Essay 15: Faith

Essay 15: Faith

Before I begin, I am immensely proud to say that this is my second-to-last essay for this book. Thank you so much for reading until this point. This was life-changing to write, and if the slightest percentage of that impact came across, then I’m the happiest person in the world. I am quite Jewish, and this essay will be molded by that, but don’t let the language stop you from appreciating what I am attempting to say. Wrestle with these words, use your discretion to find what is of value, and think on it deeply. This will not be an exhaustive or structured essay, but I will still do my best to get the main points across.

In Essay 1, I mentioned Contribution and growth as the needs we have inherent within us from birth, but we struggle to realize them until we mature. I can finally revisit it and do so quickly. Contribution is love, growth is reason. The self-othering experience of loving sacrifice is something our nature calls upon us to do, and that calling is contribution. The act of finding everything’s place in the pursuit of maximizing our wellbeing, happiness, and capacity to love is reason, and its calling is growth. It really is as simple as that. Keep this in the back of your mind, I’ll come back to it.

The belief structure tells us no less than two things about the nature of cognition. First, we have 0th-order beliefs; we must innately believe some ideas before our reason takes form. Second, beliefs themselves get organized because we innately seek the betterment of our lives through the maximization of our needs’ fulfillment. The first must be true; at some point in a structure with different “order” arguments, some arguments must have been made without an argument preceding them. This must mean that we have an essence that precedes experience, one ingrained in our being from the formation of our mind, that experience serves to only add to the complexity of. Do you remember what served as our initial answer to this riddle? Our needs. In exploring them and the various structures innate in our cognition from birth, we come to understand the basis of our belief structure and the process of belief formation itself. This is what I spent the majority of this book exploring; I will thus not reiterate the lessons and simply say that rereading the book with this lens could be a worthwhile practice.

Just as the first point dictates the floor of cognition, a limit of logical space, there is also a ceiling, our fallibility. We build the arguments of our beliefs on false premises and insufficient logic for any number of reasons. The primary of which, life is meant to be lived. It is not worthwhile to seek perfection in anything at the expense of other priorities. Perfection is a practice with diminishing returns. For every unit of energy we put into seeking perfection in any one field now, the lower the returns we get in terms of improvements in that field. Additionally, it will result in less time and energy we are putting into everything else, and consequently, a less balanced life that robs other needs and subpersonalities of expression. This is not even including that a broad range of experiences assists in forming creative arguments, which is often essential to overcoming roadblocks. It is not pragmatic to seek perfection, so we live by heuristics and treat attention as valuable and sacred. Even where we assign that attention, though, we lack all the information we need to form a complete argument. So no matter how rigorously we think of the most accurate conclusion we can we are restricted by the preconditions of logic detailed in Essay 6: Logic as Subjectivity. 

Therein lies the secret to “homo religiosus”, the reason why the theological has always been and will always be a question people wrestle with. As we move down our belief structure through lower and lower order arguments we seem to approach a land of phenomenologically religious descriptions. The axioms of “creation”, “morality”, “value”, and “purpose” find their place naturally at the bottom of our belief structure as they stem from principles inherent in our biology that can merely be refined through logic. And as we move up our belief structures through higher and higher order arguments we reach a fog of increasing obscurity, difficulty to convey ideas, the exponential difficulty in making continuously higher order arguments, and the inevitability of always being wrong. So in trying to find pragmatic explanations for “creation”, “morality”, “value”, and “purpose” we naturally create belief structures that are so tall and grand that we isolate ourselves from being understood, and our structure falls in the way of the Tower of Babel. As we try to replace god with our ideas, with reason, with ourselves, we only grow more isolated and dejected. Any explanation of the world built on incomplete knowledge will never satisfy the complexity of being in reality; no model of reality is as complex and correct as reality itself. So the moment we begin worshiping our conceptions, our feelings, our ideas, and give in to pride and attachment in our conclusions, we assign importance to them. This importance is largely counterproductive, as it innately urges us to mold our reality to suit our beliefs and we become more dogmatic as a result. This wisdom has been passed through the generations, and part of our communal nature became a religious adherence, as when we worship the same thing we can communicate with each other meaningfully.

Of course this led to the exact problem, we just replaced the ideology born of a misguided answer to everything and the respect gained therein (certainty and significance thus assigning it importance) with one born of community and expectation (connection and significance assigning it importance). In a world where there are ceilings and floors to the grandiosity of our belief structure and where all attempts at answers are need satisfying ideologies, the question arises, what is the place for faith?

