The Limits of Belief
Most human lives, taken in honest accounting, are organized around belief. Whether designated religious or not. By belief we mean what the word ordinarily means in English: the assent of the mind to a proposition that one cannot independently verify. God exists. The soul is eternal. Suffering ends. Love is the ground of being. These are propositions to which one may say yes, and the saying yes is the act of belief. The vast architecture of religion as it has come down to us — its catechisms, its doctrines, its statements of faith, its long histories of reform and counter-reform — has been built, in large part, around the cultivation, transmission, and defense of belief.
We do not say this to disparage it. The work of articulating what one holds to be true about the Divine is an honorable and a necessary undertaking. Without it, the seeker would have no orientation at all and it is the primary work of the mind to constantly translate the meaning presented to its perceptions. Belief, properly understood, is the first form most religious lives take. What we wish to consider here is what belief can and cannot do, and what happens when belief is asked to bear a weight it was never structurally designed to carry.
What belief is, and what it is not
The English word belief is doing more than one job. In ordinary speech it carries within it several distinct movements of the soul that, on closer inspection, are not the same thing. There is belief in the strict sense — the mental act of assent. There is faith — which is closer to trust, to a chosen fidelity, to the willingness to walk forward in the absence of confirmation. There is hope — an orientation of the soul toward what has not yet arrived. And there is knowing — what older traditions sometimes called gnosis, what mystical literatures across cultures have named recognition or realization, what the Course calls simply the experience itself. These are not precisely synonyms. They can be stages, or they can be different organs of the same religious life, and confusing them can be the source of a great deal of suffering.
Belief is what the mind does. Creating reliable mental frameworks for efficient reference. Knowing is what the soul receives. It hits different. And faith is often what the will sustains across the distance between the two. None of these is illegitimate. None of them is a failure of the others. But they are different, and a religious life that treats them as interchangeable will eventually come undone at the seam where they part ways.
What belief can do
Belief is a trellis. It is the structure on which the slow vine of an interior life can grow. It gives the seeker a direction in which to face. It supplies a vocabulary — grace, mercy, non-attachment, atonement, return — in which the inarticulate movements of the soul can begin to be named, and what is named can begin to be tended. It provides a community. It carries the seeker through the long stretches of dryness when nothing seems to be happening, when the practices feel like ash, when nothing in one's experience corroborates what one has been told to hold as true. The discipline of continuing to assent, even when the assent is difficult, is not nothing. The traditions know what they are doing when they ask their adherents to keep the form of the creed even in seasons of doubt. The form keeps the door of opportunity open through which something else assuredly, in time, will walk.
The literatures of the world are full of testimony to what belief does for those who hold it well. A Course in Miracles, the foundational text from which the Ekstaeses Syllabus is drawn, is in one important respect a long instruction in how to entertain a different set of beliefs about the self, the world, and the Divine until those beliefs become so thoroughly rehearsed that the mind that held the old beliefs is, by stages, dissolved. The apophatic mystics of the Christian tradition — Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing — built whole interior architectures on the disciplined assent to propositions about what God is not, in order to clear the mind for the meeting with what God is. The Upanishadic neti, neti — "not this, not this" — is, on its face, a series of beliefs about what the Divine cannot be, deployed in sequence as a method for arriving at what cannot be propositionally stated at all. Belief, used skillfully, is not the enemy of encounter. It can be one of its prepared instruments.
We honor this. The Ekstaeses Syllabus is, among other things, a careful curriculum of new orientations of the mind, or “beliefs” offered to a mind that has become exhausted of its old ones. We are not in the business of asking anyone to abandon belief. We are in the business of asking belief to know what it is, and to know what it is not.
Where belief stops
What belief is not is encounter. No specified quantity of belief produces, of its own accord, the meeting of the soul with the Source of All Things. This is not a deficiency of the believer, and it is not a deficiency of belief. It is a structural feature of the kind of truth the religious traditions concern themselves with. Truth at the level of the Divine is of an experiential order. It belongs to the kingdom of taste, of touch, of being held — to use the mystics' usual vocabulary — and not to the kingdom of demonstration. The mind can be marshaled to assent to any proposition whatsoever, including true ones, without the soul ever having met what the proposition was pointing toward. A description of water is not a drink. The point that has been made by every contemplative tradition, in its own language, is that no matter how genuine and thorough the description becomes, it does not, by force of its own accuracy, deliver the drink.
William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, drew this distinction at length more than a century ago. He observed that the conversions and transformations that mark the lives of the religiously serious almost never come by the route of intellectual persuasion. They come by encounter, sometimes sudden, sometimes long-prepared, and they leave the converted person with the unmistakable knowledge that what was previously a set of held-together propositions has, without warning, become a known thing. A finger had been pointing at the moon, in the old Buddhist image, and at some moment the seeker stopped looking at the finger and saw the moon itself. After that, the finger remained, useful and revered, but it was no longer being mistaken for what it had been pointing toward.
This is the limit of belief. It can point. It cannot deliver. The traditions have always known this, and the great teachers within them have always said so, in one vocabulary or another. What is lost, in many religious lives, is the memory of this distinction.
