Having been to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala and having seen the transplanted home of Tibetan Buddhism, I am awestruck by the sheer nerve it takes to give up one’s home in order to freely practice one’s religion. Certainly the Dalai Lama fled for his life as well. But the thousands who remain in Tibet and face China’s violent suppression, the hundreds of monks who joined the Dalai Lama, who daily pray, chant and survive with him, who rebuilt their temple, who take the traditional vows of monastic life to this farthest extreme—they live their faith and assumablly, the conviction of that faith gives them the strength to continue their resistance.
Faith like this is awesome (in its truest sense) and is terrifying. I wonder if the Dalai Lama ever asks himself if dharma is a joke, if his personal holiness, a miscalculation. I wonder if this much faith leaves that much space for self-doubt.
Perhaps that’s the point. Faith speaks to a part of ourselves that is beyond ego, that is bigger than our fears of smallness.
There is a difference between being an atheist (not believing in a deity) and lacking faith in the unseen. One is a rejection—the other still leaves room for some other reality, keeps the ego in check. I am not confident enough in my own sense experience (or even the collective experience of all people) to believe that all we see, hear, and know is all that is.
Not to diminish our physical reality—the world we know is considerable. On a sun-lit balcony in India, I see trees, birds, a dramatically mist-filled sky, mountains, children playing, and a beggar who just tired of his post and moved on for more shade. Just this world is enough to fill one’s time and concern.
So why look for anything else? For some, the search is a pursuit of safety and assurance. For some, it is the most reasonable answer.
There—right there, is what is. And this thing that is, that changes and lives and breathes and dies seems so tenuously supported by all that’s around it, that we tend to look for its true support. (The world of being, beneath this world of becoming.)
We know we are short-lived and want to know the greater sense of life, widely understood. When we fall away, it is better (more comfortable) to believe we fall into greater being, rather than nothingness.
This is something like Kierkegaard’s paradox—staring side-long into a description of reality that makes no sense (that cannot make sense to us in this world), looking below into nothingness, and daring to allow the unseen to save you from spiritual destruction.
But without faith, how do you dare throw yourself off a cliff into nothingness? You must have some inkling you’ll be caught to dare the leap.
Defined this way, faith seems to be the other side of spiritual suicide. It is a means of choosing a second life—one apart from one’s everyday physical existence. And the exercise of this—the creation and sustaining of one’s most personal, vital life—is a freedom that may be threatened, squeezed but must never relent, must never be allowed to perish, even at the hand of equally real state power. In such circumstances, it seems the alternative of faith is both the reason for the leap, and our survival of the leap, the impetus for fighting to preserve the right to freely bridge two worlds. It is a move that both requires and fosters great courage. In this, we can measure the magnitude of the great unseen—gods, being, what have you, along with the breadth of human conviction and the might of our desire for real freedom.
