“Faith is the bridge which carries us through moments of despair”
What has faith come to mean for me?
when i was young, the understanding of what faith meant to me, was akin to hunkering down, closing the eyes (in many cases closing to the voice of reason), clenching my teeth, and saying “i believe, i believe, i believe”. In a way, it felt quite desperate.
Once i began seeing, that many of those teachings i had faith in, didn’t fit with everything that “made sense” to me, i virtually dropped the word “faith” from my vocabulary, opting instead for a level of “knowing”…
Even though certain philosophers had “proven” that the human mind can never KNOW anything with 100% certainty, it seemed to make sense, that using the sensing tools given to me at birth: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and the brain for correlating, sorting and its deductive/inductive reasoning powers, was the obvious way to move ahead towards knowing… albeit a “limited knowing”.
Once many of the layers of unclear thinking based on “faith reasoning” began to be peeled away, (the rosy coloured glasses layers, the faith vs reason layers etc) much of what had been distorted by those layers became uncovered and cleared.
it ended up in a place where that faith was no longer required as a base …… where the reality which sits solidly on sensory perception, built a sense of “NOW” and “HERE”. When this happened, that despair simply dropped off…. sometimes partially, sometimes completely …. i began to see that despair was coming from “a fear of the unknown”….. and faith in “unseen things” had in many ways fueled that despair …….
But another side of trusting came into view….. i began to notice that there was an experiencing of deep valleys, almost like “in between” moments, where solid “processing” of information was not yet forming a sense of direction…..
It is in these times that a new understanding of what faith is…. and its function in our lifetime on this planet……
“Faith is the bridge which carries us through moments of despair”
Reality is Dharma 