A Question of Faith

A probing exploration of the movements of faith in our practice. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always placing our faith somewhere. What do we have faith in? What shapes our sense of limitation or possibility? And how do faith and confidence deepen?

The theme that I'd like to explore a little bit this evening is faith, the movements of faith, and partly wanting to approach it from the point of view of questioning faith, questioning our faith. So really asking some questions, probing into that a little bit. Perhaps one of the functions of meditation is to give us the clarity, the strength, and the energy to ask difficult questions. So perhaps that's one of the functions of meditation, to give us that clarity, strength, energy to ask difficult questions of ourselves and of life, of our lives. And I don't feel, most of the time, that the point of a Dharma talk is necessarily to always just affirm what we already know, what we already believe, what we already think -- a cosy, comfortable feeling -- but actually also to challenge a little bit. And in a way, the Dharma wouldn't be worth that much if it didn't really stretch us and stretch our consciousness. If the Dharma didn't stretch us, it wouldn't really be worth much.

So when we reflect a little bit in our lives on faith and what that means and its place in our life, can realize that it actually touches, this question of faith touches on every aspect of our life, every aspect of our life. Faith plays into that, has an effect there. Certainly every aspect of our practice. And in a way, the question of faith has to do with our fundamental orientations in life, the fundamental ways we are orienting, to what in life. Fundamental ways we orient to experience. Certainly we can see that we're a lot more conscious of faith or its absence when there's a lot of suffering. There seems to be a relationship there. When there's real struggle or difficulty, the faith issue is very alive for us. But I think even when the suffering isn't so strong, we are, as human beings, in a way immersed in the human predicament. We are immersed in the human condition. And so we find ourselves -- not out of our choice -- in life. We're born at a certain time; we didn't ask to be born in this period of history. We didn't ask to be born in our particular family. Didn't ask to be born with a body manifesting like this or in a certain country.

And yet, here we are in life. Here we are. And the response can be, just to the fact of our existence, of amazement, or maybe it's a response of mild irritability at the fact. But here we are, and it's the sort of existential -- we're plonked down here, and there can be, actually is, I think, underrunning it, an existential unknowing. Could say an existential angst, even. I came across a newspaper article that actually just expresses some of this, in really a very ordinary way. It's talking about something very, very ordinary. It's actually an article about belief, in this case in God:

I still recall the exact times and places when the Big Questions [capital B, capital Q] declared themselves to my childish consciousness. The first arrived when I was in short trousers and knew even less than I know today.

I had been playing with some friends on a disused aerodrome near my home in Cardiff. We used the abandoned carcasses of old aircraft to attack the squadrons of imaginary German bombers droning above us in the darkening sky. When we had wiped them out, my friends went home for tea. I hung around. It was one of those days when my mother, a hairdresser who worked from home, was giving a perm to a neighbour, and I hated the stench of the chemicals.

By now it was dark. The glory of the night sky had yet to be lost to light pollution, and on cloudless nights the stars went on for ever. That was what troubled me. How could they go on for ever? And if the universe was everything, what was it all in? And how could it be in anything because that would have to be in something else and ... and ... and so on. And what was there before any of it existed? And how did it all come into existence? And finally -- the really, really Big Question -- why?

The other Big Question came to me at about the same age. I was on a bus returning from a week's holiday in Aberystwyth. I hated buses. I was always sick on them. It was while I was hanging over the platform at the back that I discovered mortality. For the first time in my short life, I realised that one day I would die.

Once again, the question was: why? What was the point of being born if all there was to look forward to was dying? For the length of that ghastly journey and into the next day, everything seemed completely and utterly pointless. Then the normal service of childhood was resumed and it went away. But it came back. Questions like that always do.

It took me a few more years to grasp that rather a lot of people were worrying about their own versions of the Big Questions and had been for quite a long time.^[1]

So it goes on. Actually it's a very ordinary kind of reflection from childhood. What happens to those kind of questions in our life? I think we can all recognize that kind of wondering. Is it that the years go by and they become a bit dulled? Is that what goes on for us? Or do they only come up when there's suffering prominent? Or, and I'll go into this later, are the questions transformed? Are the questions transformed?