The very, very short answer, in taking advice. Faith is that which allows you to take advice you do not understand. If we agree there is a base and ceiling of our belief structure, then we also acknowledge the usefulness of advice. We have a nature we do not understand but that others, in their experience, have been able to form insights regarding. In acknowledging that you and the one giving advice to you are both human, and as such share a predominantly similar nature, you can infer that if someone is giving you good faith advice, formed from what what has helped them live a better life, that there is some element of the truth within the words stated. Advice connects the base of the belief structure with a place beyond your ceiling. Advice takes you further along the path of actualization than your line of reasoning has taken you. There are times you may be able to reason your way to a partial understanding of the basis of the advice, but understanding the advice itself doesn’t really change its innate effectiveness. In a sense, advice is like wheat. There are the grains and there is chaff. Almost all of what people may tell you is chaff by weight, but in every good-faith piece of advice is some grain, a substantial insight into the actualization of our needs. Faith answers the question of “what should I do in the face of advice?”

Faith itself has use because of this innate Thrownness inherent to our experience. We exist with a nature that cannot be fully understood, but one that necessitates understanding to achieve any form of consistent fulfillment. We each have a nature where needs call us to action regardless of rationality or preconceptions, but where actualizing them into a way of life that results in the greatest possible wellbeing requires knowledge we do not have. Then in addition to this inability to know, is a time limit to making it all worthwhile. We do not know how much time we have left, but we do know it is not enough. What we do have are hints. Moments of pain and fascination that reveals our nature in riddles, and the answers others have come to which we know have some grains of truth. Given the inherent and obvious conclusion to every essay before now that humans act for the improvement of their situation through the solving of problems, advice is, in a sense, our greatest ally. They are hints towards revelations beyond what we know; ways to achieve greater wellbeing faster and sustain it longer. It also helps us avoid the downfall of Essay 11, as instead of bumping into a wall until we become dejected from the act of trying, we can try walking around the wall by taking the advice of others. The non-optional calling towards purpose is walked towards on the field of human experience, one fraught with many walls and sirens, that can only be navigated through the help of orientation that is only verifiable through application. In such a world, that others can take their decades of experience and happily formulate it into advice is our greatest blessing. Yet, we cannot simply adhere to the words of either ourselves and others unerringly forever, so how does faith come into this?

My mom died in the summer of 2023, and unsurprisingly it was a brutal journey to recovery. I cried in the moment and the following days but I was so emotionally numb that I felt collected through the initial weeks. Sure, I had emotional outbursts, but I felt collected on the day-to-day, to the point that I genuinely wondered if I was psychotic at times. Life would be easier if we can just let emotions out and be done with it, but that wasn’t how it went for me and it’s hardly how it is for others. Something this major has cascading effects on our belief structures, and my experience was no different. I remember thinking up a book where the main character was the inheritor of a crest that was passed through his bloodline. The sorcerer that served as the antagonist created a pact with every individual in the world which said something like this: “If you feel like you want to completely give up on life, just let go and I’ll take you in. I’ll cure you of disease, negative emotion, and misunderstandings and in return I’ll be your purpose.” Those who decided to give in became beings who could not fight against the will of the sorcerer, but were generally content, healthy, and socially understood among their kind. The question of the book became “why not just give in?” and the answer the main character came to was put as a metaphor. 

We find ourselves walking through the desert. Along the way we see structures that we can use for rest, but in resting we begin to take the structure for granted and we forget that we can walk. Eventually we fear walking, and as we rest we become a worse and worse person, less capable with dealing with the trials of life. One day, these structures will fail on us, and we’ll feel betrayed by what was never ours and suffer because we rested on what we never should have. This is the world we find ourselves in, so it would simply be better to just keep walking. We never rest because the moment we find a structure we can rest on, we take it for granted and become worse people as a result. We should never give in to the illusions of structures and instead just never stop walking. Walking is where meaning lies; the certainty-created structures we assign to the world are illusions that call us to give up on walking. The uncertainty of life should be embraced, with the sole certainty we can ever let in being that we must continue striving for our betterment without fail and rely on nothing to get there.

In case you couldn’t tell, this is not a statement I agree with presently; it was the result of someone I loved so dearly leaving me, and being overwhelmed with just how much my outlook was changing as a result. Many say that when someone this important to you dies, you begin to realize how many things you thought were important really weren’t, and how few things truly matter in life. This is not a platitude; it is about as literally true as anything can be. Things kept leaving my field of awareness as they became unimportant; the innate structure (thingness) of elements of the world built by the meaning I gave them collapsed in quick succession, and in my emotional numbness, I felt that nothing outside of myself even existed. The structure of my life: routine, people, opinions, even physical objects, collapsed, and my health and well-being suffered greatly as a result. It all culminated in the study area of the apartment building I was staying at (I was 20) at 4:00 or so in the morning when I had what I could only describe as a psychotic break or existential crisis. I kept knocking on random objects and laughing at the top of my lungs that they didn’t exist. That all “I” am is a set of wants and nothing more. Everything besides those innate wants would betray me, collapse on me. Of course they would, they weren’t even real. I tried to make a lie real for my own comfort and felt betrayed when I realized it? How ungrateful of me to do that. Nothing exists, not this table, not this alligator decoration, not the floor, not this door, not this roof, not this chair, not my arm, not my legs, not my heart, not my beliefs, not my friends, not my family; nothing. I couldn’t be 100% sure anything existed, and if I wasn’t sure, then it was an illusion. In basking in the revelation, I laughed harder and longer than I ever laughed in my life, and danced to said laughter in a public (albeit empty) room. I thought I pursued rationality and skepticism to its natural conclusion; I didn’t even realize how depressed I was. 

