When you hear the word faith,
You probably think about religious faith or maybe without any specific association with a religion,
Faith in God.
And here,
What I will be talking about is faith as a human experience.
So,
I am doing this not in reference to any specific belief system and even less so to any dogma.
So here,
I want to share with you some thoughts that have to do with the question of what is it that gives us,
Human being,
That ability to have faith?
What does this ability consist in?
And I am not trying to give you definitive answers as much as raising questions and presenting some points of view that hopefully will spark some more questions in you and lead you to a journey of discovery.
I want to start from a place that is very,
Very different from the way we usually think about faith,
Which is some kind of a mystical connection to something beyond,
Something transpersonal.
Instead,
I want to go to a more down-to-earth perspective,
And I want to use faith in a much more limited sense,
The same way as we would use trust.
Let's say,
For instance,
That you have a car that you have used in really cold,
Harsh winter,
And so if you see in the weather forecast that it's going to be a cold day tomorrow,
You have some very strong degree of trust that the car will work.
You have faith in the car in that way.
So in that sense,
Trust or even faith is something that is the result of repeated experience.
Something worked repeatedly for you in the past,
And so you trust that it will again.
If your experience of life includes the sense that friends have been there for you when things were hard,
Then you probably have more of that sense that they will likely be there for you when things go bad in the future.
If you have generally had luck when confronted with chancy circumstances,
Then you probably are likely to have some degree of trust or faith that luck might also help you in the future.
And to go even further back in the past,
Back to your childhood.
If your parents were there for you,
Then you are more likely to have a sense that the universe is generally a good place.
If not,
Then you might be more predisposed to feeling that it's a harsh and unpredictable place.
So I want to relate this childhood as well as all the other experiences throughout your life as some kind of a database of experience that accumulates in order to fashion your outlook on the world.
So when you look into the future,
No matter how much you try to be objective,
It's impossible for you,
As it is for any human being,
To discount the emotional impact of past experience.
As human beings,
We are amazingly good learning machines.
So we learn from experience,
And this is what colors our perception of the present and the future.
How does this help in a practical way?
Well,
I think it's good to keep in mind that the gut sense we have of either trusting into the future or not is something that is colored by past experience.
Because when we know that,
Then we can consciously address our unconscious biases.
For one thing,
Instead of saying,
I should have faith,
You really understand that you cannot force yourself to change whether or not you have faith,
Because that is essentially a reflection of past experience.
So you need to totally accept as a starting point that your experience of having faith or not is something that is a given.
There is a very liberating sense once you accept that,
Instead of trying yourself to force yourself to be something you're not and that you cannot be because you cannot change past experience,
You actually focus on changing present and future experience.
So,
For instance,
In difficult circumstances,
You find yourself noticing your lack of faith in the future.
And you just remind yourself of how that makes so much sense,
Given the database of experience that you've had.
And having acknowledged that,
You can then be on the lookout for other facts,
Other perspectives that may actually provide more information about the current situation,
Instead of just being colored by the past.
You don't put it in terms of blind face,
Something that is generalized,
But you put it in terms of what is it that could possibly get you to build trust.
And we talk about building trust.
It's something that happens in everyday life.
You don't have to trust blindly everybody.
In fact,
That might be a pretty bad strategy.
You build trust.
And so,
If you think about what is it that has the possibility of creating a foundation on which you can build trust and over time faith.
And so,
One good place to start is to keep relentlessly asking yourself,
What is it that is good in my life?
Or what is it that is less bad?
To just keep refocusing toward what is solid,
Because unless something is solid,
You know,
It's hard to build on it.
You cannot build a house on quicksand.
You need bedrock.
So,
You look for whatever is an instance of something that is at least relatively solid.
This does not in any way mean that you are dismissing what is not solid or pretending it does not exist.
It's simply training yourself with intentionality to keep focusing on what is solid.
The image that comes in mind is if you're in the woods and you have to cross a spring and,
You know,
It's too wide for you to just simply jump over it.
But you have stones and you're going to put one foot on a stone and then on the next stone and so on until you manage to cross the spring.
So,
Same thing there.
There's plenty of water.
There's plenty of danger.
There's plenty of bad signs.
But you're focusing on the stones because that's what gets you where you want to go.
And as you do that,
You build trust and progressively you're more connected to the human experience of faith.
