Do you have faith in or do you trust yourself?
What Toryo Ito discusses resonates with me in a peculiar way. I was once having a session with a psychoanalyst and exposed how I was desperate because I had a near zero grade in a physics exam at college. To feel desperate due to low grades happens with many many people, by the way. I'm talking about it because she asked me "Why are you desperating and worried if you told me that you already knew that you weren't prepared for that exam?" (which is the truth, I didn't prepare). See how the question she made is interesting? I talked with her and she made this comment: "It seems that you are believing that a miracle is going to make something good happen". Can you see the relationship between faith and desperation right here in this short description I just gave?
Toryo Ito explains that faith in non-buddhism religions tends to put god above everything and this means believing without knowing or without seeing. When other religions worship gods there is an expectation that, let's call "pure faith", can bring salvation or redemption in any form in which the believer may think about. Buddhism on the other hand is better explained with trust or trustfulness and not faith. Because you have to believe not in some deity or supernatural force, but in yourself. It's about self-enlightment and this usually is what the meditation stance means. How many answers are there for the question "What is faith?" or "What is God?". A plethora, to say at least. Which one is the ultimate truth? That's up to yourself to find, which bring us back to the Buddha's path.
In my own wiki I made a comment that often calculus students make a leap of faith. Because they don't understand the theory and calculate something which they don't know whether it's right or wrong, but they believe that it may be right. Because believing in luck is better than not believing at all or never making a guess. Going back to my exam, now that it has passed some years since then, I can clearly see how I was expecting that out of sheer luck something could change the ill fate that that low grade would bring to me at that semester. Maybe I was unconsciously hopping for the exam grades of everyone to be so low that the teacher would offer a second chance or something around those lines. Today I imagine how common this feeling is. It must be very common. Among colleagues at college I must have heard them talking how a certain teacher is motherly / fatherly to give an extra exam for students to improve their grades. We can extrapolate the same idea to many other scenarios such as getting a job, wanting a criminal to be caught, cheering for your favorite football team, etc. See? It's all about having faith! Can you notice how often pity / condescendence relates to faith and vice-versa? I'm pretty sure everyone has heard the phrase "Where there is life, there is hope". Yeah, to abandon all hope is bad in most scenarios. However, what power does hope have on changing the fact that I didn't study? None.
Since when does faith move mountains in a reference to Christianism? Disclaimer, I'm not trying to compare here Christianism and Buddhism. If I think on every film, TV show and Animations which I watched, I notice that I had more or less the same interpretation of faith and salvation that was presented on them. People pray and some supernatural force comes to their rescue. At the end of the Supernatural TV Show, the new god, in the form of Jack, responds to Dean Winchester's demand that everyone on Earth is desperate for answers from God: "Those answers will be inside each person. Maybe not today, but someday". See? There is a subtle difference in between hoping that some miracle is going to make things happen and in you doing things to set in motion those so called "miracles". I think that often we are misinterpreting Christianism and having the wrong picture of faith.
To give a practical example of how religion can have a negative effect: In Brazil there is a national entrance exam that covers all the high school subjects. Math, physics, chemistry, biology, history, language, etc. Every year some people arrive late and cannot go in to take the exam because of their lateness. I don't think this is much different in any country by the way. I remember one year when the local news reported that a student arrived late and missed the exam. Do you know the reason for that student's late arrival? Because she and her family decided to go to a church to pray right before the exam and, in doing so, lost track of time. In my other article I told how I took the entrance exam many times. While I can't remember and can't count it, I'm sure that I must have had the thought "Am I going to pass this time because the competition this year is lower?" or something similar. I'm not saying to dismiss faith, but sometimes the way we see faith is more akin to a supernatural power rather than practical actions.
Bernardo (Bernardinho) Rezende and many other athletes and coaches say more or less the same things about hard work and achieving perfection or close to it. If I score really low in an exam. Is God, Jesus or some deity going to help me? If I am at the Olympic Games and make it to the finals. Is the food or a virus going to infect the other athletes in such a tide of luck that I win the competition because of that? It's not impossible, but to rely on this way of thinking is to neglect hard work and to dismiss how much hard work the others have done to reach the same final as you did. Randomness is a thing in this universe but it's not a deity, not a force nor an omniscient entity. I wish I could go on in this debate which mixes philosophy and mathematics but I'm not qualified for it. I've also seen people, including me, blaming misfortune on randomness and bad luck. I don't have much to say about this, but perhaps stoicism is an answer for it.
