Faith

What happens when an emotive belief crumbles?
When a belief crumbles, the emotion that underpins faith has no means of expressing itself, and the person is left in limbo. This is the problem experienced by traditional Christians who are confronted with, and try to embrace, liberal theology. In general, the difficulty occurs when a person changes his beliefs from one mode of understanding to another mode: for example, when a person changes his beliefs from a literal understanding of religious teachings to an understanding of the symbolism that underlies the teachings. A symbolic understanding is always a deeper understanding than a literal one, so the person has to let go of his shallow beliefs before he can find deeper beliefs. The person’s faith (formerly dependent on the literal teachings) may collapse until he finds a way to develop a deeper faith in the symbolism of the teachings. Another way of putting this is that the same problem occurs when the person changes from an inflexible focus on the “letter of the law” to a flexible focus on the “spirit of the law”.

My understanding of faith arose from a traumatic experience in my 40s. Although I was working at that time, I had no social life and was very much a lone person, though I was living with my mother. I was antagonistic towards the materialistic society of that time. Towards the beginning of winter in 1988 I had embarked on a deep search for meaning in my life. I examined everything that I had ever done. Looking into my past, I examined my training in science, my involvement in local politics, my social and sexual relationships, my standards of ethics, my practices of yoga and Buddhism, and my spiritual experiences. Where was the meaning in all this varied activity?

Over a period of some weeks I gradually found that meaning was absent or non-existent in everything that I had been involved with. Now I reached the conclusion that meaning was merely an ethereal will-of-the-wisp. According to the predilection of the person, so science, religion, adventure, sex, etc may seem glamorous, but there is nothing underneath that glamour. I gradually understood that all religious and secular doctrines, all teachings and practices, were nothing more than a hollow panacea over a black hole of meaninglessness, a black hole of nihilism.

This inquiry had been predominantly intellectual in manner, but in November 1988 I followed it through to its psychological termination. I was sitting in my living room at home, looking vacantly out of the window into space – this attitude facilitates reverie and intuitive thinking in me. I was thinking about the complete absence of meaning in life, when all of a sudden my intellectual understanding was transposed into a totally intuitive one and I experienced the emotional impact of that understanding. The transposition was instantaneous and devastating.

In the twinkling of an eye I went from sanity to insanity. The speed of the transition was unbelievable. There was no possibility of defence. My whole being was filled with fear and self-pity (as a mode of guilt) [¹]. I was petrified. I could not move my body. My will collapsed completely. I just sat there, staring out of the window, immovable, in utter desolation. I had never before experienced such mental pain – the totality of the desolation is indescribable.

The psychological pain was so intense that I could not endure it. Slowly I resurrected my will and withdrew from that state. This experience had profound and lasting effects on me, among which it instantly deepened my level of self-awareness. It was a state of catatonia, which is a state characterised by the complete collapse of the will – the adult becomes petrified, his mind overwhelmed by fear and guilt (mode of self-pity). For years afterwards I preferred to call this state the desolation of the will, because that is what catatonia is, a complete sense of utter desolation where the will is non-functional.

In the year following my experience of catatonia I regularly plunged in and out of depression. I was aware that each time I entered depression I sank lower than the previous time, and it became harder to emerge from the depression. By the end of that year the intensities of my depressions were reaching new depths of sorrow. I could not stand the pain any more. I had been unable to find any way out of the meaninglessness, the nihilism, of my existence.

On the evening of the 20th of November 1989, I reached the nadir of my life. I finally decided to completely abandon hope, then and there, as I lay in my bed. The bleakness of my mind was indescribable. I began to sink into total self-pity. I gave up. I began to descend into madness, from which I knew I would never return.

In the same moment that I gave up, almost in the same breath, a thought occurred to me. The problem of meaning had been created by my intellect. If my intellect could create the problem then it could also solve it. In that moment of realisation of the power of the intellect I affirmed complete, total faith in that intellect. I knew without a shadow of doubt that it would solve the problem of meaning, given enough time.

