The Power of Belief
Death, Liberation, and the Third Path
The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes a strategy for escaping the cycle of rebirth (which can only be attempted and achieved during the death process). During the days following one’s death, many scenes are said to come before the individual, each masquerading as the truth. The goal is to not believe them. To see through them as illusions is to be liberated.
There are central disagreements among the branches of Buddhism — as there are between all religions — regardless of the wish often expressed in polite culture that all religions be instantiations of the One. There is much overlap, but just as many methods, principles and goals that are incompatible. But differences aside, I find myself in agreement with this particular admonition to not be so quick to believe everything one encounters. Whatever is real, must be real enough to withstand our stubbornness.
This of course is not unique to Tibetan thought. Christianity as well has a rich narrative of rejecting the reality one encounters. This is where they most converge. Like Peter walking on the water, the message is that there is a higher truth than what is, and that our faith is more real than whatever reality we are encountering. What we call science — being itself an outgrowth of the Eleusinian-Greek/Judeo-Christian tradition — is as well embedded with this notion: that what is does not have to be, but can be transformed through our belief, which is the starting condition of knowledge. This notion has found its way into all aspects of popular culture, from psychology and self-help to education and media. We are told we do not have to accept or believe our limitations; instead, we can transcend them through the power of our belief.
If we believe the wind and the waves, like Peter we will sink. Or in the Tibetan narrative (which Jung saw as a template of the unconscious and its attending archetypes, and Leary saw as a template of the psychedelic experience), if we believe the monsters of our mind that we may encounter in death (which are as it turns out, simply the peaceful deities masquerading as wrathful ones), we will be caught up again in the cycle of rebirth.
But unlike Buddhism in general, whose goal could be described in new age terms as identification with unitary awareness, my goal is not the remerging into the undifferentiated Godhead, but as the mystics say, to ‘survive the fierce particularity of love’. What the Buddhist tradition seems to lack that the Christian one retains, is the creative power of belief. The point of reality is not to reveal itself as an illusion, but the point of illusion is to reveal reality as a creation. The goal therefore is not just to know, but to create. At least this seems to be the case for the Christian tradition.
In addition to the cycle of rebirth on the one hand and the liberation into Nirvana on the other presented by the Buddhist tradition, there is a third path we might call the Christian path, which is to decline even this unification — or to put it a better way — to walk into this unification and yet remain intact, which is what we see in the resurrection motif: Jesus goes into death and into reunion with the Father, and yet returns retaining his humanness and his human form. As much as I find disagreement with Camus, with this agree: I do not want the ‘abstract immortality of the species become Spirit’, I want ‘the immortality of the entire man, clothed in his living body’.
Choice is higher than truth, and therefore it is up to us to decide what we want. This is where Buddhism and Christianity most diverge, and why in the latter you are saved by your belief, rather than liberated by your awareness of the truth, as is the case for the former. The postmodernists have taken this out of its context. Standing on the shoulders of philosophers, they are playing with tools they do not seem to understand, attempting to mold the creative power of belief into a force for a self-centered tyranny. But as with all revolutions, like the psychedelic revolution before it, we must endure a period of excess, with the hope it doesn’t tear us apart before we learn to control it.
