Doubt and Faith

the doubtless simplicity of Presence

What Is Doubt?

Some doubt is obviously wise and important. But sometimes, doubt can become an habitual way of holding on to the known, not letting go and falling into the ungraspable vastness of what is beyond words. I’ve suffered at times from that kind of doubt, and maybe some of you have as well. There’s no clear dividing line between wise doubt and addictive doubt, but we can become more sensitive to which is which.

What Is Faith?

By faith, people often mean belief, but that is not what I mean. As I see it, belief is the opposite of true spirituality. Belief is about ideas and ideology. It’s a kind of security blanket or what Marx called the opium of the people. It turns easily into fundamentalism and the worst aspects of religion. Faith is something else entirely.

I would say that faith is a trust in what we know deeply and nonconceptually, a trust that grows out of direct experiencing, not out of belief. But this vast openness to which I’m pointing can never be grasped or pinned down and proven scientifically. And sometimes, although it is never really absent, we can seem to lose touch with it. So it can easily be subject to doubt, very often the addictive kind of doubt that holds us back.

David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic monk, describes faith in this way:

Faith is radical trust—trust in life and trust in God… Going forward in faith is not a train ride [where we just need to board, and then it will bring us to our destination]; it’s more like walking on water.

By God, he doesn’t mean some old guy up in the sky. Brother David speaks of God as “Great Mystery” or “Ultimate Reality” and as “the innermost depth of ourselves.”

And what does he mean by walking on water? I don’t think he’s speaking of literally walking on water. I think he’s pointing to something about the spirit of a story about Jesus, something I wrote about in my book Death: The End of Self-Improvement. The passage below from that book describes something that happened when I had cancer back in 2017 and was in the hospital after having surgery. I was going to begin radiation and chemotherapy very soon, and the radiation had been described to me as very painful. I was frightened. This is what I wrote:

One of the nurses who attended me was born in the Philippines, and one afternoon we had a long conversation about many things. I told her I feared the pain that would come with the radiation. She told me the way through pain is to keep your focus on Jesus. “That’s where Peter went wrong,” she told me, “on the sea, when he was walking on the water, he took his eyes off Jesus and then he began to sink. You have to keep your attention on Jesus.” I remembered that in the story, Peter had been distracted by the ferocity of the wind and had become afraid and filled with doubt and had lost faith. In my mind, I silently translated “Jesus” into my own language and understanding as Presence, Awareness, Here-Now, God—and perhaps “the wind” is the ever-changing play of thoughts, emotions, circumstances, and also what a friend of mine calls the “doubt app”—that doubting mind that feels separate from life and therefore endangered, the mind that loses faith—not faith in some external thing or some belief system (some golden chain), but faith in what is actually trustworthy—that open, spacious unconditioned aware presence Here-Now. And so I told her I agreed, that was the key, staying focused on Jesus, although not always easy. She nodded. “Not always easy, but that is the way.”

— from Death: The End of Self-Improvement

---

That Which Is Truly Trustworthy and Beyond Doubt:

This video is a conversation with my very dear friend John Butler, a mystic and former organic farmer from the UK who speaks with beautiful simplicity, often using his hands and simple gestures to illustrate what he’s saying in ways that really bring it home:

What draws me to John is the deep listening presence and spaciousness that he embodies so fully. Meditation has been at the heart of his long spiritual journey, and the meditation he practices and offers is about rising above duality and worldly concerns and dissolving or opening into that vast invisible presence that he calls Spirit: silence, stillness, space, presence, vast openness, freedom — it is to this that he points. When John speaks of prayer, he means this kind of silent meditation, to which he devotes himself twice a day.

He speaks of meditation and prayer as lifelong spiritual work, and even after all these years, he calls himself a beginner, not an expert. I love his humility, his joy and delight, his love of the simple things in life that are here right now: the sounds of the wind, the trees, the grasses, the birds, the listening silence, the all-pervasive Spirit.

As for social reform and changing the world, one of the key insights that has guided John's life has been, "To make whole, be whole." On the level of personhood and thinking, in the world of duality, humans will always have disagreements and conflicts, and each of us will see things differently. But in unbound, formless presence (or Spirit), there is no division, only wholeness, only One. That wholeness is unconditional love. And as John sees it, consciously abiding in Spirit and wholeness is the greatest gift we can offer the world. He says we have a choice in every moment—bondage or freedom.

John speaks from wordless presence, from the heart, not from the head or from mental ideas. He points you to that silent, still presence, the jewel beyond all price, available to everyone, but often undiscovered. John is the real deal. I can’t recommend him highly enough. He is currently “mystic in residence” at Broughton Sanctuary in the UK, which is where this conversation took place.

---

My books:

DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement

NOTHING TO GRASP

PAINTING THE SIDEWALK WITH WATER: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality

AWAKE IN THE HEARTLAND: The Ecstasy of What Is

BARE-BONES MEDITATION: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

---

Love to all…