It is no easy matter to probe what it means for me to believe. My wondering thoughts have roamed around the idea of belief for many years. Most of my life, I have thought that I only believed what my senses could not perceive. For a long time, I thought that to believe had to do with other beings or entities that may exist beyond my sensory awareness. I don’t think it is quite that simple.
I believe that there is a maple tree growing in my back yard. I think I have seen it, heard its leaves rustle, felt its sinewy bark, its thick trunk. I think I have smelled the scent of its dry leaves when I rake hem in the fall and have only failed to taste its flavor because I am now an adult and no longer think I need to place everything into my mouth.
I can put all these sensory experiences together and have a notion that there is a tree growing in my back yard. I think I know that tree. Yet every one of these sensory impressions are mediated by light photons, fluctuating sound waves and sensory nerve impulses that convince me, allow me to experience the presence of the tree.
The subtlety of this has begun to dawn on me. I have no direct experience of a tree, all my experience is mediated by something else. In a realty check, I notice that I may only be seeing light photons bouncing off a tree but I don’t see a tree. Yet something in me opens up to the tree’s presence. The softer and more open my heart becomes, the more deeply I feel and experience that presence as any other human might. I believe that the tree is present.
But only I, this human, experiences the tree directly in the way that is unique to me and my belief. All my sensory data is massaged and shaped by my long history of sensory experience. All my impressions are based on my belief in the validity and truthfulness of a whole assortment of mediating factors: photons, air waves, air molecules of treeness, nerve impulses. In some sense, I believe the tree is actually present based on a sensory experience I only remotely understand.
Every other week, I spend a couple hours looking at and talking with Kelli who lives in California. I habitually think I am having a direct experience of her presence, I sense her mood, watch her movements, listen to everything she says. In what seems like a truly experienced way, our minds and hearts not only touch one another but sometimes seem almost to blend. All this is based on my belief that I have a deep experience of her presence and am aware of what she is saying, what movements she makes, what expressions cross her face.
Yet, I have no direct sensory experience of her. All these sensory impressions are mediated by electronics, by electrons flying through air and wires. These electrons stimulate baffles in my speaker and a screen that glows with moving images of Kelli. I think I hear and see Kelli, but I am only hearing and seeing very indirectly. In reality, I am relying on human-made devices that mimic what my ears and eyes might otherwise perceive if Kelli were in front of me.
I believe in the reliability and truthfulness of those electronic devices, even though I know similar devices can not be reliable and truthful. Similar devices can distort and reshape the impact of photons electronically, and they can create CGI images that may resemble the original but not be the same. The images of characters created in movies like Avatar are all manipulations of photons the naked eye might otherwise perceive. The characters appear real and they invite me into their presence as any other character images might.
I rely on the reliability of my electronic devices, and I believe in a presence of Kelli who appears to be seated in front of me, even though I am looking at an electronic screen and Kelli is many miles away. She is miles away from any direct sensory experience, but I believe in what I seem to see and hear, all the while knowing only part of my awareness is true.
Humans use similar electronic means to become aware of suns and planets that are far beyond what our senses can directly experience. We even see things outside the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. We believe what these electronics tell us as all their electronic “senses” are converted into human sense experiences, images and data. They electronically “see” so that we can interpret and understand a presence beyond our senses.
Through our “seeing” devices, we believe in the presence of many unseen worlds. Sometimes we even reach beyond what our electronic devices can detect and believe in realities such as dark matter and dark energy. These realities remain only inferred and are still undetected, but we believe in their presence. We see evidence of forces, traces of reality that suggest a kind of presence and we sort of believe, tentatively, in the presence of something.
We often create a kind of loose awareness by what we kind of believe. Cultures such as Tibetan Buddhism have had similar leaps of belief and quasi awareness. They have their own science. They have felt traces, signatures of forces in their experience and they gave shape to those energies. They created what we westerners habitually call gods and goddesses, and they regarded them as personifications of what they more directly perceived and experienced. Their gods and goddesses might have even been closer to what is real, closer to direct sensory experience, than our notions of dark matter and dark energy.
So when someone asks me whether I believe in God, this is no straight forward question and there is no straight forward answer. To believe is no simple matter. There can be no simple or unqualified statement of what I believe. To believe always relies on intermediary agents that only give faint impressions of a reality that exists beyond my senses.
It is further complicated by no two of us having exactly the same awareness of any reality, even when we think we have so much in common.
Though I sometimes think I am getting close, there is nothing I yet experience directly except what is inside of me. And that has its own qualifications and complications.
So every day, I step into a world built on my belief. It is a system of believing that has been built and shaped by many years of experience. It is a system of believing that constantly changes every day. I am convinced that if my heart can be open and generous, the world which I believe exists will continue to unfold, reveal its true self, and welcome me into it.