When I watch how people have been behaving politically and otherwise - on both sides of the spectrum - I feel sad. What is occurring right now is a heightened manifestation of anxiety, cloaked in poor coping mechanisms such as defiance, arrogance, and conceit to maintain an illusion of superiority. We have abandoned any semblance of humility due to corrosive fear. Our fear is robbing us of faith.
Indeed, as I came to the epiphany recently, the opposite of fear is faith. It would be easy to think that the opposite of faith is an absence of faith, faithlessness, but it is actually fear. When we are incapable of comprehending that there is a higher spiritual power at work in the universe, we are left to think erroneously that we are it. And given our steep limitations as a species, we are sorely lacking in any means to transcend our latent existential terror. We do not know where in the universe we are, where it starts and where it ends, in what our universe is contained, and what preceded it. We can only see, smell, hear, touch, and taste on a narrow spectrum which doesn't match other species. We are fumbling for definition in the darkness, still unclear on why we exist and why we die.
We are poorly sensate beings in an endless sea, unable to help ourselves unless we embrace faith borne of humbleness. Faith is what permits us to hand over our worry, our terror at not being in control, to a higher power. Faith is not a religious manifestation per se, but a spiritual practice. With faith we understand that we emanated from the universe, that we are children of the universe in which we exist for a reason. Our existence alone is proof of a meaning of sorts, and this meaning was engendered from the origins of the universe. Faith is the only glue which can ground us when contemplating our unclear place and role in the universe. Otherwise, we are left in sheer terror, in black blindness at knowing we know nothing of nothing.
Faith allows us to believe that there must be more, something remarkably more, beyond the limitation of our knowledge. Whatever is beyond, is beyond our comprehension. But faith, an optimism in the glory of the universe, is the bridge to beginning to understand all. It is not the fear of closed-mindedness that will help us; it is the expansion of our faith which will allow us to draw closer to the comfort we crave.
