Momentum of Faith
Faith as a process, conducive to our generation of meaning and possibility as we ride with the currents of its momentum through space and time
We know that that much of life is what we make of it.
And as we move through the tides of existence, it’s not long before we also know to assert ourselves as the protagonists in a greater story being written, chapter by chapter, via our movements through space and time.
Throughout this navigation, we chase meaning like we chase fulfilment because we’ve deduced (or maybe because we’ve always inherently known) that they’re one and the same.
But the road to fulfilment, we’re quick to learn, is saddled with tests that will often shake our sense of faith in such a way as to break us down, sometimes completely, in the face of greater processes that’re always at play.
Because the universe as we know it is an ever-expansive froth of chaos and change — of entropic function that entails an endless bifurcation of increasing complexity and disorder; our consciousness, interestingly, flows in the opposite direction to all of this as it patterns and orders reality.
And so faith, as a function entwined within our conscious process and as a means to describe our prescient ability to navigate the flux and flow of our world, is an interesting marker to examine as part of our existential understanding.
Our interaction with the concept of faith is something that we seem to existentially contemplate with passionate curiosity. It’s something that authors have been trying to decipher for eons and something that we ourselves seem either honored or disillusioned by — for faith (or a lack thereof) is something that can break us or redeem us on the deepest of levels and at the most critical of moments.
But as soon as we understand faith as something of a greater process, one that itself adheres to the buoyant cyclicality of nature and one that remains intimately entwined with our conscious perceptions of possibility, we begin to see that there’s a lot more to the whole picture than we’d otherwise think.
Cyclicality
In a time where the world seems dispiriting at every turn, amplified by the more discouraging voices that grasp at our attention, the scintillating crests of faith seem few and far between.
Such a time, by the way, isn’t just today, but always — reverberating like an echo that self-propagates into infinity.
And while it’s usually quick to lose and slow to build, faith is somehow ever-present, paradoxically potent through the bleakest of moments.
It’s when we expand our perspective to appreciate the cycles and processes at play that we begin to see how faith, as a process in itself, can really function as a dynamic and necessary part of a pretty complicated whole.
Because one thing we know about our existence is that things cycle; progression and regression are inevitable, and our interplay with faith (not so much our employment of it) serves to propel us through the tides of life.
Thus we may realize a need to think of faith not as something that we create but, rather, as something that we cultivate from the meaning underlying these cycles.
If we can’t seem to ground faith in something or someone omnipotent, as would be a traditional outlet, we can at least hook it into the prescience we build from understanding our movement through the sequences and patterns around us.
We’ve seen ancient cultures do this with celestial processions and we technically do it on a daily basis with inherited knowledge — farmers with seasons, investors with fiscal trends, surfers with tides. We put faith into our ability (ergo into ourselves) to predict events based on a continuous flow of feedback from the orbital nature of existence.
In this way, it usually helps to look at the processes above the events, especially within the context of an existence whereby our consciousness functions to reverse the entropic goal of disorder.
Tuning into these processes lets us stay ahead of them, if not at least keep up and maintaining momentum, affording us a level of predictive intuition that in itself can help to keep alive the embers of faith for when we most need them.
Immortality
We’re naturally hyper-obsessed with discovering (or creating) the possibility of immortality.
Through religion, spirituality, science and technology, we’re perpetually after a transcendence of our biological limits, leaving no particle undisturbed and no corner of the cosmos unexplored, despite knowing that an answer likely lies somewhere within the depths of our own consciousness.
And within our interactions with such outlets, be it the digitization of consciousness or the embrace of God, is a process that proves more telling below the surface.
In other words, our process of generating outlets to which we pour our faith into means something; we do this regardless of era, culture, or geography. On every continent, in every epoch of human history, there has been an afterlife to consider, a dimension overlaying that which we know.
This universal pattern tells us that we seem to be co-existing with a process rather than manifesting one; that we’re maybe rubbing up against a powerful variable in an equation, as opposed to simply creating a sub-variable which orbits around for the sake of psychological necessity.
