Why do people today have so much trouble developing faith?
Faith, unfortunately, is often not well regarded in our culture. In the minds of many, it is equated with belief. It is also equated with hope. It is also regarded as something that is irrational, a position adopted without supporting evidence. This last view of faith is particularly pernicious in my opinion because it implies that there is no valid form of knowing outside of the logical or rational mind—and that is just not true. These views are pervasive, and many people have difficulty in letting them go and giving themselves to a path in which faith looms large.
Rather than say more about those difficulties, I am going to describe a way of practice through which different aspects of faith have developed in me. Here, I’m using the word faith to refer to the willingness to open to whatever arises in experience. In this respect, it is the antithesis of belief, even though many people use these words interchangeably. In this vein, James Carse in The Religious Case Against Belief presents a clear distinction faith from belief.
In the Tibetan tradition, to develop faith in one’s teacher or the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha), the usual instruction is to contemplate the qualities of one’s teacher, or The Three Jewels. This approach did not work for me—too much thinking, too much scope for idealization, and too much propensity to degenerate into belief.
A first step for me was to acknowledge that there was something I wanted to know—the nature of mind, for instance, or emptiness, or whatever term you want to use. I had to acknowledge that to know that was more important to me than anything the conventional world had to offer.
That is a reasonable starting point because I think it is very difficult to practice effectively unless you feel that way. To acknowledge that to myself was not easy because to do so meant that I was no longer in control of my life. Control is an illusion, of course, but it is an illusion that many of us in the West are loathe to give up.
Once I acknowledged that I wanted to know mind nature, it was clear that I was going to follow that calling and submit to its demands, whatever they were, wherever they led me. And that, right there, is one aspect of faith.
A second step was to acknowledge that to know what I wanted to know required a completely different kind of knowing or understanding. It was not hard to arrive at an intellectual, a conceptual, understanding of mind nature, say. But a conceptual understanding did not take me very far. It was like trying to taste an apple by thinking about an apple. It just doesn’t do the job.
One can, of course, go into all the subtleties of emptiness, all the philosophical ins and outs, as masters and scholars have over the ages, but that path never appealed to me, and my teacher never encouraged it.
When I came to understand that a completely different kind of understanding was required, I was stuck. I did not know how to proceed. Sitting meditation has always been difficult for me and I just could not develop the kind of stable clear attention that was described in the texts and that other people talked about and which, supposedly, led to the knowledge I sought. What to do?
Largely through grinding away at the ngöndro or groundwork practices, I first came to understand prayer as a way to form an emotional connection with what I sought to know. In teacher-union practice (guru yoga), for instance, you pray to your teacher as the embodiment of awakened mind, or, to put it another way, as the actual knowing of mind nature. In a series of blogposts in 2016, I discussed in some detail a prayer that is the central to that practice. You can find the blogposts starting at https://musingsbyken.blogspot.
Over time, however, I came to see prayer and faith differently. I came to see faith as a kind of knowing, an opening to whatever I was experiencing, and prayer as a way of building that ability. In other words, prayer became the primary way through which I developed or deepened faith.
For me, as least, it was important to rely on actual prayers and to give voice to them. If I just said them in my mind, they did not engage my body. Giving voice to them, saying them out loud, became a physical declaration that I was reaching into the unknown and was prepared to receive whatever came of that. For a long time, actually giving voice to my deepest longings was quite difficult. It required a ruthless honesty that acknowledged that I really was reaching out to the unknown.
That has become the essence of prayer for me, whether it’s the prayer of refuge, a prayer to my teacher, or a prayer to buddhas and bodhisattvas along the lines that I wrote in The Magic of Faith.
What I want to know is not in what I know. It is in the unknown, and prayer is the first step in forging a relationship with it.
There are many different kinds of prayer, and the kind I’m talking about here might be called supplicatory prayer, reaching out, asking, to connect with what I don’t know. I have to do this with complete humility. Any sense that I know what I am doing, any sense that I am in control, any sense of “I” at all, means that prayer stays in the conceptual domain, and goes nowhere. Thus, prayer is also a way of letting go of “I”. This is not easy, for any number of reasons including not only my psychological and cultural conditioning, but also my academic training and the way we are conditioned to think in this culture.
Basically, to reach out to the unknown means that I have to step into the unknown. That is where the relationship begins to form and that is how faith grows.
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