Blind Faith

[dodalisque]

Question: What is the difference between Faith and blind faith?

Left: Faith - 9 of Cups - Jupiter (happiness) in Pisces (spirituality) - 9 (abundant/stable) in Water (emotion)
Right: Blind faith - 6 of Swords - Mercury (intellect) in Aquarius (new) - 6 (harmony) in Air (thoughts)
Centre: Core - 7 of Wands - Mars (courage) in Leo ( confidence) - 7 (risky) in Fire (self-assertion)

This question about the nature of faith grew out of Joan-Marie's recent thread called Projectile Projection and should be regarded as a kind of companion piece. That is why I am using the same 3 card format and the Thoth deck. Since the readings are connected, I was not in the least surprised that we both drew the same card in the same position, the 6 of Swords, though we are separated geographically by a distance of about 8, 000 km. (I can already see that the next question in this sequence will probably have something to do with the subject of Doubt.)

The capital letter at the beginning of the word Faith suggests that the card on the left, the 9 of Cups, concerns the nature of religious Faith. Religious people are always talking about the necessity for Faith; that non-believers should ignore their education and common-sense, and instead should choose to believe; that they should make a decision to buy into a religion lock, stock and barrel, and swallow apparent absurdities for their own spiritual well-being. Of course most people in our modern culture reply: "No thank you. You run along and believe in your fairy-tales. I don't wish to be a slave your moronic superstitions. I want to know what I'm getting into before I choose to throw myself whole-heartedly into a religion."

But religious Faith in our secular culture is not well understood. C. S. Lewis, a devout Christian, explains it best when he says: "You do not need to understand in order to have Faith; you choose to have Faith in order to understand." The 9 of Cups, the suit of Water, tells us that this is an emotional rather than an intellectual decision. I can best illustrate this with a personal anecdote.

As I have said many times on Cult of Tarot, I have been a full-on disciple of the Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy for over 20 years. None of my intellectual friends have ever approved. In fact, I think it has lowered me in their estimation. At the end of each meditation it is a tradition to go forward to take a small piece of food from in front of the shrine on which a large picture of Sri Chinmoy is placed. The specially-prepared and blessed food is called prasad. The idea is that since we have received a gift of spiritual food in our meditation, we should also recognise the divinity of our physical body by accepting a gift of material food. There is a Hindu saying: Annam Brahma - Food itself is Brahma, or God; but this is exactly the same as receiving the host (wafer/bread) in a Christian service. We may even visualise the energy from the food permeating and energising our body. Every disciple bows when he takes the food, as a sign of respect and gratitude to the Master, who for us is a living embodiment of the Supreme Being. Sounds nuts, eh.

But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't ever force myself to walk forward in front of everyone and take the prasad and bow. Sometimes, because meditation can be hard work and you can get a bit peckish, I might go up to take the food, but then I would sort of drift away in a vaguely deferential manner and move back to my seat. I had some wonderful experiences during my meditations but there was something about cow-towing before a picture that just rubbed me up the wrong way. Nobody ever hassled me about it. It's not that kind of path. This went on for the first two years or more of being a disciple of Sri Chinmoy.

Then one day, on an impulse, after a particularly powerful meditation, I thought, screw it, this is ridiculous and probably rude to everyone else here, so I went up and took the prasad, some little pastry with a date in the middle, and I bowed. Inclined my head, just a little bit, just to be polite, rather stiffly. And then suddenly, bam, a vast wave of love and gratitude surged through me and I kept compulsively bowing and bowing, deeper and deeper, with tears running down my face. My heart was wide open, as if my arms were spread and each arm was a mile long. Embarrassing to everyone but me. Amazing! I spun around but could barely stand or find my way back to my seat.

What happened? Dissolution of the ego, I suppose, something like that in western psychological terms. Something prompted me to ignore the complaints of my intellectual ego and surrender. Then when I had a tiny taste of the feeling of surrender, of Faith, I wanted more. I wanted to gorge myself on it. The inrush of emotions made my intellectual quibblings seem pretty thin stuff. This was Aretha Franklin backed by a full choir belting out Gospel, not me mouthing hymns at the back of a drafty church on a cold Sunday morning and listening to a sermon from the vicar.