What Toryo Ito says about slowing down reminds me of what Marsha Linehan said about treating borderline patients. They don't tolerate standing still, sitting down and doing nothing but closing their eyes and meditate. If you know the description of BPD you know that these people often seek strong emotions or things which can make them feel alive. Even sociopaths / psychopaths do it too. Did you notice what I've just highlighted? These people are often able to focus on doing something which relates to strong emotions and/or feeling alive. Meditation and stillness are also about focusing on one's life. Although from the complete opposite direction! Marsha made this realization and found ways to translate teachings from buddhism to make BPD patients able to focus their attention and energy into themselves. In spite of the person being unable to tolerate meditation, they are able to work and focus on a path of healing. The key is about rethinking our perception of time, because our minds have the ability to transit to the future and to the past and often the disorders arise when the mind is stuck in a "psychological time" detached from the present time. To quote Shawshank's Redemption famous scene, where Andy Drufresne finally escapes from prison: "Dear Warden, you were right. Salvation lies within".
Side note: the intersection of mental health disorders, fanactism and religion is a very broad topic that I could dwell in, but it's too much for this article and out of reach for me. If you go research on narcissism like I did you certainly are going to find people commenting on how leaders of certain religious groups have narcissistic and even psychopathic traits. Not very hard to see the connection. Teachings of any religion can be misinterpreted and distorted because it's all open to different viewpoints, including the most extreme ones.
I've watched numerous videos about narcissism and NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and Dr. Ramani Durvasula says that if the narcissist chooses a path to heal, that's a choice that they've made on their own. Not because they were told to. They have to solve their inner conflicts, because nobody else is going to solve for them. Which is more or less the same which I said in my own article here. If you look up the description of all Cluster B personality disorders they all share the same problem of having a void inside. They all share the same symptom of having rapid mood shifts, because the emotions they have are shallow. Yet, they may appear as very strong from within. If you paid attention to what Toryo Ito said about the garden and taking the time to fully appreciate it. When I watched him talk about the garden I immediately related his description to Ramani describing how narcissists have shallow emotions.
Incidentally, I watched a video called "How to make a narcissist happy" by Nameless Narcissist, a simple man diagnosed as a narcissist sharing his life experiences. In this video he talks about his childhood and how he found sunflowers fascinating. Can a narcissist care for something so small such as a small flower? Nameless narcissist is one example and there may be others around the world. Mind you, I don't know him personally but I thought that I could cite him here. I just have this belief that no person is born and destined to follow on this or that path. The only exception I'm going to make is due to what I've came to learn from forensic psychiatry's viewpoint. Some paths are, regrettably, deemed irreversible and to better understand why I'd have to delve into the realm of criminology. Once a person is walking on those rare, irreversible paths, there is no turning back. (Disclaimer: I'm not discussing whether the person was already born on that path). My current stance is that we all have choices, but when we deal with crimes and whether the person can choose to change their path. That's something I can't answer because I don't have experience with such cases.
I think that the conclusion of this article would be along the lines of a question: Do you have faith in or do you trust yourself? Thiago Klafke made a video about getting into the industry of games and environment art and he said that you should find your own path and voice. How would I relate personality disorders, psychology and religion? From what I've came to learn over the past few years, all mental health disorders are strongly related to a flow of information and energy from you to the outside and vice-versa. Finding a balance and peace in that flow is the key to find meaning in your life.
Bottom note: Are faith and trust mutually exclusive? I didn't research on that but I wouldn't say that adopting one means discarding the other. This is a very good question with no single answer out there.
PS: Why I added that video about Kyoto's citizens in this article? I thought it was amusing that I've watched it and then I watched Toryo Ito. I thought to myself "Were the aristocrats in Kyoto during the 19th century narcissists?". Because the description that Shogo gave made me think about it. It's pretty amusing for me that a buddhist temple and school is located precisely in Kyoto. Compare narcissism and Buddhism, they are like water and oil. Impossible to blend well.
References
- A Japanese monk shares his best life advice - Takashii from Japan
- DBT Mindfullness skills - Marsha Linehan
- The 2 surprising reasons why Japan hates Kyoto - Let's ask Shogo
- How to make a narcissist happy - Jacob Danford Skidmore
- Getting my dream job in the games industry was... Hard! - Thiago Klafke
- Supernatural's scene from "Inherit the Earth", when Jack becomes the new God (It may seem strange to have this source here, but as I said. I've came to realize that many of the beliefs I had came from TV and TV is very good at spreading beliefs, both the good and the bad ones)
- Shawshank's Redemption scene where the Warden finds the message left by Andy
I can't remember the exact videos, but I'm certainly using other sources such as: Pedro Calabrez, Clóvis de Barros Filho, Bernardo (Bernardinho) Rezende, Alan Mocellim, Surviving Narcissim, Dr. Guido Palomba, among others.