There is always a response of faith to both just the human predicament, and our personal suffering. It may not be obvious to us, but there is always some kind of faith response to what's going on in our life, or just the fact of our life. It may not feel like that, but there's always something that we're putting our faith in. This is what I'm very interested in tonight. There's always something we're putting our faith in -- as a response to suffering, as a response to just being alive and being human.

Now, when most people hear the word 'faith,' they would probably immediately think of faith in a God or a benevolent God or in Christ, or in many of the Buddhist traditions, in a bodhisattva or bodhisattvas, beings who their benevolence, their love, their compassion, their energy permeates the universe and is available as something to call on. This is very common in some Buddhist traditions. And I'm certainly not going to knock that at all, at all, and having met many people in my life who [were] very much into that approach in different religious traditions, and seen the beautiful fruit that can come out of it. That's really the question: what's coming out, if there is that kind of faith and that belief, what's coming out of it? Is it something beautiful or not?

A friend who lives in Holland was telling me about this order of nuns in the -- I think it's the south of Holland. If I remember the name, it's the Order of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Prayer, something like that. And what they have, they have a convent there, and they take it in turns. One nun will come into the chapel area near the altar and pray, pray for the world, praying for the well-being of the world. And she does her hour or whatever it is and then is relieved, like a relay. The next nun comes. My friend was there -- you can sort of just be in the church with them. Some of these nuns are 90, 99, hobbling in and devoting themselves. That's all they do. They just take it in turns so that all the time someone is praying, praying for us, in a way. She said, my friend said, how beautifully reassuring that was when she was on retreat, and just to feel like someone somewhere is praying for me, or giving mettā to me.

What's coming out of that kind of faith? And this really is not what I want to go into tonight, but if one does have that kind of faith in God, etc., if you're familiar with the writing of St John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart, one can go on a journey with that, and the understanding in the heart of what that means to have faith in God, or what God might mean, begins to be transformed, if one's really approaching it with a lot of integrity, and with a fullness of heart. The meaning becomes transformed over time. As I said, that's a whole other subject.

What we might ask, whether we believe in a God or not, we might ask ourselves: what's my God? What is my God? Meaning, what do we put faith in? What am I putting faith in in my life? And not even what I think I'm putting faith in, or what I kind of see myself as putting faith in, but really paying attention, actually what do the choices that I make in life, what do they imply about where my faith is? So this is not an easy question at all. Not pretending it is. And this is something I think for all of us, and very much including myself, to ask in an ongoing way in my life. What am I putting my faith in? What's my God, really?

So big choices, or seemingly big choices. Difficult questions. What am I doing with my money? What am I investing my money in? Where is it going? What does that say about what my faith is, what I have faith in? Not easy questions. The little moments, little choices -- something happens; a little inconvenience, something breaks. What do I have faith in? Has money become a kind of God? No one would say, "Money is my God," but on another level, when we're looking. Or the security that it seems money can bring. Is that what I've put my faith in? Has that become a kind of God? House, home, relationship. None of these are easy things to address for any of us. And you know, in this culture, there's such a hype around the promise of romantic love. So many Hollywood and Bollywood -- churning out endless movies about that promise. How many people are living waiting for that or hoping for that, as if it's going to deliver something? And it can seem to deliver something. It does deliver, to a certain extent, of course. But we can see this. How much is that operating in life? What do I have faith in at a very deep level, at a fundamental level, at an almost cellular level?

You can see sometimes it can be very hard for all of us to find energy to practise or to dedicate to practice. And then there's the promise of romantic love, and suddenly we've got all this energy. Because it seems like it's going to deliver something, very significant happiness. And not for a minute to knock the beauty of that in life and the loveliness of that. Asking a very probing question here. I have another friend, and she is not divorced from her husband but separated for a while. They're very consciously going through this process of deciding whether they want to get back together, or be together, or explore living together, or what exactly it is. And this process of trying to figure it out has been lasting, I think, two or three years now. Very conscious way and very actually loving way. She was on retreat a little while ago, and she was just beginning to get a sense, "Is it really that significant whether we're together or not? Is it really that significant?"

