"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.