer this question. What I know is, I have in moments and on occasions had a deep internal existential belief in some power outside of myself which is greater than I am and which has some sort of bearing on my well-being and on reality in general. Any time I try to articulate that feeling into a statement of belief, or attach it to some dogmatic faith or religious structure, it starts to fail for me. I have a skeptical and scientifically-bent mind, and I find it difficult to take the leap of faith and say 'yes, I believe in God(dess)'. That inability to positively affirm and commit to my belief in a higher being feels to me like a bar that separates me from any particular religious faith I might decide to adhere to.

I have contemplated Buddhism, but I also know I'm not much of an ascetic, and I don't believe necessarily in the proposed cosmology that the world is an illusion that I must separate from. The truth be told, I really kinda like the world, and I'm rather attached to it, though I try to not let things get me too down, and I practice buddhism-lite of 'let it fall off your back like a duck in water'. Today the statement was made comparing Buddhism and Judaism, saying that Buddhism believes that suffering comes from our attachment to the world, and in order to achieve tranquility, we must detach from the world. This is very different from Judaism which states that our suffering stems from our deep care and connection with the world which is broken, and in order to achieve peace we must fix the world. I kinda dig that. Judaism is an activist faith that is based on good works. Kinda like Methodism, but without the Jesus.

Jesus. Yeah, good ol' JC. I used to have a pretty strong relationship with the guy. We'd talk every single day, and I felt a very strong spiritual connection with my lord of lords. That was until I lost my religion in late high school. It wasn't all at once, but it was little by little. I'm not sure that there was one single cause for my loss of faith, but probably it was equal parts sex, witnessing of hypocracy, and exploration of philosophy and my own thinking mind. In any case, I finally somewhere along the road admitted to myself that I no longer believe that good ol' JC is the son of God, sent down to save our souls. I do think the historical figure had a lot of good things to teach us regarding running a healthy social organism. I also think that some of his ideas are flawed. But the son of God Almighty? Let's just say, I don't have enough evidence to even believe in God himself, so thinking about his son is a bit premature.

I do recognize in myself a need for a spiritual connection, and I have explored many pathways. I tried on Wiccanism/Ritual magick for a while, but found in the end that its methods were just as unscientific and unprovable as Christianity. Again, philosophy was my undoing. This is not to deny that while practicing ritual magick, I did indeed have experiences that felt real enough to deem them some sort of highly ecstatic altered state which may or may not have been spiritual in nature. Among the more powerful experiences was 'channelling' or 'invoking' a spiritual entity. While doing so, that entity (I believe it was an elemental lord) spoke through my mouth and effected a personality that I felt truly out of control of. I merely witnessed it acting through me, as a spectator. It was truly amazing. It of course could have been wholely my subconscious at work, but still-- quite a powerful experience.

I have also tried atheism on, mostly right after studying Nietzsche. However, I found this viewpoint both as dogmatic as any religious belief, and also quite depressing a concept. I knew that deep inside I have a need for a connection with the spiritual, as well as a never-ceasing fear of the oblivion promised at the end of this physical body if this is all that there is. I admit it -- I am afraid of not existing. I'm not necessarily afraid of death, if it is only some sort of transition between one conscious state and another. I'm disturbed by the idea of losing self, and so reincarnation while attractive philosophically, scares me a bit as well. I feel it's a lot like writing the greatest work of biographical nonfiction you possibly can, and on the last sentence of the last page, then burning the whole thing in the trash can. What exactly was the point? But this is pretty much equivalent to atheism in that it promises the death of the personality.

Since 1995, and up until last year, I was a Rosicrucian, studying western mysticism and metaphysics in order to get a grasp on what it is that I might actually believe, and how I could harness that belief into practical ability. Part of me is very much attracted to the idea of activity on the spiritual (read extra-body) plane, and I worked at the weekly lessons, at least half-heartedly for years until last year, while serving as a leader on the track to being a very important leader of an inner sect of the order, I did some introspection and came to the conclusion that I just don't know if I believe any of what I had been learning over the last decade. Again, I had experiences that felt like spiritual connections, but nothing that I could point a finger at and say positively 'yes, I believe that this really was something related to spirit/god/other and isn't fully explainable through psychology and neurobiology. I've read articles about studies that have looked into cat-scans and MRI's of buddhist monks deep in meditation, and found areas of the mind that are active during the moments of transcendence, and which subsequently can be stimulated artificially to create the same feelings in the mind of the experiencer. So, yeah. I found myself in a crisis of faith once again, and out of fairness to the order, for after all I still respect it and the work that it does for those who are true believers, to step down and out and get my own head straight around what I might believe or not believe before I enter back into that sort of position or relationship again. After ten years, one would think I'd be certain of my beliefs. In absence of that certainty, I felt it was time to go.

