Faith, happiness & the mind

What is the mind? Not easy to answer but its main feature is concentration (not consciousness! **). Concentration is the heart of the mind (literally and figuratively). The more we can concentrate the more healthy our mind is. The more healthy our mind is the happier we are. The more healthy the more subtle our consciousness becomes and the wiser we become. [This understanding I imagine appeals more to those who take sides with what is called the 'secular'. The more restricted 'secular material' understanding takes a lot more work because of limitations in the ideas of 'matter' and what counts as 'material truth' - being worked on]

What stops us from being concentrated? Easy because it has been well documented in Buddhist writing. There are 5: hatred, fear, doubt, laziness and lust. All these I'll term distraction.

What is Faith?
Faith is not belief - that is belief! Faith is more unusual than belief because by definition it must be without Reason! If it had Reason then why do we need faith? (Kierkegaard analyses this well.) Faith is not rare however - it is essential to the mind. We have faith in many things: ourselves, our partners, our families, other people, our governments, our teachers, The Institutions, The Law, scientific method and truth, our senses, Reason itself! Yet if we try to justify any of these we only find ourselves picking other articles of faith because what stands by itself? Faith.

The problem with the "lower" items of faith is that we easily find reason to doubt them. How can we have Faith in the Law for example that so often lets the bad guy off? How can we have Faith in Other People who so often have hurt us? How can we have Faith in our sense that are so eaily confused? Most importantly how can we have Faith in ourselves when we will die? So we enter the next level of absurdities and Faith in more permanent entities like G-d and Buddha. Its all absurd however - that is the nature of Faith!

Faith & The Mind
Putting those together and the reason for the post is this suggestion that they do go together: A strong faith in something is healthy for the mind. I listed a few Reasons why our faith gets distracted above - yet when did Faith have anything to do with Reason? Faith is distracted by doubt and as Buddhism notices doubt is the enemy of concentration, the heart of the mind. When we can devote our Mind 110% to an object of faith we have concentration and that is a healthy mind. That object can be anything from science to our children to God.

What is maybe less clear to people of other Faiths is the other distractions to Faith: hatred, fear, laziness and lust. Certainly they are told to deal with these but it is never made clear how or why. With Faith however these disappear.

In a nutshell then the suggestion here is that Faith and Concentration are the same thing.

This implies that practices that aid faith achieve the same purpose as those that aid concentration. "Being Good" which curbs hatred, laziness and lust is linked to reduced fear and doubt by strengthening Faith and Concentration. Meditation and Prayer likewise achieve identical goals.

What distracts a huge amount of Faith and which has been solved in the Indian subcontinent is the issue of how faiths interact. When we meet someone of a different faith we almost by definition cannot accept their object of faith - to do so amounts to a loss of faith in our own Faith. How can I have faith in two Gods? Your God cannot be the True God. The teachers teach exactly this because we cannot have 110% faith in anything and also harbour faith in something else - that is the definition of distraction. That is the reason for the teaching. Faith is ironic then because in the same way it unifies our mind it divides people. This is only one level of Faith however. A True faith isn't even distracted by accepting other peoples' faiths.

OK gotta dash... distracted toward food...

== Update 5/9/09 ===
** there are states of concentration which are not-conscious e.g. the Jhana but to my knowledge there are no states of consciousness without concentration.

I realise that the world "faith" in the above text can be replaced with the word "love" without changing the meaning. This is quite revealing! Faithfulness takes on a particular meaning in sexual relationships - I hadn't realised before how central Faith was in partnerships (maybe should have listened to George Michael). Interesting how "lust" in thus a hindrance to Love if you follow the logic. Marriage, Faith and Love are all connected. But of course in this analysis they are just small versions of a feature of mind which covers all scales from the personal to the cosmic - namely concentration.

This seems a far cry from the expression of Buddhism for which it is famous in the West namely a rational philosophy. This was my entry into Buddhism. Yet pursuing this path has been fruitless by itself. The analysis and reasonable dissection of the mind by itself can only fill catalogues. What is secretly happening is the disassembling of the distractions of mental phenomena and the resulting strengthening of concentration - the same move as faith. The analysis of Logos and NULL preceding these posts on Faith is exactly this - the freeing of the rational discursive mind from the prison of dualisms which state that events are either one way or the other. In dialectics each depends upon the other so nothing actually happens. The mind is free from distractios - its concentration can become pure.