I apologize if it seemed I was making a more complete faith statement in this post than I intended to.

I am striving to describe for my readers various facets of my current understanding of how my own faith and practice works, partly in the hope, as I just wrote to Jerry Rudolph, that I can help us translate our different experiences to each other.

I don’t need for you or others to experience or to express your faith and practice as I do.

You write:

“I’m really having a hard time understanding exactly what your faith is in if you imagine that consciousness has a ‘neurobiological basis’….

“I’ll agree that human consciousness has a structure related to those yucky grey things…but there is no way imaginable for a network of neurons to make me experience anything at all.”

I do not hold with the notion of separation of mind and body, or of spirit, soul and body.

Those terms might be useful tags—to borrow cyberspace jargon—for the constellations of concepts to which each of them refers, but the concepts themselves are still only attempts of human consciousness to label and describe experience.

I am currently interested in the research of neurobiologists like Antonio Damasio.

These students of life set aside any assumptions about “spirit” or “soul” or “mind,” in order to investigate just how it is that the biological organism of the human body brings in sensory data, stores, interprets and represents it in the brain, and uses those representations to cobble together what we call “consciousness.”

I am also interested in what 23 centuries of Buddhist pyschological research have been able to discover about the phenomenon which we call “the self.”

These students of life set aside any assumptions about the “I,” in order to investigate the flow of sensations, feelings, thoughts, etc., which arrive in and depart from consciousness—yet which have only momentary, not long-term, existence, and cannot add up to a “person.”

Neither of these paths of study explains what my faith is or how it works.

Faith is simply what happens when I stop trying to figure how to get out of bed, on those mornings when I awake distressed about my problems, and sit quietly, centering down and waiting.

Then that Something which I am wary of naming—for the same reason the Hebrews would not speak JHWH out loud—reminds me of its Presence. And of its unconditional affirmation of me, however I happen to perceive “me” at that moment.

Then I am back in the moment, and I am able to proceed with the day, dealing with what is happening right then—and right then—and right then, rather than with what is “happening” in my imagination.

And so it is.

Bléssed Be,
Michael

Thanks so much for reminding me of the Stefen Grellet passage and comparing it to my words about being “in the present moment with other people, as well as alone.”

I agree that it need not be in a religious community. Nor need it arise out of an explicitly religious sensibility.

I have no argument with secular humanists who are able to say and practice what Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit nuns affirmed in his Dune books:

“I stand in the sacred human presence.”

Bléssed Be,
Michael

I was delighted to read your June 10th comment. It’s as if you have been reading ahead into blog posts I haven’t written yet.

I want to respond at more length in a new post, because you speak directly to a crucial challenge I have set myself in starting this blog.

Key points:

“I don’t think we see an external reality and an internal reality. Everything is seen through our notions and the language that defines the notions…. We use words and concepts that exist by a kind of collective agreement enforced by our language. We live in a world that is defined by this framework.”

“But at the level of concepts and language, we are only talking about our thoughts. What we are seeing is our own perceptions. So though it is probably informed by external information, we are essentially seeing our own mind.”

“The Zen Buddhists talk about seeing the original self and seeing directly into reality. I think they must be talking about getting behind this conceptual framework that defines our reality and seeing directly without resorting to language. So how can you describe it? You can’t. What’s more, the framework is empty….”

I completely agree. Hence my name for the blog: The Empty Path.

I share with you the awareness that “we are only talking about our thoughts,” rather than describing the Real. Yet as I suggested on my About page, I am engaging myself in the exercise of looking for translators.

I embrace and am embraced by a multifaceted community of faith, people across the spectrum of theist and nontheist belief who clearly share an experience of and trust in Something which binds us together and lifts us into a better Humanhood.

My leading is to help us talk about this across all of our languages.

Your words are very helpful to me, because you articulate—more clearly than I had yet for myself—the difficulty, but also because you articulate what I trust in:

“But there are times when I am brought to the present moment and feel a deep love…, compassion…. At those moments, what knowledge I have is enough. Successes, failures, harm I have done, and moments of achievement I have had do not consume me.”

Thank you, and

Bléssed Be,
Michael