I've tried Yoga as a spiritual pursuit as well, and so far it's been my favorite, since it requires no belief -- only postures -- to stimulate the same sort of spiritual action inside. But, ultimately I'm lazy and I've let that fall by the wayside as well. And deeper than my laziness, is a realization that shocked me at first, but now feels very comfortable. For all of my life up until recently, I've been seeking a connection with the spiritual for several major reasons: One is the possibility of personal spiritual power, but that is really just a means to the second reason -- to convince myself of a world outside of this one, to a place outside of my body that I might exist and be conscious. I've tried astral projection through meditation and through hypnosis, but never got any results I felt positive about. I've tried all sorts of manipulations and exercises to prove to myself without a doubt that the world beyond exists, and that I can pin my faith to it. And of course, I always fall short, because I am misapprehending the nature of faith, or else I am unwilling to participate in it as I understand it.

But maybe, I'm just approaching it all wrong. Much like the studies that prove that while expressions on a face are indicative of inner emotional states, that merely by imitating the facial expression, we can evoke that genuine emotional state within us, perhaps faith acts in somewhat the same fashion. Through all of my spiritual journey, as a child deep in the throes of Christianity, or my experimentation with ritual magick, or my studies with the Rosicrucians, I had experiences that in the moment were very real for me. They involved physical sensation, and mental/emotional ecstasy which had meaning to me and effected me whether or not they were actually caused by some extra-physical contact. I continue to have these meaningful experiences when I allow myself to enter into a deep meditative state, and I know that for days afterwards my life is just a little bit easier than it was before the experience. Perhaps I need to merely become practiced at invoking the state of faith, so that faith becomes resident in my being.

Why do I care so much about faith? If I don't have it, what makes me certain I need it? Don't I have skepticism about true belief, and if I held a belief that I did not examine, would I be happy? And if I did examine it, could I call it faith any longer? Or more importantly, could it survive my scrutiny? Hard questions. Maybe it's because I feel inside myself a nostalgia for my childhood when it was all taken for granted, and the peace that feeling gave me around certain existential questions. Perhaps on the other hand, it's because I have a memory of my own personal power in the heights of my faith, and lacking that faith, I lack an inner certainty that I could harness like an anchor in my life through all of this worlds storms and troubles. Faith can move mountains... or at least, it can hold someone strong in the face of an onslaught of bad luck and consequence. Perhaps I yearn for that certainty, just so that I have something to pin my universe on. Right now, it's all a bunch of shifting sands, and some ideas I just choose not to analyze too deeply in fear that I will again uncover unstable ground. So, I ignore the heavy existential questions as meaningless and unanswerable. Is there a God? Is there life after death? Is there such thing as an immortal soul? All questions that we cannot answer through philosophy or science. All questions whose answers lie beyond this mortal coil or in oblivion. I leave myself then to the questions that matter here and now: how do I live a good life? What is my moral compass? What do I believe in, at the practical level? Am I alone?

At these sorts of questions, I find that Judaism excels in helping to find the answers. While nominally a faith that postulates the existence of a God that has had in the past a very direct role in the fate of his people, it is obstensively today a faith that focuses on how to live a good life, and how to form a more perfect society. In that, I can totally get behind it. I have met many Jews who are not true believers, but still go to temple at least for the High Holidays and still practice the rituals and holidays lain down by tradition and family. I once heard an allegorical story of an atheist Jew asked why he attended temple religiously every Shabbat, and his answer was 'You don't have to believe in God for God to believe in you.' At first, this seems like a witticism that is cute and points at the need for Jews to keep to tradition exterior to their own personal spiritual beliefs, but I suspect it might point to something deeper -- to the idea that deep inside, no matter what we might believe or not believe, we have a sense that we are not alone in the world, and that there is something bigger than us that we have direct and intimate contact with every single moment of our lives. We know we have that contact, and furthermore... we know we need it.

