All of my entries about my rediscovered path of spirituality seem to have a common element. They’re all about trust, or rather, a lack of trust. Intuition, gemstones, animal totems, Akashic records, deity, meditation. I don’t trust myself to do them right. Even if I believed I was doing them right, I don’t trust I would get answers from a place beyond my own imagination. And I don’t trust any answer I might get from my own imagination is truth.
I’ve read several different sources that say it’s natural to feel like I’m making up the answers when I first start practicing meditation. The same sources also say that I will eventually learn to trust my intuition. There’s that damn word again!
Once upon a time, I had faith. If I had a problem, I prayed to God to ease my distress, then I let it go. I trusted it was being handled by someone else. Christianity was easier on some level. But is it faith? Or is it really the willing suspension of disbelief?
This new path feels very hands-on, which works for me. I’m a diy sort of girl, so a diy spiritual path is a good fit. :) But faith? I don’t know if I’m ready to trust like that again.
I suspect it’s my lack of trust—lack of faith—that’s causing my spiritual anxiety.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I think everyone eventually has some crisis of faith, it’s just human nature. I also think it is especially prevalent in creative-minded people who, well.. create things. After all, that is the realm of the gods right? As children we are filled with wonder and awe when we look at the world around us, but as we grow older some of the things just aren’t as awe-inspiring any longer – sometimes simply because they aren’t as *big* as they were when we were kids.. that giant tree that seemed to reach to the sky when you were three or four barely seems to be higher than your roof. All of those little things begin to diminish our sense of wonderment.Of course, education also ruins things. We learn that some things that appeared magical are just simple chemical reactions or tricks of light.. or simply slight of hand. In stead of seeing the wonder and the mystery in everything around us, we begin to see the man behind the curtain everywhere we look.
So, once where it was so easy to *believe*, skepticism starts to take over. That tiny grain of sand called doubt begins to be found everywhere we look until soon the wellspring of faith is nothing more than a fading oasis in the desert and we dismiss so much as mere mirage.
So many of us want to believe in something, to *know* our place in the cosmos and what we are here for but yet when we look out at the world, we cannot see the answers around us because of that lost sense of wonder and that magical view of the world.
I think often we get too caught up in trying to understand the universe rather than just seeing the beautiful, magical wonder of it all. I think of it somewhat like the the Zen Koan about the sound of one hand clapping. There is a simplistic magesty in thinking about the riddle.. yet one can get distracted when pondering it when reason and logic begin to intrude.. there is no sound of one hand clapping for one hand cannot clap right? Perhaps, but there may be a different answer.. slightly the same – silence.
Don’t know if it helps or clouds your issue more, but these are some of my thoughts..
I think trying to understand the universe is what caused me to stop trusting/believing the first time I had a crisis of faith. Because I didn’t understand, I couldn’t accept certain things to be true. I couldn’t prove things and I didn’t trust someone else’s experience and belief. I wanted to know for myself. Someone else’s word wasn’t good enough.
Now I find myself questioning once again. I *want* to believe. I want that childhood magic back. But yeah, a tiny part of me is skeptical. I can’t prove anything, and I hesitate to trust another person’s faith.
Then again, I believe in atoms though I’ve never seen one. I was told atoms existed and I simply believed it. Maybe religion and spirituality aren’t so different. I have faith in science.
Over the past couple days, I’ve come to a compromise of sorts. I want to believe, but there’s a nagging little skeptic inside. The nagging voice might question and dismiss all these unfamiliar ideas on a spiritual level, but it can accept the power of the mind. I’m completely comfortable with the idea that our minds shape our realities.
I don’t think it matters whether that magical thing I want to believe in exists, or if it’s simply my desire to believe that makes magic happen. Like you said, maybe I’m missing the forest for the trees.
As always, you make me think. And it helps. :)
Sorry, this might be disjointed as I’m sleep deprived from work..
Sometimes I think faith is all about questioning our beliefs, not about *knowing*. It’s the search for answers and the time spent within our own minds debating the truths we are told and trying to mesh these things with what feels *right* within our hearts. Like so much in life, it is the journey and the process that is vital, not the end destination.
I do believe there is something out there greater than ourselves, something that invested this world with the magesty and the beauty of life. I’ve simply seen and experienced too many ‘odd’ things to believe this is all some happy accident or happenstance thrown out of some chaotic primordial soup. I just don’t know if what that ’something’ is continually watches over us or is what others picture as a ‘god’. I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure I’ll ever know. That being said, I’m usually content with that idea.
Like everyone, I have times where I question what I feel and what I’ve experienced to make me believe how I do. Often it is due to some event in my life or just a general feeling of discontent with the state of my world. I find it hard to accept most defined systems of belief since they are all seen, shaped and interpreted through the lens of the devotees to whatever particular religion it is. We humans are fallible and are prone to imprinting our own views and values onto whatever we teach others, so I can’t accept that ‘God’s Word’ isn’t actually Joe Schmuckatelli’s word with his own spin on things. I think there are common threads to all religions that give hints and clues to the ‘truth’ so to speak, such as how we should all treat each other and whatnot. But I’ve yet to find any religion that doesn’t seem flawed and imperfect when viewed through the lens of my own experiences and what feels *right* to me. I realize that sounds incredibly hypocritical in some respects.. that I don’t find other’s interpretations valid and they don’t pass my own personal standards. But it’s not like that in all honesty, I know how flawed I am so it is all too easy for me to see these other people being flawed as well. Even if some ‘prophets’ or whatever were vessels for the divine word of some god, those words have been diluted through the passage of time by translation and outright editing. Since I have never had a god speak to me that I know of, I can only continue my search for what feels right in my heart of hearts.
Lately I’ve been leaning more and more towards the concept of Deism, which is what most of our Founding Fathers in the US believed in. Not sure I would equate the deist god as the Christian one, but the concept of it certainly feels more ‘right’ for me than most others I’ve explored.
In the end, I am not sure if it really matters who or what each of us believes in. I have always had a sense that what is important is to believe in something, however tenuous that belief might be as one searches for the fertile soil to root their faith to.
Probably muddying the waters more but there ya go..