"Faith is taking the step, even when you don't see the whole staircase."

On Faith

The above quotation, by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., happens to be an extremely effective perspective through which we may learn to relax and perhaps enjoy, at times, the movement of experience. All action, or karma, may be seen to imply faith. What Dr. King said is deeply profound and yet simple--once a basic understanding of the way in which experience moves and the manner in which experience is generated.

Action as karma, according to the Buddha is intentional. Karma, action in the Buddha's and now our sense of the term, aims toward the future in the present. Action is always about something--as the phenomenologists say--i.e., it is intentional. Often, this future is unspoken and even unconscious--like walking down a flight of stairs. No matter whether the act is one of body, speech, or mind action is not possible without faith. The question now becomes, "What is faith?" Or, as Wittgenstein advised, let's determine how we are using the word faith. A discussion of faith is one of our exercises that aims toward the alleviation of suffering. Let's give this some thought to bring faith to life in our everyday, i.e., profound, experience. Let's look directly at experience and determine if making our reliance on faith a truism is helpful in our quest to minimize our suffering.

I just stated that faith is something to be relied on. Yes, indeed it is. At first glance, this sounds quite absurd. Isn’t faith the act of reliance itself? Recall that we rely on the staircase being there for the fulfillment of our intention to ascend or descend a staircase. More often than not, we simply act in the faith of the stairs’ presence, as we say, “unconsciously.” In short order, we may find that our definition of what is conscious and what is not calls for some revision. (Remember, from some of our prior blog entries, it’s all about the narratives.) Is our reliance, our faith, on or in the presence of the remaining stairs conscious or unconscious? What do you think? Often, as when we know that a staircase is in need of repair, we may be quite conscious of the stairs above or below us; it may imply danger to ascend or descend. But what about in more normal conditions? The remaining stairs in our movement forward--and this applies across the board to mostly all actions--are not necessarily brought to consciousness, or thematically known, as they may simply be there for us in a modality of faith-full knowledge or a consciousness that is faith itself. The wonderful Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said that this type of consciousness might be called “the consciousness I (we) count on." We simply count on the stairs being there for our next step. But is consciousness or awareness present? It would seem that I am pressed to say “Yes, definitely." If we somehow lost consciousness regarding the remaining stairs we would cease to move forward. Yet, we do not normally apply the word consciousness to this kind of knowing. We do not often use the word in the sense of it operating at a more or less subliminal level. However, I think we would not want to admit that we lack consciousness of the remaining stairs but we must expand our usage of the word. I doubt that we would wish to say that our ascent or descent does not involve consciousness. So, let us use consciousness in a more inclusive sense to help us to realize that consciousness is not exclusive to thinking, or if you like, conscious thought, thematic thinking, or even so-called representational thinking. Now, having said that, we must move to this expanded use of the word consciousness.

Experience, History, and Embodiment: Meaning and Impermanence

Experience, i.e., reality, may be viewed as an evanescent, sentient, breath-driven, felt, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of historically (karmically) conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses. This vectorial or intentional movement is synchronously paired with correlative responses that manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances perceived as either fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses or desires. Therefore, intentions and their reciprocally generated ephemeral circumstances form an experiential union wherein the drama of human life is played out in and as the process of living. In this sense of the word reality, it may be used to denote experience as the evanescent movement of a karmic (i.e. an historically sedimented) or intentionally constituted vector seeking the fulfillment of those intentions. When these intentions meet with obstruction, difficulty often arises as suffering and new intentions arise seeking to remedy the suffering--—and this is what we may refer to as conventional experience.

Often, the intentions are erroneously perceived as fulfilled and a movement of pleasurable feeling arises, more often not, sedimenting the drive to continue the feeling despite the evanescent or impermanent nature of these very feelings. This movement gives rise to further pleasure-seeking and difficulty-evading in a self-reinforcing and futile attempt to achieve a homeostasis of pleasure synonymous with the absence of difficulty—in a word, utopia. No such time nor place exists. Experience admits to no such possibility.

This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest far too quickly to be grasped by the reflective activity of a consciousness of, i.e., thought, and thus is all-too-often mistaken for an independently existing objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills my intention eliciting pleasure-feeling or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven. It is in the nature of intentions to be reductive meaning they cannot possibly anticipate all of the prevailing causes and conditions that will be brought to bear in the eliciting of circumstances that arise with respect to their execution. Unforeseen conditions, e.g., weather, traffic, resistance from other sentient beings, etc., may arise that obstruct fulfillment and if they don't obstruct those unforeseen conditions are largely left unmanifest.


This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest too quickly too be grasped by the reflective activity of a consciousness of and thus the intention-generated and reciprocally elicited situation s are all-too-often mistaken for an independently objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills “my” intention eliciting pleasure or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven thereby reifying conceptual constitutions into worlds seemingly independent and constituted from their own side. The sedimentation process or memory aids in this movement contextualizing all actions within the frameworks of pleasure-seeking and avoidance. And so it goes, on and on and on and...until.

If one takes language as in thought, speech, text, or bodily acts or more accurately languaging—i.e., narratives, stories of, by, or about self if taken as fundamentally referential, one is bound to suffer. This is simply the way things are. Not a great realization, but a significant one.

Self-natured, self-laden, or self-ish narratives, of whatever sort, also are carriers of feelings. These feelings arise from a very subtle level below, a topic too early in our examination to unpack, into full bloom in the esophagus, throat, and head. Narratives dictate the precise configurations of these feelings and, if narratives become habitualized, as they are inclined to do (another important topic to be addressed in due time) their associated feelings also become habitualized and form an isomorphic relationship with the narratives that produced them.

Now, it is very important to note that the beginning of this process has far too many causes and conditions to be analyzed in great detail. In fact, there is no perceivable beginning of this process of habitualized self, narrative, feeling (SNF) as it reaches far back into history where it has caused great suffering as well as great accomplishments. However, we are concerned, not with accomplishments driven by SNF, but with the alleviation of the suffering the movement of SNF often brings in its wake.

The SNF proliferation process, driven by beginningless intentions, i.e., desires, seeking satisfaction, and inevitably encountering obstacles to fulfillment in many instances will give rise to suffering unless--and wait for this--one surrenders to the indicative, the "what is." This surrender we will term acceptance-attention (AA). More to come...