Belief, Faith, Experience, And Adaptation

[Antlerman]

These terms, belief, faith, experience, and adaptation or transformation, are used in discussions in many often interchangeable ways. However I feel to use these in more the way I see them expressed in practice, making clearer distinctions of them in a spiritual and religious context offers greater insights into the psychological and spiritual states involved. In looking at these, not simply conflating the terms together, it helps to categorize, discuss, and open up an understanding of the distinct nature and roles of these. To head this off at the outset, dictionary definitions don't always express these distinctions, but there are valid distinctions to be made. Dictionaries follow behind language, not define its common use.

So with that, I recently wrote this elsewhere I feel will help flesh this out and open up discussion.  The analogy of the tree I came up with really summarizes this well:

Beliefs may be objects of faith, but more often they are substitutes for faith. The "true believer" is typically someone whose substance of the experience is derived from the beliefs. It is rooted in, and grounded in their beliefs, their doctrines, their tenants or articles of faith. As such to challenge those beliefs is to threaten destabilizing the foundation of the religious experience, to threaten the source of it for them. Typically these are those that switch religions as they find a new belief that makes more sense to them. A lot, not all of course, of your most ardent atheist who espouses science as Scientism, were those formerly Christian who now have a new truer belief to rest the experience of life in. Science will tell us all things, as opposed to trusting in God's word. It's the same approach. One trusts in "God" or "someone" as you put it, or one trusts in Science. It's the same approach, and neither is actually Faith, in the spiritual or religious sense of sensing and trusting in the unknown, the unseen, the unknowable. And trusting that future events will bring answers based on past experience, is itself not faith either.

As such the true believer will fight tooth and nail to protect and defend and justify their beliefs, for the reasons stated above. Someone with Faith, on the other hand, can more easily let go of their beliefs, modify or even change them because they are seen as supports for that intuition, that faith, which is by contrast to the true believer the substance of their religious experience. Since their experience is rooted and grounded in the unknown or the unknowable, then there is an innate recognition that beliefs can be wrong and the substance of their experience remains intact. They can look at things like Biblical criticism and say, "Hey, that makes more sense and it doesn't threaten anything since I 'feel' there is something more than just this simple material world pulling at me to look higher". In this case, the beliefs change to support their mind in the experience of their faith, or intuition.

Then there is direct experience. Not experience of beliefs, not experience of faith, but experience of that which was intuited. At such a place of direct experience, faith is no longer the substance of religious experience, but direct experience itself replaces it. Now you know, firsthand, direct experience. Then the only questions are is more how to talk about it, how to related it to your lived experience in this world. This is the mystical realization, not metaphysical speculations, not intuition, and certainly not beliefs themselves.

Beliefs are like leaves on the tree that yellow and fall off at the end of the season and are reborn as new, different leaves at the beginning of the next. Faith is the reaching of the tree to the sun. Realization, or direct experience, is seeing and knowing and experiencing the tree itself; the sun, the sap, the ground, the leaves, the air and all that in within and surrounding and moving up through all things, creating and unfolding existence itself. And it is all known within you directly. 

 

And finally adaptation is to grow into that as a permanent realized state of your conscious life, your very lived being. That is the result of beliefs held with opened hands, faith realized into direct experience, and direct experience practiced and realized into a transformed reality.

[Geezer]

Very informative, and I especially enjoyed the clarification made between faith and beliefs. It also highlights the factors that produce similarities in the thinking and actions of hard line fundamentalists and militant atheists. They apparently process information in similar ways but for different reasons.

[Antlerman]

Very informative, and I especially enjoyed the clarification made between faith and beliefs. It also highlights the factors that produce similarities in the thinking and actions of hard line fundamentalists and militant atheists. They apparently process information in similar ways but for different reasons.

I would summarize it as it being external to them as opposed to internal. "Faith" or intuition of the yet unseen but sensed reality, is purely an internal matter. I should add it that is distinct from emotions as well as emotions are responses to things like beliefs, which are in essence objects. Faith is in essence a sense of knowing; a hint, a smell, a yet unrealized sense of truth beyond what can be seen, proven, or justified objectively.  It is not irrational simply because it is non-rational in nature. 

 

The problem in religious discussions is that faith is conflated with beliefs which often times violate reason.  They elevate what is in fact a cognitive dissonance as an act of faith, which it is in fact not.  In no way is that trusting in that faith, trusting in that unknowing.  It is needing the structures of a belief system to remain intact in order to justify putting ones hope in them and violating both reason and faith in order to maintain them.  There is a clear distinction here. 

 

Someone resting in their faith, or intuition of that yet unrealized truth, is not interacting with beliefs directly in the sense of deriving that sense from that, but with that internal sense itself.  As such, the beliefs to them are supports to that faith.  And as such, as new information comes along to provide a clearer picture surrounding those beliefs, faith is open to a better, stronger, and more supportive structure to turn to for faith.  In other words, the center of gravity is in that intuition and as the environment changes, they are more capable of adapting to it.  Someone resting in the belief structures themselves will suffer a collapse when the environment shifts as their center of gravity is the structures themselves; the doctrines of their adopted systems.  This then leads to an existential crisis for them, which will then either open them up internally to growth, or collapse into a cynical fundamentalism of one form or another. 

 

The key is an internal center of gravity, versus an external one.  "I have the truth!  I have the proof!" is looking for ultimate Truth externally.

[Geezer]

I think I read just about everything you post because your posts are always informative. I would love to copy and paste your original post to some people I know but they probably wouldn't read it and even if they did they probably still wouldn't connect the dots.

[Antlerman]

Thanks.    Send them this way.  I'd be happy to discuss these things with them.  Even if they hold to their particular religion it doesn't matter.  This applies to any system really.  It's as true for Buddhists, Hindus, as well as Christians.  It has to do with what's going on on an existential level with the individual.  I respect faith in anyone, as I describe above.  They are much more able to "hear' that same thing in others regardless of their supporting belief structures. 

 

Then of course those who have direct mystical experience beyond, or through faith if you will, can clearly see that realization in others.  It was Meister Eckhart who said so well, "Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language".  I say it this way, I am all religions; I am none.