Sometimes we may feel I don't have faith in love or romantic love, but there's a lack of faith, there's a lack of faith in being able to be alone. That's what I'm saying -- this question of faith, it finds its way into every aspect of our life, every aspect of our being. So our choices, big and little, reveal our faith, reveal what we have faith in. What are we investing in? Our money, our time, our energy. That reveals our faith. In case any of this is sounding very negative, just to really acknowledge how much faith it takes for anyone to actually be here. Just coming on retreat for a week, two weeks, two months. Some people in this hall are here for a year, or nine months or whatever. How much of a statement of faith. Sometimes we need to acknowledge where we have faith. I'm not just wanting to criticize at all. And just in the schedule of a retreat, to sit and to walk, to sit and to walk, and all of that is actually an expression of faith, and we need to acknowledge and realize that.

But this question. It's one of the first questions I want to draw out tonight. What do I put my faith in? So it's a question, as I said, we all need to ask ourselves, all of us. What am I putting my faith in? One of the shifts, one of the really significant shifts that can happen, does happen in practice, as practice goes on -- I'm not quite sure even how to even put it into words, but it's a blossoming faith, an emerging faith, in what you might call purity of heart, or goodness of heart. And I know those phrases -- I have a friend who's actually a teacher now, and she says how nauseating she found those phrases for years. It really does push some people's buttons the wrong way. What I mean is faith in the beautiful qualities of heart that we can nurture, that we can cultivate. So whatever phrase works for you.

This is a very, very significant shift in practice. There's, I think, a beautiful passage from Viktor Frankl, some of you may know. It's quite well-known. Viktor Frankl was I think Czech, from Czechoslovakia, and he was imprisoned in Auschwitz in the Second World War. He survived, and he reflected very deeply on his experience, and what was helpful and what was not there, and wrote a very lovely book called Man's Search for Meaning, which is a very recommended read. There's a passage here, and he says:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember those who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.^[2]

Very powerful passage. And he's coining it as an expression of freedom, freedom to choose, but it's also, I feel, what that's expressing, a person making that kind of choice in those horrific -- absolutely can't, hard to imagine more horrific circumstances -- it's actually a statement of faith as well. What is it expressing a faith in? Love, selflessness, care, the deeper priority of that over anything else, even hunger, even survival. So it's really -- sometimes faith gets expressed in ways that we don't actually conceive of it as faith.

I was reading also recently about a Cambodian woman who's now a Buddhist nun. She was living in Cambodia in the seventies just before the Khmer Rouge came to power, and in all the chaos, she managed to escape, but her husband stayed behind and died, was killed. For a long time she didn't even know what happened to him. All this turmoil, and a lot -- I mean, immense pain, from everything that happened to the country and to her personal life. I was reading the story of her journey with that pain and the healing of that pain, and it was very much a sort of two steps forward, one step back. There was a passage I came across. I'll just read it to you, actually. She had just been asked -- it was sort of quite far into her journey, so she'd already done quite a lot of work. Then she was asked to go and speak at some reconciliation conference in Sri Lanka, something different. She said:

Until then, I had known my Buddhist roots, but not been so connected to them. This was the moment my faith came back to me. We went to Kandy, and they took us inside the Temple of the Tooth. I made a vow in front of Lord Buddha. "Lord Buddha, your daughter's here. Please let her know that you are here." And the minute I said that, I got goosebumps, and pīti [rapture] started. I cried, "Lord Buddha, come now, and I will be your ambassador. Please empty for me everything that stands for bad things, bad thoughts, ill-will, anything. Please take it out and substitute it with the Dhamma."

Another little instance I read also the other day about a young nurse in a clinic for very premature babies. I can't remember where it was; somewhere in America. And she said sometimes they would get really, really premature babies, tiny, and really unsure if they were going to make it, if they were going to survive. When they would get the baby like that in this sort of intensive care unit for premature babies, this young nurse, who was not religious in any way, would get on the phone and call her old Catholic grandmother, very traditional Catholic grandmother, and just tell her, you know, "We've got another one." [laughs] And the Catholic grandmother would light a candle on her kitchen table and pray for the baby.

We may hear both this Cambodian nun's story and this other story, and it's like, well, it just sounds like nonsense to many of us. It just sounds like nonsense. In this tradition, certainly, we don't really relate that much on that kind of level. But the question: what is being nourished here? What is being nourished in those two cases? What is being aligned with? What energies, what qualities is there an alignment with? What intentions are being nourished and empowered? It's not a question, as far as I'm seeing it, it's not a question of is that nonsense or superstitious or whatever. What's being nourished? What's being fed?

