Buddhist Faith Crisis

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“The ideas can be so beautiful, but yet the people did the worst things. I just saw the story of buddah the PBS special, and it just seems like in India, that they embellish the truth, to tell a story, if it’s true I don’t know. My faith is now really spotty. My only release to deal with the anxiety I felt, now not there. I wish we had people to talk to here. I read what he wrote, and now I just think, is nirvana just simply being nice and happiness?

HG, this has been my experience as well, when talking with friends of other faiths. While stories and backdrops vary from different religions, the human experience is very similar, that it seems to show how Stage 3 and 4 descriptions of a faith development in the individual is beyond the institutions that are serving the individual.

These issues are not unique to us. We are all part of the human family. Just different stories as we try to express or make sense of our experiences.

I think the struggles we have come when we get down to the details of any religion. At a high level, the messages inspire us and ring true…but take any religious story down to day to day interactions (how bishops treat us, how monks treat us, truth about the stories taught, rules of what to do or not to do and how that makes sense to us, etc) and the human experience is still difficult to make sense of. The details get tricky.

The first thing I noticed are the commonalities about what drives people out: hypocrisy, personal slights, insecurity, withholding information, and so forth, but the next thing I always wonder is what came first, the shift in perspective or the perception of these negative things. They sort of escalate and snowball once you have the thought that “this isn’t for me.” Suddenly every interaction is a pro or con. Every new piece of information is for the defense or the prosecution. Even your own moods become an extension of how you view the religion and how it views you. It’s similar to a rocky marriage. Something gets it to the point that it’s rocky, but at that point, your spouse not doing the dishes or sighing at the wrong time can all be seen in light of the rockiness of the relationship rather than overlooked as momentary irritations. There is heightened awareness and sensitivity in that moment. Maybe we don’t need to go back to pre-faith crisis so much as we need to go back to reading less into things, forgiving and overlooking more human frailty, whether our own or that of leaders or random people we meet.

I know that I am like this. If DW and I are fighting I can build a mental case (prosecution) for why she is in error. If DW apologizes or makes some other gesture at reconciliation then my case for prosecution evaporates. So sudden is this shift that it has caused me to wonder, “What changed?”.

I believe that the principle change is my orientation. If I am feeling wounded or on the defensive then there are ample points of evidence to justify my response. If I feel good and my primary needs are being met then the picture shifts to a much more positive image.

The state of my marriage doesn’t change often or in significant ways (thank goodness). The bad parts and the good parts coexist and stand at the ready to help me build whatever narrative I need at the moment.

In relation to the church, I imagine that over time such negative thought patterns could sort of calcify and become permanent fixtures in my brain. Perhaps that is why some are observed to “leave the church but never leave it alone.” I do not necessarily see this as a bad thing – I am sure that our brains would get tired or having to reevaluate their orientations all the time. Just interesting commentary on how my brain functions play out on my perceptual world.

Buddhism undergoes a lot of bowdlerization and glamourization in the west, but it does have certain practical aspects lacking in Mormonism, e.g. meditation… these actually produce physical and psychological changes, whereas we just try to stay in line all the time.