Year of Faith

I was planning on writing that previous post last night, but I ended up crashing pretty hard once I got home.  At the end of the day, as I made my way from work to the library downtown, I really started to feel the effects of the fast.  There were some predictable bodily pains, aches in my stomach and such, but there was also a feeling of focus, of concentration.  Perhaps I was just trying to ignore my own hunger, but I felt very, very focused on my own thoughts.  It was a lot like meditation actually.  It felt, well… spiritual.  Almost religious, like this feeling was important.  Considering I was reading Baha’i books throughout the day I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise, but I was really able to think clearly.  I actually felt good, like I really had a handle on what I was doing.  However, if I can learn anything from last month, it’s that I’ll have the rug pulled out from under me the moment I think I’ve come to understand anything, so I’ll just leave that as it is.  No matter how spiritual I may have felt I pretty much collapsed on my bed after I ate, so maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to praise whatever this was.

I have to say though, finally breaking down and eating something felt a little bit like defeat.  I wanted that feeling to last forever, but I was also STARVING, and as I am discovering hunger can be a powerful motivator.  I really didn’t get the same feeling this evening, I was just hungry, no closer to anything spiritual.    Still, I’m really curious to see if I can attain that same state of mind again.

I wonder how long I could last without any food at all…

I need to stop writing things on my hands. This morning I scribbled a couple of things on the side of my left hand, things to keep track of, things to remember so that they aren’t swept away by the work day. But when I go to perform my ablutions before prayer all I see is a blemish, something that could be offensive. I think the same about the scruffy stubble on my face as I rinse it. It shows that I haven’t been mindful, and I don’t want to offend.

I have mixed feelings about that thought right there. It implies that I could be offending someone other than myself. Maybe other Baha’is? Maybe God? I don’t like that this thought has so quickly and effectively taken root, infiltrating my habits overnight. However this is exactly the kind of thing that I was hoping for, a genuine experience of the religious life. So I should be happy, but still… it’s weird.

Anyway, I like my daily ablutions. Not only is there the inherent cleanliness, which is nice, there is also a feeling of a new start, a new day, a new chance and, within the context of the prayer that follows: a new deal with God, a new promise.

There are three kinds of obligatory prayers one can chose from in the Baha’i faith, and as I understand it you’re covered so long as you perform one of them every day. There is the short prayer, which I’m doing now, which is a short verse stated once a day at midday. The others, the medium and long prayers, are obviously lengthier recitations, and they are performed several times a day with accompanying prostrations, much like Muslim prayers. They include more ablutions too, one before each prayer. I’m definitely going to be attempting these longer prayers soon, since they obviously act as a catalyst for my experience of this religion.

Oh, and I have a question for any Baha’is reading this. How do you go about your ablutions? Do you just rinse your hands and face, or do you really scrub and make sure everythig is spotless? Is there an approved method in Baha’u'llah’s writings, or is it more of a personal thing?

Thanks in advance.

During the last Year of Faith I learned that fasting has a very strong moral component.  It really lets you connect with people who don’t have the means to be able to eat everyday.  But I’ll get more into that later.  There’s probably a spiritual component to it as well- since you aren’t worrying about food or other carnal things there is a lot of time for reading, prayer, and reflection, but I haven’t really gotten to that point either.

Today I really got to appreciate the physiological side of fasting.  As your body depletes it’s primary means of energy, glucose, it moves on to glycogen reserves in the liver and muscles before moving on to fatty acids.  I’m not quite sure at what point of this process that you begin to get the warm and fuzzies, but I know that at around three or four o’clock I stop feeling hungry and start to feel all full and warm inside.  I assume that this is my body burning up my plentiful reserves of backup fat.  Feel free to replace the word ‘assume’ in that sentence with ‘hope’ because that’s what I did.

Apparently short term every other day fasting can be pretty healthy for you, as can brief longer term fasts.  Anything over a month is bad news, so something like the Nineteen Day Fast is healthy for the soul and the body.

Breaking the fast is fifteen kinds of awesome.  The food tastes amazing and I really did appreciate the first meal of the day.  In addition to this, the meals you do manage to have at the end of the day take on a whole new meaning.  It’s a chance to make dinner into a big deal, a chance to enjoy yourself with friends and family, to celebrate after a difficult experience.  It must be quite fulfilling for Baha’i families, to come together for a meal and have it actually mean something.  Me?  I try to have dinner with my friends, to go out and make a big deal of it, because it is really easy to take something like this for granted, and it deserves celebrating at least once a year for a few days.

I tried and failed to pick up some Baha’i books today, but apparently my local Chapters doesn’t believe in this particular faith market.  But I’ll be damned if I leave a bookstore empty-handed, so I picked up some other titles instead.

