The Many Faiths in Life

In coping with fear about the world and its looming crises, I lean on an idea that’s helped me for years, namely drawing a parallel between personal mental illness and collective dysfunction. 

I first thought of it during the pandemic, when I watched with dismay as rational discussion gave way to overreaction, sound bites, invective, and conspiracy theories. At the same time, reports of climate disasters and social breakdown steadily increased our collective anxiety, which sometimes bordered on panic. Stabilizing voices—though present—were drowned out.

For me, this pattern was painfully familiar. Back when I was in psychiatric crisis, a sane part of me watched my erratic, destructive behavior with dismay, but it lacked the strength to intervene. I see this as fundamentally the same as what’s now happening globally, as wise voices exist but remain too weak to realign our civilization’s sad trajectory toward disintegration. The collective mind is gripped by a dysfunction that seems like an expanded version of individual mental illness. Of course, this collective mental disorder relates to individual ones like depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, ADHD, narcissism, sociopathy, self-hatred, and so on. The latter feed the former, and the former echoes the latter—at continental scale.

My own healing required nurturing the wiser parts of myself until they grew strong enough to lead me beyond trauma, delusion, and reactivity. Healing society will require the same: cultivating wiser voices until they acquire a critical mass and can guide us onto a saner course. As with personal mental illness, collective healing demands we face our trauma and its legacies with compassion and understanding. We cannot get better by denying the conquest, feudalism, colonialism, slavery, land/resource theft, genocide, and other horrors that built the wealth and social structures we inhabit today. We must face and heal the wounds.

Nature shows the way. After volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts, Life engages damaged landscapes and heals them. Previously obscure species adapt to the new circumstances and grow in numbers, diversity, and dominance, helping the world reinvent itself. Humanity could do something similar if more of us cultivated faith in the power of Life and relinquished our desperate, doomed efforts to take control through aggressive views and technologies. Scattered pockets of wisdom could coalesce and gain influence. Intuition, synchronicity, and inspiration would become more common, and our collective mind would begin to mend. We’d then stand a chance of averting the disasters that threaten to end this attempt at civilization.

Durable change requires deep transformation of the collective mind. Though I used to believe Mindful Biology might help in this task, I now understand guiding society toward psycho-spiritual health requires more than half-baked teaching programs. For one thing, many folks who see the problem still remain mired in it. I am one of them. Thus a lot of so-called spiritual teachings become—in effect—commodities. 

Personally, before I can feel authentic as a teacher, I need to advance my own psycho-spiritual healing. I also suspect easing my own mental dysfunction will help the global mind by shifting its balance of health versus illness—even if I only ’teach’ by being a little calmer and more contented.

These days I’m recognizing that calm and contentment depend on some sort of faith. What I have faith in seems unimportant; it’s the faith itself that matters. 

My own faith usually orients around ‘Life' but sometimes around ‘God', or ‘Mystery’, or Quakerism’s 'Inward Light of Christ’. And in many ways, when I use the word ‘Life’ it is a stand-in for the unnameable that goes by so many names. But there is an additional value in orienting toward Life, in particular, because we can see how it works (whereas we find it much harder to be sure how God works). 

One way Life inspires faith is the way it continues to grow and evolve as long as it possibly can. Unless we trigger runaway global heating and sterilize the planet, living organisms will continue here for billions of years. Humanity is likely to continue too, at least for millennia, and the people who remain will find food, make babies, etc. Beyond that slightly comforting fact, we can have faith in Life’s ingenuity. If it can work out how to see and fly, it can work out how to sustain a global population of verbally fluent apes. No matter how grim things look, there remains a chance the human collective will learn from its mistakes, gain the ability to minimize greed, hatred, narcissism, and sociopathy, make amends to those who need it, and create a truly humane society. I have faith that we (as part of Life) hold that potential within us, whether we realize it or not.

Another inspiration for faith is how Life instills us with fortitude to endure harrowing experiences, and how living beings (including human ones) have met all sorts of adversity in the past. In the best case, they do so with creativity and grace. My own history has taught me I can make it through circumstances that seem certain to destroy me, and that—in due time—I feel strengthened, softened, and wisened by the process. 

Aside from growing through outer adversity, it’s also possible to grow through inner turmoil. I’ve been confronting some deeply troubled parts of my own personality. Happily, I’m able to do so without my former shame, seeing them as imprints from personal, ancestral, and historical trauma—or karma. As I face them and work to both accept their existence and minimize the damage they cause, I see clear evidence of Life’s resilience, this time on the individual psychological scale.