So that's what C. S. Lewis means by choosing to have Faith "in order to understand." And that is why that torrent of bliss on the Thoth 9 of Cups is such a perfect card to explain Faith with a capital F. Faith is an emotional compulsion rather than an intellectual decision. Even a lot of religious people who advocate Faith don't really understand it, the raw power of it.

OK, now we turn to the card on the right, the 6 of Swords, to tell us something about "blind faith", which I take to be the sort of faith that persuades us to believe what politicians and TV evangelists and car mechanics tell us. It's blind because we don't know better, and we are making an intellectual decision to admit our blindness, or ignorance, and trust that someone, a human person not an impersonal Godhead, is being honest with us. Swords are the suit of Air, probably hot air. It is the suit of the mind rather than the heart that we saw on the 9 of Cups.

The number 6 in numerology and the qabalah is associated with the sephiroth of Tiphareth - Harmony. We can see on the card how the 6 Swords are aligned in a symmetrical shape and meet at the same point, like lines of a seemingly logical argument that establish a conclusion that is difficult to resist. The small white cross in the centre looks like a child's toy stuck with pins. So blind faith is a decision to fall in line and agree with someone, to see their point of view and take it as our own. The wispy geometrical shapes in the background look like a spider's web in which we may get caught. There is a circle in a square in the middle of the card suggesting that the person we have faith in and give our trust to can persuade us that square is round, that black is white. In this context the 6 is a bad kind of harmony: we are falling in line with someone who may not have our best interests at heart. God always has our best interests at heart. He is the heart, by definition.

The middle card, the 7 of Wands, is the card of courage, personal heroism, and of taking risks. The central club represents one man against many. This confrontation is sometimes heroic but can be foolish. From the point of view of spiritual "Faith", we need courage to confront our ego's arrogant fixed notions of superiority, represented by the more sophisticated designs of the 6 crossed staffs in the background. To break through that grid of resistance is a spiritual victory, an act of liberation.

But from the point of view of "blind faith", that central club is unsophisticated and outmatched by other human egos much like itself. The 7 of Wands card is expressing, if you will, its reversed meaning. The central club is not doing battle with the 6 staffs but attempting to meld with them out of feelings and ignorance and fear. Trust me on this, I know what I'm talking about. Show some faith.

For people my age, 65, the name Blind Faith calls immediately to mind the world's first ever "supergroup": Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Rich Grech. When Cream and Traffic and Family split up, these 4 guys created astonishing excitement by announcing that the most talented members of the original groups were forming a new band called Blind Faith. Cool name. Mock religious. Expectations for this group were immense. They were all superstars before they even made an album together. We all knew it was going to be amazing and take music where it had never gone before. But they had no tunes and no musical plan or unique vision for the new band's sound. In other words they, egotistically, had blind faith in themselves, that with all that talent thrown together something great must surely come out of it. And we, poor suckers, had blind faith in them and we all bought their album, which was horrible on a cosmic scale. They did one tour to promote the album, and the tour ground to a halt halfway through, then they split. A moral lesson for an entire generation not to put blind faith in Blind Faith. There are Gods, and then there are false idols.

[Charlie Brown]

I don't think the album is horrid at all. It's not great, but fine enough. And, of course, there's Can't Find My Way Home.

[Joan Marie]

If you haven't seen it, I highly and with all my heart, recommend the documentary "Beware of Mr. Baker."

dodalisque, what a beautiful post. Thank you so much for sharing that story.

[Diana]

dodalisque, it was indeed a beautiful story you told. Thank you for telling us. And thank you for daring to tell it. A pure act of Grace you received, when you allowed it in.