Dharma Punx by Noah Levine.  This is something that I’ve been wanting to read for a while now.  It’s the memoir of an ex-punk who did the acid, sex, rock and roll rebellion thing, failed to find any spiritual meaning and found a kind of salvation and direction in Buddhism.  Sounds like a good time, and a great addition to my reading list for May.

Against the Stream by Noah Levine.  Lessons on Buddhism using personal anecdotes and guided meditations.  Levine uses the experiences chronicled in Dharma Punx to teach others how to escape addiction and find freedom from suffering.  Looking forward to this one too.

The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight.  I have been looking forward to this book ever since I saw the documentary Taqwacore at last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.  It was one of the best films that I have ever seen, and it covers the small but acute counter-culture mismash that is punk Islam, following a band of queer and Muslim punks as they travel accross the states, playing gigs and finding out what Islam means to the youth of today.  I should keep this tucked away for my month of Islam, but I may indulge for a few chapters.

“I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee.”

This is stupid…

“I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth.”

Really stupid…

“There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.”

I can’t believe I’m saying this.  Crap, which way is East?

Such were my thoughts during my first prayer in the Year of Faith.  This simple, short prayer includes a lot of things that grate up against the principles left over from the real me, the person who I am when I’m not trying to be a Taoist, or a Satanist or a Baha’i.  The first two religions of the year fit me really well, at no point did they cross my line of self-rule.  There was no point at which I felt that the way I usually live my life was threatened, I was still the one in control of all the rules, I was still the ultimate arbiter of my life.  My autonomy is important to me and this is the first time during the year that I feel that I am being threatened by what I want to experience.

Suddenly I am poor, suddenly I am made humble, and suddenly I have been created by and for this God guy who I don’t even know.  This is going to take some time.

Before the obligatory prayers I must perform oblations- washing my hands and face, and I must also face towards the East while I recite the prayer, towards the Shrine of the Baha’u'llah in Israel.  These things help set the prayer apart from the rest of everyday life.  It makes me more aware of my body and where I am in the world in relation to the rest of the members of the Baha’i faith.  It’s a short prayer, and much like my first attempt at oral sex, it felt strange tumbling around off my tongue.  But it did feel, well, religious.  It felt like a first step.

Monotheism is going to be a hell of a hurdle for me, being an atheist.  But as a lover of religion it’s something I need to face, and this definitely won’t be my first attempt to do so.

Well, here we go again.  During this month I will be a Baha’i, one of some six million adherents around the world.  Baha’i is the first monotheistic religion I will be practicing and I have two things to look forward to already: obligatory prayer and a nineteen day fast.

There are several different forms of the obligatory prayer- a short, medium, and long version each with different acts of bowing and supplication.  The short, easy to remember version which only needs to be said once a day is as follows,

I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee.  I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth.

There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. [1]

Much like its parent faith Islam, these prayers are required in order to foster feelings of humility, faith, and devotion towards God, who in the Baha’i faith is the center and creator of every major religion on Earth.

The nineteen day fast stretches from March 2 to March 20, and is concludd by the Baha’i New Year, a celebration called Naw Ruz.  The fast is to be performed during daylight hours during whcih I will not be eating anything.  During the entire week I will be abstaining from carnal things like sex, alcohol, drugs, and video games (gulp).  If you can think of anything else I should avoid then I’m all ears, I really want to make these nineteen days count for something.  As to the purpose of the fast, the former head of the Baha’i Faith, Shoghi Effendi puts it quite well.

It is essentially a period of meditation and prayer, of spiritual recuperation, during which the believer must strive to make the necessary readjustments in his inner life, and to refresh and reinvigorate the spiritual forces latent in his soul. Its significance and purpose are, therefore, fundamentally spiritual in character. Fasting is symbolic, and a reminder of abstinence from selfish and carnal desires. [2]

Frankly this sounds like something I could really use, doubly so since I kind of ignored similar perscriptions during Taoism.

Wish me luck!

[1] Baha'i Reference Library- Prayers and Meditations by Baha'u'llah p. 314

[2] Baha'i Reference Library- Directives from the Gaurdian pp. 27-29

Christ I hope I get better at this.  It comes to my attention that my pride kind of got the best of me at the end of this month.  I basically pulled an Icarus, flying high and thinking I had everything well under control, but the moment my emotional landscape changes the glue in my wings gets runny and I tumble back down to Earth.  So yeah, lost some time there but I’m pretty sure that I’m back on the horse… the faith horse…

Yeah.

So, Taoism.  Once again, February didn’t end with the kind of climax that I would have liked, but it was a successful month, overall.  I’m happy with what I learned, even though I didn’t experience as much as I could have.  But let’s sum this up before things get too deprecating, shall we?