I am coming to terms with that very deep core belief. I think I have it. I can't articulate it beyond that. I don't know what it means exactly, and I don't always have the ability to grab hold of it. Some days, I'm just... not a believer. Some days, I just feel... alone. But on other days, I do feel it, and I feel it deeply and intimately, and it is for those days that I know that I can't give up on the quest. Julie and I have just joined our local synagogue as actual card-carrying members with fees and all. We are going to be trying to integrate spiritual practice in our lives and in our family's lives on a deeper level than just during High Holidays and Passover. For me, it's an exploration. I have played with the idea of conversion to Judaism because I love it's tradition of questioning its own beliefs and disputing the meaning of scripture ad nauseum. The Talmud is a document of just that debate. for every ten Jews, there are at least twelve opinions on the meaning of any particular scripture. And yet... there is something deeply traditional and unchanging to the faith. The practices are questioned, but never abandoned. I am thinking that this might have something to do with the idea that as faith dictates ritual, ritual also imbues faith. The Shema, or prayer to god that is supposed to be on the door and gate of every Jewish home, and are to be spoken every morning and every evening reads as the follows:

Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates...

The prayer goes on, and you can read a translation of it on the web (try this translation of the shema) if you like. The important thing is, I think the Jews really got it in the faith department -- practice makes perfect, not perfect makes practice. So, faith is not necessarily something that you have, but something that you do and you get better at and that you fail at, and that you recover from.

During Rosh Hashanah, the Shofar (ram's horn) is blown, and many different explanations are given to what the horn means, but the most prevalent reason as to why the horn is blown, is that it is a shock to the system and a wake-up call to the soul, to bring one's self back to the faith, to the introspection of self, and to spiritual belief and practice. Every year the Jews undertake a ritual in their holiest of days to self-examine, to repent, to correct, and to commit anew to their identities as Jews. This is manditory, and universal. What other group of people, what other religion requires such a level of self-examination? I'd pay good money for that experience alone, not to mention the food :). Also, in the blowing of the shofar, at least as put forth by the rabbi at our synagogue today, there is the recognition that we can be broken, or smashed to pieces inside, but there is always the promise of wholeness. In short, the shofar reminds us of the promise of spiritual wholeness that is within our grasp, no matter what our current state may be. This is something that is given to us only if we choose to take it, but it is free and freely given. All you have to do is believe it.

My experience of Judaism so far has been interesting, and I'm going to explore it pretty much for the rest of my life, as I am married to a Jewish woman and by lineage have given life to two Jewish boys. How does this affect my belief in God or anything else? Well, time has only to tell on that score. I'm not likely to lose my skepticism, nor my desire to connect with that deep spiritual experience -- those are integral to my core. What I find that I have been lacking in my previous explorations is a certain honesty with myself and with others that I really don't know where my belief and faith stand. When you are trying to join a club, you pretty much try to act like a club member. In this case, I'm not sure I want to join the club or not -- but I'll come for the food and entertainment. I am going to enter into the exploration of the Jewish spiritual experience at a deeper level than I have in years previous, but I'm also going to enter into that exploration with complete honesty that I really don't know whether or not I believe in God, and I don't know what that means. I hope that in that honesty, I can find illumination in one form or another. And in the meanwhile, I will continue to enjoy the sermons and the real-world connection they have in my every day life. If anything, I will learn at least one way to live a good life. One set of moral strictures to follow. One compass that I can choose to follow or not. Who knows -- maybe along the road I'll catch that slippery fish from time to time, and gaze headlong into a solid belief. I doubt I'll be able to hold it for too long at any given time, but I'm open to the possibility.

Well, if you've actually made it to the end of my post, I thank you for following my ramble. It took me several hours to get it all out, and I know I've missed some important points along the way. I'm likely to continue on this theme from time to time as we enter into Yom Kippur next week and beyond. It's a major theme of my life, and I think for once I'm going to engage with it directly, openly and honestly. We'll see what comes of it.