The cost of asking belief to do what only experience can do
Elsewhere we have written about demoralization — the slow attrition of the soul that has been asked to live on a diet of meaning manufactured by itself, alone, with materials that turn out not to have been adequate to the task. It is in this place that the most common cause of demoralization in the religious life can be named directly. Demoralization, in many cases, is the natural consequence of asking belief to do the work that only experience can do. The believer rehearses the creed for years, decades, sometimes a lifetime. They do everything they were told to do. The form is impeccable. And at some point — often quietly, often with shame attached to it — they discover that the form has not, by its own performance, brought them into contact with what it intended.
This is not a crisis of faith. We want to say this clearly. What is collapsing in such a moment is not faith, and not even, in most cases, the underlying intuition that the Divine is real. What is collapsing is the agreement that belief alone, especially belief reliant on one particular system or articulation of truth, was supposed to be enough to experience transcendence and perfect peace. A system is useful for a level of passage that a system can hold and support, but any system must lose its power naturally, through irrelevance initiated by direct experience. The collapse is, properly understood, information. Data. It is the soul's accurate report that it requires something other than further rehearsal. It requires the encounter that belief was, all along, supposed to be a preparation for, and that has, somewhere along the way, been quietly substituted.
Many who appear to lose their religion have, in our reading, lost only this substitution. The actual life of the soul beneath the substitution is intact, and is in fact the very thing that has refused to keep pretending. The question that follows the collapse is not whether to find a stronger version of the same type of belief system. The question is whether one is willing to begin the different work of preparing for encounter directly.
What does not always wait for belief
It must also be said, in the same breath and with equal seriousness, that the encounter does not always wait for belief to be in good order before it arrives. The literatures of the world are filled with accounts of those who were met without their consent, against their preparation, before their assent. The Pharisee Saul, traveling the road to Damascus on an errand he believed himself to be theologically certain of, was met by the Risen One without warning and without his having sought it. The contemporary person, knowing nothing of theology and asking nothing of the universe, who is invited to a ceremony as a curiosity and is, in the course of an afternoon, returned to themselves and to the Divine in a way no proposition had ever prepared them for. The Source from which encounter flows does not, finally, require our permission to make itself known. The conditions of preparation are real, and the carefully tended ones tend to receive more than the casually offered ones, but the Divine retains its own prerogative to break through where it pleases and to precisely the level that can be held in that moment by that individual.
We name this for two reasons. The first is that it is true, and the religious vocabulary should not pretend otherwise. The second is that it relieves the believer of a particular burden that is not theirs to carry — the burden of imagining that the Divine is locked up behind their performance, and that some failure of theirs in the matter of belief is what stands between them and what they long for. It does not. The Divine is not waiting to be earned by the precision of one's assent. The Divine is, in the deepest reading of every tradition we know, already present, already met, already the ground of the very longing in which the seeker first becomes aware that something is missing. The only thing that prevents recognition, most of the time, is the architecture of the self, or identity that has been built around preserving the substitution. The work is the loosening of that architecture, not the perfection of it.
The right relationship to belief
All of this leaves belief restored, we think, to its proper dignity. Belief is a trellis. It is not a destination. The trellis does its work — it gives the climbing thing something to climb upon — and at no point does the trellis pretend to be the bloom. Held in this way, belief becomes a beloved instrument of the religious life rather than a disappointing proxy for it. One can study the teaching, hold the creed, sit with the catechism, work through the Syllabus, and do all of these things without confusing the activity with the encounter. The encounter, when it comes, will not depend on the rehearsal. But the rehearsal may very well have prepared the soul to receive it.
This is the orientation we ask of those who come into the work of Ekstaeses. The Ekstaeses Syllabus is not a creed. It is a workbook. We do not ask members to believe the Syllabus before they take it up. We ask them to perform it — daily, for one year — and to allow the process to do its slow work in them. We trust that what is true in the teaching will be confirmed, in time, by what is met in their lived experience of their life, and that what is not strictly necessary in the teaching will fall away in the same encounter, without our needing to legislate in advance which is which. This is the inversion of the belief-first model. It is experience-first, with belief — if belief comes, and it usually does — as the natural settling that follows encounter rather than the precondition required to deserve it.
A word to the demoralized believer
If the description above has named something you recognize — if you have spent years inside a tradition, performing assent faithfully and well, and have begun to suspect that the assent is not delivering what it was supposed to deliver — we want to say one thing to you directly. You are not behind. You are not failing. The exhaustion you have felt is not weakness. It is, in our reading, the soul's refusal to continue accepting a substitute for the thing it actually came here for. The refusal is honest, and the refusal is the beginning of the next part of the work.
The next part of the work is not to find a stronger version of the belief you have been failing to sustain. The next part of the work is to prepare, carefully and patiently, for encounter — through silence, through ritual, through community, through study of the texts that are themselves prepared for this purpose, and through the sacramental practices that the long tradition has held, in its most serious moments, as the proper occasions of meeting. What encounter requires of you is not more assent. It is your willingness to be met. And the Source from which the meeting will come does not, in the end, require your permission first. It only asks that, when it comes, you have prepared the room.
That preparation is the work we know. We are willing to walk it with whoever is willing to come and look.