I fell into the hedonistic worldview that our needs were all that existed, and nothing else was real. I kept reiterating it, focusing inwards and essentially living a hedonistic life. I lost any sense of my ability to restrain myself, and felt like a helpless passenger in a body that was mechanically following my immediate wants. I slept whenever I wanted, frequently didn’t shower or brush my teeth, ate convenient protein bars daily instead of making something nourishing, watched endless anime, and did my best at class in fear of the disappointment in myself that failure would bring. Without something outside of me I could not love, and without love I could not reason. I was in a protracted, existential nightmare with no logical out in sight, and only in hindsight do I understand how desperately I was looking for one. I will give myself one point of immense credit that I thank myself every day for, I was skeptical of everything, including my own skepticism. I was always wrong, so I was open to anything. I was empty, but I was open to being filled. I rejected structures, but I kept walking, and refused to stop even for the comfort of the absurdism this argument implies. Then, eventually, the goat entered the scene.

“I found out that the difference between the world and God... is the difference between words and music. The world is words, god is melody.” “Even if it is an illusory world. They’re the best memories I have.” “The world is a vessel. That which can fill that vessel…” “The sense of the world must lie outside of the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value - and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside of the world.” “[Life] cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine. You hear as well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. But only he who travels and takes chances can break the habits paralyzing stances. It might be, even, that the last of hours make us once again a youthful lover. The call of life to us forever flowers.” Wonderful Everyday, began a transformation best summed up by these quotes, and one scene from Tomorrow’s Joe. Joe escaped from prison and swam across the ocean after losing to his rival in boxing. Staring at the open sea, he realizes what he wanted wasn’t in this open sea of possibility but in the prison he just left. So he returned as quickly as he left. All this to say, I learned to have faith. Faith, despite all reason, that the world outside of me not only exists, but is inherently good. That structure allows me to live on a baseline of habits that help me maximize my love for the world. That the world itself isn’t separate from God, but has Godliness concealed within. That I, others, and the fabric of reality itself are inherently good. I can make all the logical arguments towards this goodness now, but it wouldn’t convince anyone, and it wasn’t logic that convinced me. I was in a slump, the world was meaningless and lacked form, the vessel was empty, and I was in an endless dark room with no way to orient myself. I was anxious, everything took so much energy since I habituated nothing. In that darkness, I just kept walking, and little by little I began to have faith that something outside of myself existed, and that those somethings were there for me, not to betray me. Most importantly, now that the world was good, now that I knew the truth wasn’t there to harm me, there was no such thing as a dangerous idea. In the face of the truth, I gained immense satisfaction in being the person who would lower myself before the truth and limit the influence importance associated with my ideology had on manipulating the truth. I could never prevent it from happening, though, and therein lies the nature of faith.

Israel means “we who wrestle with god”. Faith in god, in truth, in the world itself, isn’t a propositional statement; it is a lifelong struggle in pursuit of truth. That struggle often requires taking leaps of faith, trying things you do not understand in hopes that you see the merit of it in hindsight. It requires continual learning and openness. Not letting life bring learning to you, but making it a day-by-day habit to learn about everything. We find puzzle pieces of information having no idea what they individually connect to, every now and then a new piece appears that connects many old ones, and experientially comes as something of a revelation. Yet that last piece has no use if the others were not there beforehand. Faith requires structure, as often you will not feel like doing the right things, but god is found neither in the grand moments of emotion nor the burnout of depression, but in the still, small voice of an intimate relationship with our purpose.

Fiction, religion, the sciences, philosophy, my writing, my health, my friends, my family, my emotions, and my commitments were all continually wrestled with. They were not treated as things that simply are, but truths worth thinking deeply about and continually challenging my preconceptions of. I invite all to wrestle with god alongside me, and in doing so acknowledging that life is too vast for any one of us to reason our way to the right answer. But in taking leaps of faith and having others join us in the struggle, we can live richer lives than we could have ever imagined. I am not offering an answer to what faith is; it is up to you to look through the writing and find the grains within this pile of wheat. This is merely my advice. This book is my advice. I began from our first experiences as humans and progressed through maturation, building an argument with no clear conclusion. But isn’t there something nice in the non-answer? Well, you'd better come to like it; you never get answers, just hints. 

That is all, see you all sometime by June 28 for Essay 16: Embodiment!