I was thinking a lot about this thread today. Because I like thinking about Plato's Cave. And I was thinking about faith in general but mostly faith in God. I thought I'd come and give my thoughts, but there's someone who says it much more eloquently than I ever could so I'm going to quote. It's about having to lose one's faith in God before one finds it. It's from a book by Joel S. Goldsmith, the 20th century American mystic and teacher, called "LIving the Illumined Life."

As a matter of fact, until one loses faith in one’s God, how is one to find the true God? As long as a person has faith in a God from which there is no fruitage, he has not found the true God. He is entertaining a false concept of God and he wants to cling to it as Peter wanted to cling to his Hebraic God. This was true of the other disciples as well. It took Paul, who was not an immediate disciple of Jesus, to awaken them out of that particular state of consciousness.

Who knows what particular event in our experience will awaken us to the fact that we have not been worshiping God, but have been entertaining a false concept of God and expecting it to do certain things for us in a certain way, and it has not done this.

We have not found God. We have been entertaining a concept of God, and until that concept is taken from us, until we lose our faith in that God, just as Jesus made His followers lose faith in all the things in which they had their reliance, we will not find God.

[dodalisque]

I don't think the album is horrid at all. It's not great, but fine enough. And, of course, there's Can't Find My Way Home.

You're probably right. I never heard it, but I needed a nice way to round out the reading. I'm going to blame Trump for setting a bad moral example. Dammit, now you have said that I'm going to have to go out and buy a copy of that album. Steve Winwood grew up just down the road from me in Birmingham, England. He used to play in the local pub when he was 15 and everyone who saw him knew even then that he was a genius.

[Charlie Brown]

I'm going to have to go out and buy a copy of that album.

He won't be missing the royalties if you just listen online. It isn't great but, like I said, it' fine. I listened to it the other night after seeing your thread and enjoyed myself. I did, ftr, buy a copy of the cassette in about 1988 or so.

[Joan Marie]

I woke up thinking about this. And I haven't had my coffee yet, so I'm going to blame that in case this makes no sense.

My head is reeling, and I am now haunted by this question: What is the difference between having an ability and having a willingness to believe in, trust in, have faith in something?

The Germans have a saying which they use quite a lot but it is almost impossible to explain what it means.

The phrase is "jumping over your own shadow." You can google it and find many attempts at explaining it, but it's hard because is is more a feeling. Essentially, you can't jump over your own shadow. It's impossible. Try it. So to do it, to actually jump over your own shadow, is to do something you did not believe in, did not think it was possible to do because it went against your very character.
This definition, like all definitions of this phrase, leaves a lot to be desired. When you hear how it is used sometimes you begin to understand how complex of a concept t is. Can you jump over your own shadow, or not?

And I am staring to think the simple little word "faith" is also far more complex of a concept than it its usually given credit for.

It requires more than belief or trust in another person (for example). It also requires belief and trust in yourself. Trust that you won't dissolve into vapour or dust if you make the shift to "faith" and, moreover, that that dissolution won't end you.

What were you afraid would happen if you bowed to that photograph? What did the people who set up that whole arrangement with the snacks think (or know) would happen if you did? And what did happen? Was there a kind of dissolution, but in fact rather than end you was it an epiphany of sorts, a breakthrough? Did you jump over your own shadow, and live to tell the tale?

OR, since jumping over your own shadow isn't possible, is faith something that you always had but had just not tapped into?

And, (I have so many questions) is what you experienced a feeling a faith in Sri Chinmoy, OR was it faith in yourself to (finally) know you can experience this kind of ego death? Were you surprised to learn this faith you felt doesn't make you a lunatic or an idiot? Isn't that what you were afraid of? Did you think faith would make you inauthentic?

Is faith where the ability and the willingness to surmount the ego meet? Because one without the other seems useless.

okay, I will go make my coffee now. I had to write this before I forgot which happens to me a lot.

EDIT: I just googled the phrase "Jump over one's shadow" (again) and see the standard inadequate translations, but I did just learn that it was the existentialist Heidegger who said it first in his book "Being and Time." Sein und Zeit . I did not realise that until now.