Leap of Faith: A Spiritual Invitation

[author_by_night]

In today's world, sharing your beliefs is taboo. If you do share them, you are judged, you are told not to share them so loudly, and there are hateful people who actually do horrible things to people of different faiths than themselves.

A few years ago, I did a Livejournal Invitation wherein people shared their beliefs. The purpose was to express your beliefs - whether Christianity, Islam, Taoism, or even Atheism - without fear of condemnation, without fear of judgement. I learned so much about my flisters, and about faiths I knew little about or had never heard of at all. I am going to open the invitation once more.

Say anything, anything at all. And your beliefs do not even have to be specific to a religion - if you believe in reincarnation, if you believe in ghosts, if you believe in parallel universes... those may not necessarily be tied to a religion, (although they may be), but they are still beliefs, and I'd like to hear about them. 

One warning, however - I will state that this is not a debate. We are not here to condemn other beliefs - only to express our own.

Comments

[dmp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the invite, first of all -- I've been reading everyone's comments here and find them absolutely fascinating! It's interesting to have someone talk about their faith in a public forum that doesn't erupt into religion-bashing or theological arguments of dooooooommm... . :)

Warning: This took me about an hour to write and I'll have to break it up into two parts. If it's tl;dr, I totally understand!

My personal spiritual beliefs have always been a source of struggle for me growing up and still moreso today. I never had any formal education in religion -- my family has Mahayana Buddhist beliefs influenced by cultural traditions (ex. ancestor-worship, not eating meet on the full moon). I'm an Asian-American who grew up in a mostly white, Catholic & Protestant community, and so in school I got a lot of mixed messages on what my religious identity should be and made strange associations between religious identity and racial identity. I was never discriminated against because of my family's religious background, though I had been discriminated because of my racial identity. Thus, I always felt awkward and isolated in terms of religion between me and my white friends, and many times it hurt knowing that they had a church community and different life outside of school that connected them together -- one that I was never involved in and didn't want to be. Internally, I felt like I was different because my family didn't believe in Jesus Christ, but I couldn't believe in him myself -- partly out of family pride and partly out of fear of betraying my own sense of racial identity by "giving in." As a child, I associated being Christian with also being Anglo-Saxon, and because I was Asian, I felt that Jesus was a "white person's" god and by believing in him I was betraying the core of myself. I suppose part of me still feels that way, though I know that is ridiculous.

When I was thirteen I had a nervous breakdown of sorts and dedicated myself into a full exploration in Buddhist doctrine. That was when I realized that while I agree with the basic tenants of Buddhist belief, I could not believe in the Mahayana & cultural traditions my family upheld -- at least in a literal sense. Deciding these things was a struggle in itself, because at the time then idea of heaven & hell were still floating in my imagination as a very real possibility, and in my understanding, Buddhist hell truly existed and was a million times worse than any Christian version I had read. I was debating that if I chose not to follow the exact religious beliefs of my parents, my soul would spend its next million lives in torment -- a lot for a kid to think about!

[dmp.livejournal.com]

My spiritual beliefs are still something I think about and debate with myself, but here are the few things I've come to realize:

1) I do not believe in the Mahayana form of Buddhism: mainly in the existence of bodhisattvas (kind of parallel to Christian saints) or that Buddha is a powerful, omnipresent force. I believe that there lived a man who became Buddha -- became Enlightened -- and his teachings are the true path to attain Enlightenment. I believe in reincarnation and karma and their impact in controlling all of the ever-changing life forces in the universe. I believe that Buddha saw the cogs of the machine in his Enlightenment, but that he does not exist in this world any longer, because he broke out of it eons ago.

I practice ancestor-worship because I believe that our ancestors are important and should be respected. Mostly, however, family altars serve as a memorial for them -- I don't believe that my ancestors live in them or that they have any "powers from beyond" that could influence my life. I bow to them out of respect for them and respect for myself and where I come from.

2) I respect Christianity and am fascinated by concepts of damnation, redemption, and deliverance, but I can never believe in Christianity at all. Mostly because I feel that Mahayana Buddhism and modern Christianity had changed from their original, philosophical intents that their founders had. They both were simply good ideas that got mystified and perverted through time to become a set of superstitions and dogmatic beliefs.

3) I believe in miracles, namely one miracle that should be repeated by everyone: that miracle of pure human connection. There are so many aspects that block out full understanding between people: a person's upbringing, their prejudices, their ignorance, or simply their "self-centered" viewpoint (not that a person is arrogant or narcisstic, but that they simply cannot understand something they have not experienced themselves. People may sympathize, but they can never empathize). Humans in this sense are raised "blinded," by their own viewpoint. As a result, they can cause pain and suffering to others, willfully or unintentionally. It's horrible, this blindness. And it cannot be controlled by a person -- a person can live out their whole life with this blindness and never realize it. That's what makes it so terrible.

That is why I believe that for a person to connect, for even two people to see each other for who they are -- that is a miracle. Because those moments happen only a handful of times in a lifetime, I suspect. That you can look at a person and see them for themselves and accept them and feel like more of a whole person because of it. I'm not taking about love motivating this connection, religious love or otherwise -- because love itself is a blindness, it smooths over the cracks, it makes exceptions, because I believe that no one can love everyone equally. I'm talking about acceptance truly and wholy without judgment but still being able to care for them. Buddhism calls it compassion; Christianity calls it grace. I call it a miracle.

4) I'm an agnostic, because while I believe in forces greater than ourselves, but I also think that because of humankind's inherent blindness, it is impossible to believe in the validity of one answer or even if the answer can exist for us.

5) Humankind will never fully understand the spiritual realm, but that it exists, along with other supernatural creatures. Ghosts, energy forces, fairies, demons, werewolves, vampires, zombies -- the whole lot of them -- are real beings, but do not exists in same way portrayed in pop culture or conventional mythology.