So a very significant point, if you like, in practice, is the understanding that we can actually cultivate what's beautiful. We can learn to cultivate that. It's very, very significant. Sometimes on retreat or in our spiritual life, it's very tempting, we can get sucked into only looking at the negative, and what we're trying to let go of, and what we're in the process of trying to let go of. If that's the predominant way of viewing our practice -- the negative, what I'm wanting to get rid of -- fear and disorientation are very shortly on the heels of that, very shortly on the heels. And I wonder if faith actually implies a sense of direction. Does faith imply a sense of direction? It's very difficult to be on retreat, even for a short amount of time, but certainly for a long amount of time, it's very difficult to be on retreat without a sense of direction. Makes it very difficult.

So if we are -- and this is very understandable; we can find ourselves just with so much of a sense of burden from the past, and difficulty from the past, and accumulated stuff that seems to inhibit us and make our life painful. We can find ourselves just involved in looking at practice as letting go of what's negative from the past. Or wanting to dismantle the painful childhood conditioning. And it can become the whole of our practice, understandably. But if there is that attitude and that way of seeing practice, then the sense of fear of the unknown will come. Sooner or later, it will come. We're moving out of that, we're dismantling that, and "Whoa, where are we going? I'm lost." A little bit as if one has been on a ship that is sinking at sea, in flames, and has got into a lifeboat, and is moving away, rowing away from this burning wreck. You can see it sinking. That's the old stuff, the negative stuff that one's letting go of. And one's looking at that transfixed. All the old structures are sinking, are disappearing. We're actually looking that way, at the old and the crumbling of the old, and not in this sense of direction of where we're going, in terms of what's beautiful that's being cultivated.

This is quite common. But we will become transfixed by that and then there will be this disorientation of fear of the unknown. Or again, and this is very common in the breadth of what practice is, of what practice can be for us, a person finds themself reconnecting, discovering, reconnecting with beautiful or very early aspects of one's being, from childhood or early in one's life, and can be with that a lot of pain, a lot of old memories or hurt. This is a part of what the breadth of practice can be. And again, it can be very easy to get sucked into what's painful there, and the sense of this young part being so needy, needy for love and needy for this and that, and a sense of almost like, "Ugh." Can we look at the positive, and recognize, acknowledge the beauty of what's emerging? That something that has been covered is emerging, something beautiful. Even the neediness for love is something beautiful. The openness, the life there that's emerging. And conceive in terms of the positive, of the beautiful, of what we are moving towards, and not just of the negative that we're dismantling.

So this is actually a huge shift. It's a really major shift to realize that we can really cultivate what's beautiful. And I think it's a real rare maturity in practice that one actually really has faith in that. Because it seems, relative to money in the bank or investment, or relative to the solidity of the walls of our house or whatever it is, beautiful qualities of heart can seem so insubstantial, so naïve to have faith in them. Want something [knocks on something] really solid that I can bank on. And it's a real maturity in practice to know in one's heart: that's where the investment is. That's the best investment portfolio. And it's not naïve at all. It really is a mature practice that sees that, understands it, and lives from it. It's not a sudden shift, but it's one of the really significant shifts that can happen in practice. This is our treasure, what we can cultivate of beauty in the heart.

Sometimes in the course of our life, in the course of our practice, we feel or we sense moments of faith, moments of faith that feel deep, and oftentimes it is in an environment of stillness and silence, possibly on retreat or whatever. Those moments are really important. Not to gloss over them or steamroll through them, but to actually stop then and really make sure one sits in that faith, in that feeling of faith, in aligning oneself with that faith, however one is conceiving it. Very, very important, so that that alignment can kind of take root in the being. Really, really significant.

So it might be we have a sense of direction, direction towards the beautiful, towards truth, towards freedom -- however we would put it in words. But we feel the being literally coming into alignment and taking root in that alignment in the being, usually in a very quiet way, just in the stillness, and letting the stillness and the silence do its work on the being, taking advantage of that. We align with what's deeply important to us, what's most important to us.

In a way, we can have a kind of sense of devotion to that direction, to the sense of that direction, and for some this is a real heart movement, the movement of devotion. That would be a whole other talk as well. But for others, the devotion to a sense of direction, to what they have faith in, is much more cognitive. And that's fine -- not to make too much of a dichotomy here or a duality. It's fine, whatever it is that it feels like the being is coming into alignment.