The inevitability of religion, as a process next to the conscious human movement through space and time (rather than as a by-product of it), may thus be misunderstood as an existential construct of some kind.
If we humbly zoom out, and consider ourselves (at least for a moment) not to be the nucleus of our knowable reality, but rather a symbiotic fantasy of beauty and imperfection living off a blue speck floating through the cosmos, we can see that some processes are naturally supposed to function outside of us.
More over, we can also see that these processes are themselves subject to the same kind of natural law that we’re subjected to; evolution, increasing complexity, dissolution.
Faith, like the roots of a tree or the arms of a river system, encapsulates the same cycles of growth and decay as everything else seems to.
Unlike our consciousness, which seems to be the only exception to the hard and fast rules of reality, faith seems to be an undertaking for the subjective experiencer to interact with.
This perceptual shift can explain our unwavering faith in something that’s actually greater than us, not something of a disposition that happens to develop out of an existential thirst.
In other words, we don’t seem to create religion or seek digital immortality because it makes us feel better — we seem to be engaging with a bigger pattern, one that somehow hints at an overlay to our reality of more complex proportions.
Possibility
There’s also something of a powerful interplay between faith and possibility.
When we have faith, we have options; when we have options, we have faith.
When all seems lost, a sense of faith not only convinces us that the pendulum always swings the other way, but it expands our horizons by allowing us to idealize a greater scope of possible outcomes.
If we ground our perspective in despair, such a scope is diminished considerably. This is what a lot of media achieves today — grounding our perspective in one of desolation: the world is ending, there’s no socio-economic hope for the future, everything’s beyond repair; so why try? Why aspire if all the systems are corrupt and everything means nothing?
It’s all too easy to become jaded and hopeless. But if we look at the larger processes — the ebbing and flowing of events and trends, the natural expansion and contraction of circumstance— we see that today is no different from (and in countless ways better) than any other day in history; we see that failure will always be a close acquaintance to success; we see that dark needs light and light needs dark to exist with respective meaning.
To maintain a sense of unwavering faith in the larger processes of reality (in the dynamism of our existence) allows a conscious mind to ground expectations in an expanded realm of possibility (due to that very dynamism). Not to mention that it also saves a lot of unnecessary grief along the way.
To have faith in the cyclicality of all things is to temper expectation and fortify hope against those momentary lapses spurred by unexpected results. It’s thus easier to build a sense of trust with reality, understanding the entropic function of the universe and the inevitabilities of both creation and destruction.
Velocity
To assume that we’re at the highest echelon of some kind of chain of conscious agency and understanding, as we sit atop a fleck of dust for a period equivalent to a grain of sand in a desert of time — it seems to be a disproportional assumption, akin to the geocentric model of our cosmos that, until pretty recently, we aggressively killed over.
Yet this desert isn’t all that arid of a place. In the recorded millennia of our existence, we’ve carved out one hell of a story. We’ve carried fragments of that story along from one eon to the next and we’ve created meaning in a space of time that somehow allowed for meaning to be created in the first place.
All the while, we’ve grappled with faith and categorically lived in a way that exemplified its function, it’s value, it’s necessity and it’s prominence as a critical element of the human experience.
Our co-existence with faith, not only as something that expands out from within us but also as something that we seem to tap into, reveals itself as something of a dynamic universal process, encoded into the more objective structures of reality.
Such a process is most conducive to our generation of meaning and possibility if we ride with the currents of its movement through space and time — not resisting it, not doubting it.
It’s a message etched into every religious doctrine and historical lesson alike: faith seems central to the human journey.
The point is that faith, in itself, is a conscious process that seems to somehow transcend consciousness, encoded within the very essence of our movement through a reality we can’t understand. Our endless attempts to explain it through religion (or our attempts to explain it outside the context of any spirituality) say it all.
Through understanding our position relative to the cycles around us, to our interactions with the greater layers of reality, as well as our own orbits of possibility, we can make the most out of the momentous effect that faith affords us.