From that moment of the genesis of my faith in my intellect (and hence my faith in myself ) the mind-fog of nihilism began to roll away. It rolled away so fast that after four months it required a tremendous effort of imagination to try to recapture the utter despair of that night. Even so, that spectre of total desolation haunted me day and night for years. The nihilism, but not the catatonia, only returned several years later when I began a deep exploration of the traditional issue of good and evil. The catatonia did not return because eventually I realised that the sense of meaning that I sought is always within me: it is in the relationship to my higher self.

This experience of catatonia taught me that finding faith is a way out of a deep pit of hopelessness and self-pity. In psychological language, I had found a way of sublimating my despair.

A Retrospective View
Nearly 40 years later I understood how the catatonia happened. In the Buddhist understanding, one effect of enlightenment is to see the world as being empty. Emptiness means that no mental structures exist, and the ego is a mental structure. Hence at a fundamental level the ego is no more real than a shadow. In this viewpoint, reality is just a play of shadows. In 1989, I had confused a spiritual view of emptiness with a psychological view of meaninglessness. This is why it can be dangerous to teach high level spirituality to beginners.

Three Kinds of Faith

Faith is not a single phenomenon, a single state of mind. In my view, there is more than one state of mind that can be called faith. Faith has its origins in self-pity. Now since there are three forms of self-pity, so there must also be three forms of faith. This implies that the three forms of faith are underpinned by either the self-pity modes of jealousy and guilt, or self-pity by itself. Jealousy and guilt are binary emotions, meaning that each can be expressed in two forms, one of them being self-pity. Jealousy is a social emotion, and its mode of self-pity can generate blind faith in a teacher or in any person acting as a suitable role model. Guilt in self-pity mode can lead to faith in God or faith in an abstract ideal, such as science. Self-pity by itself can lead to a person having faith in himself or herself.

The person who finds faith is fleeing from hate and self-pity. The object of the hatred differs in each kind of faith. When a person is the disciple of a teacher, then he is usually counter-balancing his subconscious hatred of a parent. The follower who has faith in God or science is counter-balancing his own subconscious hatred of himself. The person who finds faith in himself is counter-balancing his subconscious hatred of society. What each person has to keep in mind is that because the hatred is subconscious, so usually the person is not consciously aware of it. The person who finds faith will often not have the necessary level of self-awareness to be able to detect his subconscious motivations.

With exposure to, and adaptation to, new experiences over a period of time, a person’s faith may mature. The narrowness of his beliefs may fade and he may become more broad-minded and tolerant. When the beliefs mature, so then faith also matures. This maturity means that the subconscious self-pity is no longer a dominant influence in the background of the person’s mind and so has decreased in intensity.

The hallmark of an immature faith is the person’s emotional intolerance to beliefs that are different to his or her own. To dislike another person’s beliefs is just personal choice, but when this antipathy is very emotional in tone then we have an immature faith functioning in the background.

Faith in a Teacher

I look at the kind of faith that one person can have in another person, usually a teacher. This revolves around jealousy. Jealousy produces the phenomenon of blind faith in a teacher: this faith is the product of a religious conversion. It has its roots in the conditions of childhood. The child’s identification with a parent centres on jealousy in love mode [²]. If love from the parent is absent or in short supply for the child, then when adulthood is reached he will seek a new role model. He develops blind faith in a teacher; the emotion underlying this bond is jealousy in the self-pity mode. Since an identification bond with an adult role model is underpinned by jealousy in love mode, so identification is different from blind faith. Blind faith in a teacher is an attempt by a person to return to the source of care and happiness in his childhood prior to dissatisfaction with the parent.

Why does the convert adhere to the teacher through jealousy? Because the teacher himself has dominant jealousy! The teacher projects a suitable image of character, thereby helping to bring out any similar qualities of character in the disciple. This means that the teacher radiates his jealousy, and the receptive listener attunes to it through his own jealousy and absorbs it as blind faith. So the bond between teacher and convert is established through jealousy: the jealousy ( love mode) within the teacher stimulates the jealousy (self-pity mode) within the convert. This is the way that jealous love flows between two people, from love mode in one person to the self-pity mode in the recipient [³].