Sometimes we have a sense of direction, of what's most important to us in this life, and what we want to devote ourselves to, devote our lives to at the deepest level. But it may not be that the practical implications of that are yet clear. We know that service is important, we know that love is important, for example, but I don't know exactly what I'm going to do. Or we know that meditation and depth of meditation is really important; don't know exactly where I'm going to go or how I'm going to figure that out. That's okay. The thing I want to say is it's this sense of alignment with something, that we really want that to go deep. From that alignment, it's like a stake going into the ground, solid, steady, secure -- from that, the practicalities will work themselves out. If we get too involved in figuring out the practicalities, and this pole in the ground is not secure, well, some winds of circumstance come and over it topples. To really have that sense of what's important to us, and the faith in that, and the devotion to that, really aligned with. As I say, however we conceive of that -- love, goodness, truth, freedom, freedom from suffering, whatever it is.

I mentioned at the beginning just briefly this relationship that can be very clear between the presence of suffering and the issue of faith. There's a real link there. The Buddha pointed out -- and this is something that's quite easy for us to check in our own experience -- that when there's suffering, it can lead in one of two directions. It can be that we turn around and look at that suffering and actually that it brings faith, or that faith is stimulated, and we begin practising. So suffering can lead to faith. Or suffering can lead to confusion. It's very easy to see that. Suffering, the mind gets agitated, the choices get agitated, there's more confusion. Out of that confusion we make unwise choices or reactions, and more suffering comes. The Buddha's saying from suffering can actually come faith or more suffering.

So what is our response to suffering? What's our response to suffering? And you know, it's just a fact that many people would never even consider taking up meditation. People have told me, "I wouldn't want to open that can of worms." There's this sense of, "Well, there's obviously a bunch of stuff in here that's best left well alone." Would never come to a place like this or anywhere near anything like this. Or a sense that -- actually the underlying sense is a kind of nihilism: "Life is meaningless, and life won't stand up to my scrutiny." There isn't a faith in the possibility of inquiry, investigation. This is really interesting. Some people just have a sense that I better not probe too deeply because I pretty much know what's going to be there, and it ain't going to be pretty.

This question, it's interesting. With suffering, where do we run to when there's suffering? Again, this is not an easy question. Where do we run to? I remember periods many years ago -- I mean, it's a complicated story, but -- when a lot of suffering, and working with someone, an authority figure, and I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong in their eyes, in this authority figure. There would be a lot of fear in the relationship. And instead of kind of understanding how the whole thing was working, the mind just went to superstition. I was trying to remember before the talk some examples, but I'm sure they're -- it was very long ago, and they're probably so embarrassing that I've blocked the whole thing from my memory. But instead of inquiry, the mind goes to superstition. We can see this in our life. What are we believing in some kind of magical thinking, instead of actually inquiring into suffering?

So sometimes with suffering and what happens, the difficulties that come in life, sometimes we actually find a faith that we can't really understand where it came from. It could be that -- actually it is the case that forms break in our life. Things fall apart in all kinds of ways. They break. I remember thirteen, fourteen years ago, I was a jazz musician and living in America. I had a band, and I loved this band. They played my music. I wrote the music and I played in it. I loved it. It was very much at the centre of my life. And the band fell apart at a certain point, and it wasn't a very nice falling apart. It really shook me. For about a year after that, I stopped playing music. I stopped writing and I stopped playing. And it was very interesting to see, being in that stretch of time -- which I didn't know how long it was going to last at the time -- without this identity of being a musician. Just being in the 'not being anyone.' At the time, I didn't really realize what was going on, but there was a kind of trust in not having to be anybody. Had a lot of time for reflection and just stillness, and letting go of the need to be someone, and having faith in not needing to be anyone. I couldn't formulate it at the time. Actually, I went back to music, and it was a very different relationship then in terms of the identity. But I didn't understand that expression of faith at the time.

