This week’s reading is a short Q&A with Sharon Salzberg on faith and trusting our own experience.
Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience
QUESTION: What is the difference between faith and belief?
SALZBERG: Beliefs, as I use the word, are constructs that contour our sense of the universe. I might believe in a future life, for example, and therefore, that affects the way I behave in this one. Faith, in contrast, is admitting what we don’t know and going forward anyway because of that strength of heart. I don’t think beliefs are necessarily bad at all. They may bring not only comfort and solace, but also inspiration and a tremendous articulation of truths that we can’t affirm through our own experience. But everything depends on how we hold the belief.
QUESTION: It seems that you first need something almost like faith to arrive at verified faith, or some kind of trust in your own self. How does that come about?
SALZBERG: You do need trust in your own self, and I think that is a great challenge for many of us. We need to learn to trust our own deepest experience and honor that — my sense of faith is very much interwoven with that kind of love and respect for oneself. It’s like a journey. It’s halting, and it happens in fits and starts, but we know where we want to go. There’s nothing wrong, or incorrect about finding that we have to begin again and again and again.
There are many ways to work with our doubts or uncertainties. The primary tool I’ve used, of course, is meditation. Rather than the strict, formal sense of meditation, that means having an ability to relate to the various things that come up in one’s mind with compassion, wit and some ease rather than spiraling into a negative self-judgment.
QUESTION: I heard you say that fear is the opposite of faith. Can you talk about that a little bit?
SALZBERG: Fear certainly is different than faith. But one of the things I learned, and one of the things I wrote about, is that we can have faith right alongside our fear. We don’t have to vanquish our fear or make it go away. Instead, we can learn to touch something deeper in the face of the fear, which enables us to go on. The chapter I wrote about fear draws on my experience with Ram Dass. He is a very important spiritual teacher and friend for many of us, and as you may know, he had a stroke. From a Buddhist point of view, the fears we experienced about Ram Dass would be called fixated hope, which is similar to attachment. We feared that maybe he’ll be able to walk again, but not talk, or maybe he’ll be able to talk again, but not walk, or maybe this or that will happen, as though by saying something enough we could make it so. I really wanted him to get better. But I realized at some point that he himself was going into the unknown, and the only way to fully go there with him in love and friendship was to acknowledge that. The fear didn’t go away, but in some ways, it was more surrounded with love and care.
I saw him not long ago. I was teaching a retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center up North and one night he came to dinner. When he had to leave, he decided he wanted to walk down the stairs instead of using his wheelchair on the ramp. So someone lifted him up out of the wheelchair, and then step by laborious step, leaning on somebody, he went down the stairs. When he got to the bottom of the stairs, we almost dropped him, but we got him into the wheelchair. He wheeled over to the edge of the car door and lifted himself up inside the car. During this whole time my heart was sinking, and I kept thinking, that this was such an ordeal for him and so painful to watch. But then, as I was standing directly in front of him, he looked at me and gave me a beautiful, radiant smile and said, “None of this makes any difference at all, you know that.” And I said, “Oh. I guess I do know that.” This was a beautiful expression of faith, touching on those deepest truths, those things that will support and sustain us. It is our own power of love, the love that is in the universe and our power of connection, no matter what. Faith is being in touch with the strengths or powers in this universe that are not defined or crushed by our circumstances. Then we can go forward, even if we’re very afraid.