The values of the religious convert reflect the values of the teacher, since the convert does not question his faith. Therefore the convert adheres to the same code of morality that is the teacher’s; this gives the convert a vicarious moral authority and a sense of power. This point is important to understand. Blind faith is a mechanism that can enable a powerless person to acquire a sense of social power and moral authority. In fact, all three forms of faith can be means of acquiring power; the power within blind faith is simply more obvious than the other two forms.

This desire for power explains why militant cult members hate their heretics and apostates worse than they hate non-cult members. Heretics divide the power of the cult and weaken its sense of authority; and apostates discount that power and sense of authority, thereby weakening the validity of the other members’ desire for power. The perennial bane of religious sects is their inability to handle their jealousy.

Faith in God or in an Abstract Ideal

This kind of faith is based on guilt. The unconscious ideas that generate guilt are life is punishment (self-pity mode), and I deserve punishment (self-hate mode) [4]. When the faith built on these ideas is immature it inculcates obedience to authority; in this state of mind, freedom expires.

The person who follows his faith in God aims for a life focused on goodness; however, his idea of goodness is determined by the creed of his particular religion, and this creed is an ideology. An ideology is a set of beliefs held by the members of a group which presumes that all the answers to life’s significant problems (especially quality of life problems) are contained within the teachings of these beliefs. Anything outside the range of such teachings is invalidated by the group.

The person who follows science as an abstract ideal will rarely dispute and challenge the academic consensus if his faith is immature. He too believes that science can enable a person to live a good life. But just like the religious person’s creed, for such a person science has become an ideology too. Anything outside of academic consensus is invalidated (for example, many New Age topics).

An alternative abstract ideal is that of “humanity”, for example, the beliefs of the 19th century activist Giuseppe Mazzini. Such an ideal is suitable for international law and jurisprudence thinkers.

Why did ideology arise in science? In the 19th century it became imperative for free thinkers to challenge the ideology of Christian religions. The idea of Darwinian evolution was seized on as the tool for doing this and it became the beginnings of ideology within science. The ideology within religion led to the beginnings of ideology within science. Free thinkers put their faith in Darwinian evolution and not in religion.

Free thinking in religion eventually gives way to conformity and ideology: there seems to be no way of avoiding this negative effect from happening. The same has happened to science. In the early days of science, peer review became the way to eliminate wild speculation and poor standards when doing experiments. Nowadays peer review has become academia, and it functions to stifle and obstruct the acceptance of new ideas that may be socially-unpopular or challenging to the academic consensus. Academic consensus has gradually replaced independent thinking since it assumes that all answers to life’s problems will eventually be found within the framework of orthodox science. So science became an ideology as the freedom to follow independent investigations gradually evaporated.

The Office of Pope
The difference between the faiths of jealousy and guilt is not always self-evident. I give an example. Suppose that I visit the pope, or the equivalent person in other religions. If my mood is guilt in self-pity mode then I may bond to him because he is the office-holder, he is the incumbent of the charismatic office of pope, the representative of God. In other words, I really bond to the office; it is the office that is sanctified and holy and the source of authority. What the pope is like as a person is usually irrelevant – I will have faith in him irrespective of whether he is competent or incompetent. By contrast, if my mood is jealousy in self-pity mode then I bond to him as a personal teacher: he himself is the source of authority. What he is like as a person determines everything; the fact that he is the pope is just a bonus. If he becomes incompetent then my faith will shatter.

Faith in Oneself

This is the third form of faith, and the one that I prefer. This form came to prominence in me during the time of my self-analysis. It is based on self-pity. The unconscious idea that produces self-pity is I need help. I obtained the help that I needed by going deep within myself. My attitude to life rested on the sole criterion that anything that I needed to solve my problems had to come from within myself alone. Even now, over more than 30 years after finding faith, when I become too stressed I still retire into myself as my way of handling my problems – I prefer solitude to social help.

My faith acts through my beliefs about life. I live my ideas, and my ideas come from within my own reality. I live my ideas, and simultaneously examine them whilst I live them – this is the real meaning of empiricism. Or perhaps it should be called existential empiricism.