I also remember many, almost twenty years ago, I was a very young, very gung-ho meditator, and had been meditating a few years, and ... this is a very long story, which I won't go into. There was all kinds of very odd stuff going on in my practice, really off the wall. I was on retreat at a centre in America, and very difficult stuff, and I was just trying to practise with it, and just trying to practise with it, and trying to practise with it. I had a kind of faith in the practice. And then the teacher said to me, "You should stop. You should stop. This is really too much now." And I was so shaken by this. The thought was -- I think I was 22 -- "How am I going to get enlightened if I don't meditate?" Really shook me up. But then there was, gradually after that, a kind of faith that I didn't even realize at the time was a faith, that somehow in the movement of all that and what I explored not meditating was somehow all part of the same movement. I couldn't even see that it was the same faith.

Sometimes, as I say, forms break. Sometimes the teacher disappoints. I've had, in my life, actually the two teachers who were most formative for me over the 20-whatever years it is, very disappointing. Something happened, this happened or that happened, or gradually, very disappointing. What happens then? Forms break. This is the nature of forms. Even meditative, contemplative, spiritual forms. Things break. What happens then? Again, this is a whole other subject, but what's the relationship with a teacher and the faith with that? Sometimes people are looking to the teacher and kind of scrutinizing their aura and what's the vibe there. For a lot of people that has its place and they're feeling it out. But it has to be about our practice, about the teaching and not the teacher. About the teaching and not the teacher. And about our practice, not about what we think about some vibe, or how we feel about some vibe, because that is very subjective.

It's interesting: the traditions that place a lot of emphasis on the kind of presence or aura of the teacher often correspondingly place less emphasis on the need for individual practice. Interesting. And there can and there does come a point in practice when it doesn't matter what the teacher does or how they disappoint or what they look like or anything at all, because the practice has developed to a certain point where one just has faith in that and one knows for sure. One knows for sure and it's not about what the teacher did or didn't do, or what they looked like or whatever.

So sometimes we also discover in ourselves, in the course of our lives and our practice, a lack of faith that's also hard to understand. We see sometimes, we discover these kind of core beliefs. I think that's a phrase borrowed from psychology; I'm not sure. "I'll always be alone." "I'm not good enough." "There isn't any real love for me." "There isn't any real love in the world, anyway." "No one understands me." Or sometimes they take the form that we don't even articulate them to ourselves, they're that sort of under the ground. So something like, "Deep happiness, or real freedom, real peace, is not really possible for me. Don't think it's possible." We might not even articulate something like that to ourselves.

Someone said to me the other day, "I don't believe we ever really get over our childhood wounds." This is quite a common belief, that once it's there you're kind of scarred and you don't really heal that. You can work on it, but you don't really get beyond it. So even the word 'core beliefs' implies something deep, and these kind of things can feel very deep. They can feel very deep. But actually they're not -- you know, sometimes they are, but sometimes they're actually not as deep as they feel. Part of cultivating the beautiful, what I talked about before, part of that is that slowly and gradually, over time, with the cultivation of the beautiful, we taste happiness with that. We taste a different sense of being, of joy, of peace, of loveliness, of openness. It comes with the cultivating of the beautiful. That joy, that peace, that loveliness begins to dissolve and transform many of these core beliefs. Very, very significant. Of course, investigating them, opening to them, inquiring into them, bringing compassion to them. Of course. Of course talking with friends and those we trust and exploring together, getting some feedback. Of course all that.

So the response to suffering. What was the Buddha's response to suffering? What was the Buddha's response to suffering? So we could, as from the newspaper article, etc., we could ask all kinds of questions in response to our human predicament, in response to our suffering. Many of those questions are unanswerable, or the answers are not verifiable. Not much point asking the questions. There was a TV interviewer that interviewed Krishnamurti, I think shortly before he died. And I think it was the final question, he said to him, "One final question. What is the meaning of life?" [laughter] And Krishnamurti just about bit the guy's head off, as he could do sometimes. "Meaning? What do you mean, meaning? Do you really think that the mind with its thought and its pettiness and its smallness can put the magnificence, the vastness of life in a little box, label it with a meaning? Do you really think that's possible?" I don't know what the interviewer's response was, but.

