What is the power of faith?
What does religion have to do with it?
The New Mindscape #A2–4
None of your goals for the future exists. They are pure figments of your imagination. But you’re going to convert that imagination into reality.
A necessary condition for this is faith.
You’re going to do it because you have faith that it’s possible.
If you have no faith, you won’t do anything.
Your faith will empower your goal, which will empower you, and make you change your reality.
Lacking faith, your goal will be weakened, and it will disempower you, and you won’t change anything.
What can give you faith?
The first source of faith is your own experience.
As a child I was awful at sports and physical education. I had no faith in my body, and ignored it completely, focusing only on my intellectual development.
But a few years ago, I decided to start exercising at the gym. I had little faith in my ability to train, but after doing it for a few weeks, I started to see the difference. I had succeeded. Now I had faith, and I was more confident to continue.
A second source of faith is your companions: others who have accomplished the thing that you want to accomplish; or others who are striving together with you.
Think of a sports team. Everybody is training together, learning together and encouraging each other. Some of the players with more experience give tips to the more junior players, helping them and giving them confidence.
A third source of faith is teachers and mentors. Teachers what is needed to reach the goal, they can instruct you on the proper steps, correct you when you’re going the wrong way, and help you to advance further.
And a fourth source of faith is role models. These are people who have accomplished what you want to achieve, and you want to be like them.
Role models could be others in your group. Or they could be friends, or more senior family members. Or they could be people you’ve heard about or read about.
The role models could be real people you personally know, but they could also be historical figures. Or they could even be fictional heroes from films or novels… or myths or religious history.
Who are your role models when you imagine yourself in ten years, or when you give yourself goals for the next year for your body, your mind and your spirit?
All of these people in your mind — your past self, your companions, your teachers, and your role models — are objects of consciousness that you empower, and who will empower you to reach your goals.
The more you remember them and think about them, the more they will inhabit your mindscape, helping you to reach your dreams.
The more they are alive in your mind — the more you imagine yourself with them, you hear them talking to you, you think of how they respond to you — the more they will have a positive influence on you.
But it goes the other way too. Often, what stops you is voices in your mind, telling you that what you can’t do it, that it’s foolish, you’re going to fail…
These thoughts come from your past experiences of failure. They come from people around you who have discouraged you in the past, or who have negative attitudes or influence on you today.
The come from your fear of others, your fear of what they will say if you become different.
All of these people — rather, the thoughts of all these people — are filling your mindscape and create a strong energy field that prevents you from having the faith to realise your dream.
So your mindscape is full of people giving you positive and negative energy, helping you or stopping you from achieving your dreams.
Some of these people are people you know, others are real people you’ve never met in person (whether they’re alive or lived in history), others are purely imaginary.
But even those who are real people, are largely imaginary in your mind. You don’t know everything about them (in fact, you know very little about most of the real people you know in your life), and they aren’t physically with you most of the time. Much, and perhaps most, of how they appear in your mind is imaginary. And yet there they are, mentally present with you, in your mindscape, and sending you positive or negative energy.
So what are you going to do?
You want to enhance the presence of those who empower you and give you positive energy, and to reduce the presence of those who are dragging you down.
You want to do that in the real world — spend more time with those who will be companions, role models and teachers to inspire you, encourage you and help you.
And you want to spend less time with those who are drawing you down.
And you want to do that in your mindscape — you want your companions, your role models and your teachers to have a greater place in your mindscape, so that they can empower you all the time.
Let the positive energies be greater than the negative.
And when you are full of positive energies, they will flow out and transform the negative energies in your mind and in the world around you.
You will have strong faith, and your faith will inspire and give strength to others.
Faith in your body, faith in your mind, faith in your spirit
Now let’s go back and see how this applies to the body, the mind and the spirit.
In terms of the body, let’s imagine that you’re a member of the basketball team. You gain faith and confidence in your capacity to be a better player, because you have a warm and supportive team. You practice weekly with them, the coach corrects you and helps you to improve, and you have role models among the professional players, who inspire you to always do your best. Through basketball matches and competitions, you are tested and learn to improve.
Now, if you had never heard of basketball, or never played it, or if your first experiences playing were very negative, or if your team was divided and unsupportive, or if it never met to practice, or if the coach was bad or deeply discouraging, or if there were no role models, or if everyone around you told you that basketball was a bad or useless sport — you’d have little or no faith, and you wouldn’t be able to learn to be a good player.
In terms of the mind, same thing. At school you’re with cohorts of other students, you mutually help and encourage each other, you create a study environment, you practice daily, you have teachers and role models, you learn to improve through competition, tests and exams.
Through all of this practice and this support from companions, role models and teachers, you gained the faith that allowed you to develop your abilities and to gain admission to HKU. But if you’d lacked all of that — no peers to stimulate or encourage you, no practice or opportunity to exercise, no good teachers — and if everyone around you always said that going to school is a waste of time — it’s likely that you’d not have gained faith, and highly unlikely that you’d have been admitted to HKU, even if you had the potential to do so.
Now let’s think of the spirit. This will be harder for most of you to imagine, because nowadays most people have never even heard about training the spirit, or the only thing they’ve heard is that it’s not important or a waste of time, or they even laugh about it, or they think it’s something easy and not worth bothering much with, or they think it’s something so hard it’s not even worth trying. Under such conditions, it’s very hard to develop the faith to grow spiritually.
Religious communities are common environments for nurturing and training the spirit. In a healthy religious community, spiritual seekers will find a group of companions who will mutually support and encourage each other. There will be teachers and mentors to guide those who are learning. And there will be role models who give inspiration.
Among those teachers and role models, some may be living people within the religious community itself, or friends or family members of the spiritual seeker.