However, when the honeymoon period of finding my faith faded into the background, I found that it had helped me in some ways but in other ways it made little difference to my difficulties. I gradually realised that faith is not always suitable as a replacement for self-help and self-development, since it only corrects some of the many limitations and inadequacies that each person has. Faith is not a panacea for all problems.

Dynamics of Faith

Many people cannot distinguish belief from faith. To help distinguish between them I look at the function of faith and the unconscious ideas that underlie it. I also mention the limitations to faith.

What is the Function of Faith?
Faith functions so as to re-orientate the person to the world of spirituality, by changing the relative importance of his system of values. His value system changes because his beliefs change. Faith can be considered to act through a valuation belief. From this way of looking at it, finding faith is a process of having oneself valued, of seeking something that gives value to one’s life. The person either tries to find a perspective from which he can value himself, or else he seeks a teacher or God to do the valuation for him.

What are the Unconscious Ideas that underlie Faith?
Faith is clearly separated from belief only when the person comes under deep psychological pressure. Only under such pressure is faith revealed for what it is. When conflict arises in me due to external pressures, I will sacrifice everything, no matter how alluring and entrancing, in order to follow my own path. I reject even the prize of spiritual enlightenment if there are unpleasant (to me) strings attached. I will sacrifice everything to follow my own path to freedom. This view of sacrifice can be extended to one’s relations to teachers and to God.
So the unconscious ideas that create faith are:

Faith is the sublimation of self-pity. The unconscious idea of faith gives a person the determination to rise above self-pity. When a person is not prepared to sacrifice everything then any faith that he has is weak and will not survive much adversity during times of change.

The unconscious ideas of faith do not have a specific content. This is why faith needs to be channelled through concrete beliefs. The way I view my own path sums up my beliefs; hence my faith acts through these beliefs. When a person has faith in God his concrete beliefs are usually centred on principles of morality or ethics. These principles can be viewed as coming from a personal God but not from an abstract, impersonal God. An impersonal God has little attraction as a source of faith; for most people, an impersonal relationship to an impersonal God is no relationship at all.

Faith is not a cure-all for every human problem. Faith is only the beginning of the spiritual life, and not the culmination of it. The re-orientation of beliefs and values is not very deep at first and takes a great deal of time in order to work its way through the structure of the person’s mind and character. Changing conscious beliefs is fairly easy, but changing subconscious beliefs is very difficult. Finding a faith can be viewed as the easy part of a re-orientation to a spiritual worldview; changing all one’s subconscious negative beliefs about oneself, about society and about reality is a long-term task, and takes many incarnations to achieve. Hence the attainment of faith does not end the process of reincarnation around planet Earth.

There are Three main Limitations to Faith

One way of classifying consciousness is to separate it into three components, those of character, identity, and motivation. Character is what I am. Identity is who I am. Motivation refers to a general level of intensity or passion in the way that one lives life.

Traits are relatively stable and permanent characteristics of the person: for example, being industrious, ambitious, progressive, pleasure-loving, sly, lazy, imitative, shrewd, efficient, manipulative. Traits are derived from the person’s will (or will power) and his or her various standards or principles. Each standard gives rise to a different trait. Will power gives strength to the trait, and the standard puts importance on it. The overall prominence of the trait depends on how strong the will is and how significant the relevant standard is. A person’s will is rarely of uniform quality: he finds that in some aspects of his character the will is strong, and in other aspects it is weak. [5]
Now I can describe three limitations of faith.

a). Character Traits
The acquisition of faith does not always change character traits. Unpleasant traits are simply masked by the new enthusiasm, but come back into prominence when the new beliefs are challenged (perhaps by former believers who have now become dis-illusioned, or by believers who prefer a different interpretation of tradition). Faith does not generate self-awareness, so the person sees only that his surface beliefs have changed; he does not realise that his subconscious traits have remained more or less the same, at least in the short-term. Faith does not remove all character weaknesses.