I also begin to see my skills and limits more clearly. It helps that I’ve gained new information, like a diagnosis of mild autism. I never understood my painful social difficulties before, but now they make perfect sense. So another form of resilience (and another basis for faith) comes from the culture itself. Yes, it’s largely insane, but it still produces valuable insights we can use to grow into what Life calls us to become, whether on the personal or collective level.

Of course, as we grope our way to sanity, we can’t ignore the world’s immediate suffering. We are called to help in socially responsible ways. I’ve taken on some volunteer roles with that aim. However we are able, we must engage in tangible action. Our actions might seem very small, perhaps insignificant, but small steps can cover a vast distance as they add up.

We can cultivate even more faith by recognizing how wisdom has emerged repeatedly in human history, as people grappled with the terrors of their own era. Long ago the Buddha identified the root causes of needless suffering: individualism, greed, hatred, and ignorance. He was responding to those tendencies in his time, and now we live in a culture that actively celebrates and promotes those parasitic qualities. That’s discouraging, but it also means we have knowledge that can help. Culture evolves and ours could adapt—in effect by developing a better immune system. Over and over in the history of life immune mechanisms have countered the emergence of parasites. The human immune system is a marvel of complexity that counters any number of pathogens. Socially, police are a crude example of cultural immunity, as is the legal system. Both can be corrupted and side with parasitism, but that simply points to a need for further evolution. What this will look like is challenging to imagine, and we may need a genuine improvement in collective mental health before it can emerge, but I have faith that society could protect itself from its parasitic overgrowth (akin to cancerous transformation coming from the inside rather than infection coming from the outside). 

Then there is Christ’s message. To my mind and heart, it shows how human life need not come to a comfortable end to be meaningful and advance an important spiritual cause. Maybe all the uproar we live through is necessary, even salvational—a kind of crucifixion. That certainly feels true in my case. I have a strong intuition that I’ve been resolving a great deal of antecedent trauma and karma through my own struggles and resolutions. Part of it comes from my own past and lineage; part of it comes from the history of humanity and possibly even the history of other civilizations in other solar systems or even other dimensions. Who knows? What feels clear is that this is important work, and when I came to that realization my stormy history immediately felt less like a curse and more like a sacred duty. Maybe our society’s storminess is similar, as hard as that feels to believe.

One step toward an effective immune system, and also toward resolving humanity's toxic past, must be the spiritual maturation of more and more people. An ever-increasing number of us must reject the grasping/achieving/producing/consuming/self-criticizing/self-promoting/etc that is so rampant.  To live with less pressure to achieve and produce can be a radical, healing, and salvational act.

Aside from the activism inherent in letting go, there’s the way aging calls for it—very relevant for those of us in the meditation club. When embraced, the inevitability of decline makes simple being sweetly attractive. Two years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Currently it is being watched rather than treated, but it reminds me of the of my own impending decline and death. And for the past week, my wife Mandy has been dealing with a small bowel infection, which likewise puts some painful reality in front of me (in fact, I’m very scared). Somehow, more savoring and less struggling feels essential at this point. 

By analogy, we might frame the problems with are deteriorating civilization as an aging process. The sad truth is that our political/corporate institutions might complete their march toward total dysfunction, humanity might destroy the ecosphere, nuclear war could break out, and so on. In ‘The Light of Our Stars’ astrobiologist Adam Frank argues that civilizations arise frequently in the universe, but we see no evidence of them because they destroy themselves too quickly to overlap in time. That may or may not be true on a cosmic scale, but our earthly civilization surely seems to be building momentum in its slide toward ruin. If the end is coming, or even if it might be coming, savoring the beauty still with us becomes the urgent duty of anyone who wants to resist the despair of parasitic overgrowth. 

For me, leaning toward faith makes all the difference. I don’t need to be sure everything will work out, that cruelty will recede, that people will be treated fairly, that the ecosystem will be preserved, etc. In fact, I can’t be sure about any of that. Yet I can be sure that the sorts of faith I’ve described are valid and potent. With them in mind and heart, even the most painful of times can be met with compassion and awe. And no matter what is coming, we can savor now. 

As said in Max Ehrman’s Desiderata: “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."