There is a central “schism” in Taoist tradition that I have really failed to address, and that is the difference between religious Taoism and philosophical Taoism.  Again, as with most things Taoist, this is going to be tricky to explain, and I don’t know whether or not I’m completely sold on the distinction being made, but it is still noteworthy.

Philosophical Taoism is where Taoism begins historically, it covers the Tao-te Ching, Chaung Tzu and some other texts, and makes up the foundations of all Taoist thought that was to follow, including religious Taoism.  It is concerned with cosmogony of the world and one’s place in it (Tao) and translating those thoughts into actions, a way of living, into virtue (te).  Philosophical Taoism is relatively unorganized, more like a kind of self-help program in which there are teachers rather than priests or monks.[1]  While it possesses a cosmogony and an ethics (sort of) nothing is set in stone, and as I have said before, things are more prescriptive than descriptive, or dogmatic.  There is still an awful lot of thought going on here, and I don’t think that I will be able to penetrate it all, now that I’m at the end of the month.  Suffice it to say, philosophical Taoism is more a philosophy than a religion… as one might imagine.  But possibly not in the way you expect.

This actually has a lot in common with a philosophical period that I much admire- the ancient Greeks, specifically Socrates and the Hellenistic period that followed immediately after his death, the Skeptics, Epicureans, Stoics, etc.  Much of what Socrates was on about can be found in the Tao-te Ching.  His epistemological approach, that one could call oneself wise only if one knew the extent of their own ingorance, is repeated almost word for word by Lao-Tzu,

To know you don’t know is best.  Not to know you don’t know is a flaw.  Therefore, the Sage’s not being flawed stems from his recognizing a flaw as a flaw.  Therefore, he is flawless. [2]

Only through admitting your own ignorance can you begin to live well and start being a virtuous human being.  Much like Socrates and the Hellenists, philosophy in Taoism is tailored to helping people lead better lives, rather than trying to analyze the world and our place in it.  There is some of that in Taoism, yes, but the emphasis is on living a good life, a life of ataraxia (free from anxiety or free from worry) rather than the accumulation of knowledge.

I think this goes a long way to explaining why I tend to shy away from philosophical study once we pass the Greeks, until we get to the existentialists, anyway, and why my academic career veered into religion rather than deeper into philosophy.  After the Greeks it seems that us Westerners became a lot more concerned with how we can know things and what those things are composed of, and how they came to exist, rather than ataraxia.  Religion deals a little bit more with this moral realm, and does so through incredible myths and powerful imagery.  Then again I might be trying to simply justify my abysmal grades in certain philosophy classes.  I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, that is philosophical Taoism.  Religious Taoism is what grew out of that fertile soil, with an emphasis on meditation and vital essence or qi (chi), movement of the body and filial piety.  This is where the cultural mishmash from Confucianism and other folk religions come in, and honestly things get terribly confusing.  The point I’m trying to make is that I sampled a very small part from a large body that can be called Taoism, a part that some people wouldn’t really call a religion, but was nevertheless what really interested me.

One thing you can say about Taoism though, is that there is no deity, or at any rate there is no theism.  Ancestors like Lao Tzu are deified and there’s a lot of spirits and Immortals running about, but a creator God who keeps track of you and knows when you’ve been naughty or nice?  No sir, not here, and that makes me extraordinarily happy.  Why?  Because this means that people who simply disregard religion because it involves the worship of a higher power no longer have a leg to stand on.  The typically cynical and skeptical atheist actually has to take pause when confronted with this kind of monster, because the familiar chink in the armor is absent.  Taoism cannot be written off as some folksy superstition held up on the Word of God, and do so reflects poorly on the detractor, and not on the idea.

This is one of my motivations for doing this project, because when I look out into the world to find people like me, which are people who are atheists but still like to talk about religion, all I see is a bunch of this, and that terrifies me.  All these people can do is scoff and feel self important and choke on their own bloody hubris as they speak of that which they do not know.  Taoism begins to show a trend that I hope to make apparent throughout the year, that atheism does not exist by itself, that like theism it is always a component of a much larger idea, and sometimes that idea is actually a religion.

Taoism occasionally felt so right.  It was like love, something that exists beyond words.  No matter how many times I try to describe it I fall short, like grasping at the sand, like grasping at water.  The path goes so much further than what I have written here, or what I have gone through this month.  It is a perfect pearl of wisdom born of the axial age, and I sincerely hope we will remember it for as long as we can, or at the very least, that I may carry it with me until I die.

[1] Huston Smith, The World's Religions, p. 200.
[2] Robert Henricks, Te-Tao Ching, p. 44