For example, if a person changes from being listless and lazy to being industrious and hard-working once his faith emerges, then it takes a long time for the industriousness to become a part of his subconscious mind and so become a permanent habit. If he loses his faith after a short time, then he will revert back to being listless and lazy.

b). Fundamental Attitudes
Fundamental attitudes are nearly as difficult to change as character traits. The new beliefs only slightly modify the fundamental attitudes. Like traits, the old attitudes are masked by the new enthusiasm. Only secondary, less important, attitudes change when beliefs change, and this helps create the impression that the new life has begun. Public behaviour usually improves, but rarely do attitudes to sexuality and authority change for the better.

c). The Issue of Power
The believer is often side-tracked into the issue of power [6]. He may arouse a crusading spirit, on the assumption that it is a component of his faith, whereas in fact the person has only activated his desire for power as the means of elevating his low social or political importance. When the desire for power takes hold of a religious leader, then we witness inquisitions and witch-hunts, and genocides of heretical groups.

A traditional and popular method of instilling new attitudes and traits into the person is through the practices of service and devotion. Change of fundamental attitudes and traits is a very slow and difficult process, so it takes many, many years of service to instil better ones (since the subconscious mind is usually resistant to change, and hence changes only very slowly).

Form, Content and Path

Another way of looking at these ideas is to see the relation between faith and belief as form and content. Faith is the form, and the beliefs and ideals are the content. Or we can think of faith as the carrier wave for our beliefs and ideals.

When a person finds faith in God or in science, then this is form. The person’s religious creed or the academic consensus is the content. When the person is an independent thinker, he can find faith in himself. The content may be the belief in his ability to find truth, or his ability to attain equity and fairness, or some other suitable belief that is deeply held.

The way that he practises and follows his beliefs and ideals can be called his “path”. For example, some people believe that their work justifies their faith, and so they are usually hard-working. Other religious people have the belief that God is always good, and so their path is the practice of devotion.

My ideals are the quest for equity and fairness, and the achievement of a utopia of friends and heroes. This is what I call my Utopian idealism; it is an aspect of my romanticism. My path is the pursuit of truth, to follow it wherever it leads me, whether to sorrow or to happiness. Why truth, and not goodness? I have faith that the pursuit of truth will eventually remove the confusion from my mind. In addition, I believe that reality is governed by an impersonal God; such a God, being impersonal, is neither good nor bad. Hence I prefer wisdom to virtue.

[¹]. Guilt is an emotion. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. Identification is a part of the child's bonding with parents and others. I have three articles on Bonding in my book Living in Times of Change, beginning with the article Overview of Bonding. [2]

[³]. A table for showing how love flows between two people is given in the Glossary. [3]

[4]. Unconscious ideas are explained in my first article on Emotion, on the Home page. [4]

[6]. I examine power and the desire for power in my book Patterns of Mind, in the article Power and the two following articles. [6]

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Ian Heath
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.	Genesis of My Faith Faith is a much-misunderstood topic. Many people think that faith belongs only to religious devotees, but this is not true. Many scientists have faith in science; although this is an abstract faith, it is still as much a faith as the faith of a religious person. The hallmark of faith is that it is a belief which is underpinned by emotion. Hence when the person’s faith is challenged, whether he is religious or a scientist, he can get very emotional in defence of his beliefs. For example, in any debate on a topic that is a borderline science, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, there is likely to be heated outbursts of passionate opinions from the faithful on both sides of the debate. Faith is an emotive belief that helps to orientate a person. A belief does not usually lead to faith. However, a belief has to be transformed into faith in order to be meaningful as a way of guiding one’s life. This transformation occurs by underpinning the belief with emotion. The emotion sustains the belief and enables it to become a permanent state of mind. The belief supports, incorporates, or regulates rules of morality and ethics that the person will live by. The belief shapes the person’s attitudes to reality. In short, faith acts through belief.
Sub - Headings
Three Kinds of Faith
Faith in a Teacher
Faith in God or in an Abstract Ideal
Faith in Oneself
Dynamics of Faith
There are Three main Limitations to Faith
Form, Content and Path
References