So some questions are not answerable. It's not worth asking. But the question of what gives rise to suffering, how suffering comes about, and how it can be dissolved, that is answerable. That is answerable. And it's not an abstract question. It's a very real, practical question. It's not a theoretical question. It's not a metaphysical question. It's a real, practical, compassionate question. This is why the Buddha framed his teaching in the Four Noble Truths: okay, there's suffering. Why is there suffering? How is it coming about? There can be freedom from that suffering. How does that come about? The Four Noble Truths are actually a formulation of a questioning. One of my teachers, Ajaan Geoff, calls this path a path of questions, a path of questions. That's what the Four Noble Truths are. That's the second question I want to draw out for us all. The first one, what am I putting my faith in? The second one, am I asking the right questions of life?

So when we hear the Four Noble Truths, there's suffering, there's a cause for suffering, there's freedom from suffering, and there's a way to it -- rarely does that have a kind of pull on the heartstrings. It sounds very dry and very sort of cut and dried. Actually it's only dry from the outside. Once we dive into these questions and make them our own, real juice there, real water there for the heart. So am I asking the right questions in life?

In Dharma terms, faith does not mean faith in a God, ultimately speaking. That does actually have its place. But ultimately speaking, it does not mean faith in a God. Does not mean faith in the benevolence of the universe, ultimately speaking. Does not mean faith that there's a meaning to it all. It's not faith in a creator. It's not faith that there's guidance available from higher beings or angels. But it's faith in the reality of possibility. It's faith in the reality of possibility. That's what Dharma faith means. This is the third question that I want to draw out: what do I believe is really possible for me? What do I really, really, truly, in my heart of hearts, what do I really believe is possible for me in this life?

Understanding is actually part of that faith; it's an important part of faith. This is not kind of a faith that does away with the understanding of the path, and how it works, and the Four Noble Truths and all that. Faith, actually, I think involves our whole being. It involves our understanding. It involves our will, because what are we doing with our faith? And it involves our heart. Our whole being. Faith is involved in the whole being. To reiterate what I said right in the early talk, remember, faith is finding its way, like tributaries of a river, like blood vessels, like capillaries -- it finds its way into every choice of our life.

Just a final thing. Many of you know the story of the Buddha growing up in the palace, etc., and venturing out from the palace, encountering what's called the four heavenly messengers. If I remember ...

Yogi: Ageing.

Rob: Ageing! [laughter] First one's ageing. Second one is sickness. He sees an ageing person, a sick person, a dead person. And finally a contemplative, someone who has devoted themselves to asking deeply in life. And as the story goes, as he recalls it, he went back to the palace and he asked himself this question. I think it's an extremely significant question, a very powerful question. I was going to say "thank God" that he asked it, but thank ... we're very thankful that he asked it. "Why should I who am subject to ageing, sickness, and death, seek refuge in that which is also subject to ageing, sickness, and death? Doesn't make any sense." Here he had a great life, with his father giving him all kinds of stuff, and a beautiful wife, all that could be given to him, but it was all subject to ageing, sickness, and death. He said, "Why should I seek refuge in that which is subject to ageing, sickness, and death?"

And he had faith, the seed of faith, that it was possible to find something deathless. I'm again touching on what we ended talking the other day, if some of you were here, talking about the body. He had a seed of faith in the possibility of discovering the Deathless, despite what his friends and family were saying -- "Come on, you've got it really good. Hedge your bets. Go with where it's good. There isn't really a deathless. It's pretty pointless to go looking for it. It's just going to be a struggle, a hassle."

How much faith do we have in this path? How much faith? Again, I don't think these are easy questions. I don't think they're easy at all. In a way, I mean it to stir us up a little bit. How much faith do we have in the possibilities for ourselves, real, genuine possibilities for ourselves and this life, really? And it can be that we're, you know, on retreat or in our lives, and there's a lot of unhappiness, and there's a lot of struggle, and it seems not only that's a frequent guest, but it seems as if unhappiness and difficulty have sort of moved in for good. But that doesn't mean -- the presence of a feeling of unhappiness does not imply that we do not have the potential for deep happiness and deep freedom, just because we feel unhappy now. It doesn't rule anyone out based on that feeling.

We all have this potential for freedom, potential for realization, potential for deep peace and happiness. How far do we have faith that we can go? That's a way of putting it. How far do we have faith that we can go? How far do we dare to go? How far do we dare to go on this path? And again, just to really acknowledge: just being on retreat is already a statement of faith. Just doing the practice is a statement of faith. These questions, they're difficult, I know, but the decades can go by, they do go by. The decades can slip by and we don't ask ourselves these questions. How far do I think I can go? How far do I have faith I can go? How far do I dare to go? We get to 40, we get to 50, we get to 60, 70, etc. The decades just slip by.