But some of the great teachers and role models are historical or mythical figures. The world’s major religious and philosophical traditions are derived from such great teachers or role models — figures such as Laozi, Confucius, Krishna, Buddha, Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and Baha’u’llah. And within the different religious traditions, there are countless other teachers and role models, often known as saints, sages, bodhisatvas, wise men, learned ones, heroes, and so on.
These figures are known as either perfect manifestations or incarnations of divine or spiritual qualities, or as exemplars of high levels of spiritual qualities and wisdom.
Spiritual seekers find inspiration in the lives of these figures, and they find guidance in their teachings. Learning from their lives and their teachings, they gain faith and confidence in their spiritual efforts and progress. This is especially the case if they have companions learning from each other and helping each other along the way, such as through spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, rituals, studying the teachings, and putting the teachings in practice in their lives. They also learn through tests and failures, which allows them to strengthen their faith.
A different approach to religion
The way I have talked about faith and religion here, is very different from the way most people talk about it.
People think that the main question concerning religion is whether you believe in God, or whether you believe in gods. And they think it’s about arguing the pros and cons.
But actually, for those engaged in a spiritual path, that’s not the main question. Jesus, for example, really existed in history. There’s no debate about that. And he lives in the mindscape of those who have faith in him. His life and teachings, recorded in the Gospel, give them guidance and inspiration. It is the same for the Buddha and his followers. He lived in history, and he lives in their mindscape.
There are doubts as to whether figures such as Laozi, Krishna and Moses actually existed in history, and if they did, what is historically true about their lives.
But regardless, the stories actually exist. The books such as the Daodejing, the Baghavad Gita and the Book of Exodus in the Bible exist. These stories and books, and the figures within them, do provide guidance, inspiration and faith. And for those who study them, they exist as objects of consciousness in their mindscape. And those who turn to them for spiritual guidance and inspiration, empower them in their mindscape. In their mindscape, the stories and books release positive energies and strengthen their faith, helping them to grow spiritually.
Practices such as prayer, meditation and ritual all consist in arranging your mindscape to establish objects of consciousness that release positive spiritual forces, and to diminish or remove negative spiritual forces.
You don’t need to “believe” in it. You can be an atheist and just “play” with these thoughts in your mind, like a thought experiment. You don’t need to have a religious identity. You just need to do it. The more you practice, the more effect there will be.
Of course, if you “believe”, if you make an effort to empower the objects of consciousness, and if you are committed to such a practice with a community of companions, the effect will be far, far stronger.
But what I want to say is that it’s not so simple as believing in God or not, or having a religious identity or not.
This isn’t the way most people think about prayer, meditation and ritual. For most people — even religious people — they think these practices are about comfort or relaxation, or that they’re quaint or boring customs, rules, traditions or superstitions. And if they practice them blindly and superficially, there won’t be much benefit to their spirit. Just like, for the body, a basketball player who only knows some mechanical moves but not really how to play. Or, for the mind, like a student who only knows how to memorize but doesn’t know how to think.
Here, you’ll start to learn the methods of how to think, grow and act spiritually.
This course is completely different from most courses or introductory books on religion, which tell you that religion A believes this, and religion B believes that. And it doesn’t make much sense, and you can’t understand the power of those beliefs.
Here, you’re going to learn the methods and the mechanisms. Something that even many religious people don’t know.
If you really want to learn, reread and listen to this lesson, and meditate on each point deeply. This lesson alone contains the keys to opening your mind and releasing its powers, and to understanding the power of religion. If you read it once and quickly, you’ll forget it. But if you meditate on its contents and figure out how they apply to your own mind, you will see things in a completely new light, and you will begin a path to discover new powers and capacities in your life.
Most of you don’t have companions and teachers to help you to learn about your spirituality and strengthen it. This course is a space with such companions and teachers, where you can learn, explore and support each other without requiring you to commit to a specific religion. In this space, among your companions — your fellow students — you have different backgrounds. Some of you have different religious traditions and commitments; others are atheist or are simply open minded. All of you will be helping and supporting each other. Here, you are free and encouraged to question, to doubt, to debate. In this space, I’m your teacher, but only to facilitate and support your learning. Ultimately, I hope I will disappear from your mindscape — because, in this space, you are on an independent search for truth. You will never be required to believe in anything. Just learn how to play for a few months with your thoughts, your magic and your energies. And after this class ends, you can decide to stop playing, or you can decide to continue. But this will be your choice, and yours alone.
Further studies on faith:
Smith, William Cantwell. 1979. Faith and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sliwa, Paulina, 2018. “Know-how and Acts Of Faith”, Oxford Scholarship Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198798705.003.0013
Fowler, J.W. (1991), Stages in faith consciousness. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1991: 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/cd.23219915204
James W. Fowler & Mary Lynn Dell. Stages of faith and identity: birth to teens. Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics VOLUME 13, ISSUE 1, P17–33, JANUARY 2004. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1056-4993(03)00073-7
Heinz Streib (2001) Faith Development Theory Revisited: The Religious Styles Perspective. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 11:3, 143–158, DOI: 10.1207/S15327582IJPR1103_02
Jeff Levin. “How Faith Heals: A Theoretical Model”, EXPLORE, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 77–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2008.12.003.
Magin, Zachary E., Adam David, Lauren M. Carney, Crystal L. Park, Ian A. Gutierrez, and Login S. George, 2021. “Belief In God and Psychological Distress: Is It The Belief Or Certainty Of The Belief?”, Religions(12), 9:757. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090757
The New Mindscape series is a practical exploration of spirituality rooted in the critical perspectives of anthropology and sociology.
Click here for the previous essay in the series: Activate the power of your imagination.
Click here for the next essay in the series: A consultative approach to investigating the truth.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
