I mentioned that one's own faith is a kind of switch. If you believe you are in the presence of a Buddha, you will receive the blessings of a Buddha. If you believe you are in the presence of a frail human teacher, you will receive the blessings of a frail human teacher. And there is no doubt you can feel the difference!
I told them that the secret might be just to say, "Why not?" and just experiment and give it a go. I had developed all sorts of abilities simply by being immersed in environments where people took it for granted they could do this or that thing I aspired to but that I had previously thought was beyond me. It was almost like giving myself permission to try it. Why not play as being that way for a while?
I told my colleague about Piet's Play as Being project and drew similarities for them. Why not just play at believing, I suggested? Just for a while? Suspend disbelief. No one else need know. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.
I later told this story to my fiancée Michele. It had a profound effect on her. And afterwards she wrote the following:
"After an insightful conversation with Storm about faith and trust, I have done a great deal of soul searching. The way I understood him was to ask the question why not? Why not have faith beyond what we can experience with our worldly senses? Why not open ourselves up to possibilities beyond our wildest imagination?
"Along with my beloved Storm, I know a few (very few) people who see, hear and understand Beings that are totally out of my experience (in this lifetime at least). I sometimes ask Storm to ask a certain Being about a pressing problem I might be having. His response is usually, 'Ask them yourself. You can!'
This latest discussion with Storm has opened me up somehow. Why do I think I can never be in the presence of such beautiful, other worldly Beings? Why am I so different? With my practice of Buddhism now, I am told over and over that yes indeed the Buddha and all the Buddhas are with me during my practice and yes I WILL see them when I have eliminated enough of my delusions.
"One of my biggest delusions is fear. I have feared it. Why? Maybe I was not ready. I did not trust. Now it is clear that I am on the right path and am committed to becoming the most compassionate and loving person I possibly can be. There is no longer a need to fear anything! I no longer must fear somehow being sucked into the dark side. I am headed for the Light!
"So I have been meditating on what it would be like to be free of all delusions, to be stripped clean of any and all of them. What is on the other side of delusion? I have never thought this way before. I have no idea of what being without delusion would really be like, but I trust more and more it WILL all be revealed to me. I will see Buddha and all the Buddhas one day. I will see the other side of delusion! I will experience emptiness! I will know what it is like not to be separate, to be one with whole of everything. I am more open and trusting than I have ever been!
Storm and Michele, thank you both for sharing your moving experiences! What you touch upon is such a nice example of the human side of what I also recognize in science as the notion of a "working hypothesis" -- we test it by assuming that it is true and then explore its implications, while simply suspending both belief and disbelief. Suspending disbelief is important because an attitude that is too skeptical blinds us for what is there to see. Suspending belief is important too, since initially our belief will be too naive and simple, not rich enough to begin to embrace what is there to see.
ReplyDeleteSo there is a kind of double faith, as I understand it. There is a faith that it is okay to suspend disbelief and really give our all in exploring a hypothesis. And there is also a faith that we don't have to stick to our own original rather primitive understanding of what that belief is; we can let that go as well and make room for a much richer form of seeing than our original belief would have allowed.
In short, we can give ourselves permission to believe beyond any disbelief that can hold us back -- and to disbelieve those details of our original attempt at believing that would have hold us back also. Sorry to make it sound so complicated :-).