So sometimes -- and I find myself doing it as well -- we talk about practice very much in terms of opening to life and being with life and touching life deeply. All of that's very beautiful and very much a part of practice, part of what practice is. But it's also not going -- in a way, it's not giving the fullness of what practice is, it's not giving the sense of something completely radical, completely other, completely beyond all that, beyond our sense of what life is. Because we can touch life, and we can open to it, but that leaves a sense of me here, and you there, and this room, and this carpet, and this space, and this time, and all of that. And the Dharma, actually, the promise is something way beyond that, much more radical.

I was struck by two things very strongly recently, because they sort of happened at the same time, and they came together. One was a book I was reading, a little bit about the history of India at the time of the Buddha. And it made the point that several hundred years before the Buddha, not that long, the Upanishads came about -- beautiful Hindu spiritual texts. And from that time in India, the belief took root in the culture so much that it was taken for granted that it's possible for a human being to train this, the heart and the mind, to train the heart and the mind to be able to see so deeply into life that they know the ultimate truth of things and they perceive the ultimate truth of things. From that time in India, probably changing now, the way India is changing, but it's a taken for granted thing. Now, many people won't make that choice to do that, but it's still taken for granted that it's a possibility.

In the West, we've actually evolved in a very different way, for different reasons and the priesthood and the advent of science. I was struck, discussing with some friends, and we were talking about some very deep aspect of the Dharma, time not being that ultimately real, and several people were saying, "If I want to understand this, it's not the Dharma I go to. It's science I go to." There's a sense of, "I don't really believe that this is trainable, to see that deeply, to see ultimate truth." It really struck me, because other people have complete faith right from the beginning that it's possible.

Sometimes I feel if we don't point to this radical other -- you know, we can set it up and it can become a kind of goal and a thing to achieve, but sometimes if we shy away from talking in terms of goals and achievements, just a question: are we maybe losing something by doing that? We may be losing something by not talking in terms of goals and what it is that we can achieve. Of course there's a place for just not going near goals and the sense of achievement. But are we also losing something? So am I closing the door on something? Am I closing the door?

I think -- I mean, I don't know how many people there are here tonight, or how many people there are even in the building tonight, but sometimes I have the feeling that if we went around and asked everyone exactly what it is that they want from practice or what they're hoping for, we would actually get -- whatever it is -- forty-five or fifty different answers. And of course that's all valid. I think the point that I want to say is more, do we know why we're making certain choices? Is it fully conscious and fully explored? What we choose is up to us, but do we know why?

Very finally. I'm almost through. One of the things, going back again to this cultivation, one of the things is that gradually, not linearly, but gradually over time we do begin to taste what is lovely. By virtue of the fact that we're building what's lovely in the heart, we're cultivating what's lovely, we begin to taste what's lovely or what's joyful, and that gives a faith. Slowly our faith then builds, and it's built based on experience, because we're tasting something and we think, "Maybe some more is possible. The Buddha said this. Maybe some more is possible." It's a very experience-based faith, coming from moving into more loveliness through the cultivation.

Going back again to the Four Noble Truths, it can sound so dry, but in a way, just making that one's own, making it personal, discovering the juice in there, the depth in there, the beauty in there, hanging on to the Four Noble Truths as a way of orienting, just doing that, we're guaranteed to discover an experience-based faith, guaranteed. And we will see the suffering go out from experience more and more, go out from our lives more. And if we just hang on to the Four Noble Truths, we can go so far that we do taste something deathless. It's not unreal. It's not abstract. We do taste something deathless. We do see the emptiness of things. There can come a point when faith becomes unshakeable. It's the end of doubt. The end of doubt. Absolutely unshakeable faith. Nothing that happens can shake it. And it's not the end of the path; there's still plenty more work to do. But that point can come. And this is a very, very real possibility for us. Very different orientation, certainly to practice, but to our lives then. Unshakeable faith.

So this is what I really wanted to point to, this possibility, and also to take away some of the questions -- what am I putting my faith in, in my life, and in a moment? Am I asking the right questions in life? What do I believe is really possible for me?

Shall we sit together quietly for a few moments?