In This Episode…

“When we are on a path of spiritual awakening, we are going to be required at some point to take a leap of faith. The spiritual path is a path of learning to trust in something that we cannot see, that our mind cannot know, that we cannot control. From one point of view, trust and faith are the entire path.”
—Craig Hamilton

In this episode, Craig examines the fundamental questions: Who or what exactly are we being asked to have faith in? In an unpredictable cosmos, what can we truly trust? He explores what living a life of deep faith and trust looks like in practice and addresses why fear and resistance are natural responses. He also addresses how these emotions play a role in our spiritual journey.

Additionally, Craig shares an approach to meditation practice that can help cultivate the kind of trust and faith that supports a spiritually awakened life in action.

This episode includes a contemplation exercise, which can also be done as a journal exercise, so you may want to have a piece of paper and a pen ready before you tune in.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I want to invite you to take a moment to sit with the word “faith” and notice how it feels in your being. And then sit with the word “trust” and notice how it resonates.

I’m very aware that the word faith conjures up negative connotations for those of us who were told we had to have faith in some external higher power.

This never quite rang true for many of us, as this higher power didn’t ultimately seem worthy of our faith. Why? Because our blind faith in an external higher power didn’t seem to really deliver anything.

Reflecting on Trust and Faith

I want to invite you to let go of past associations with this whole idea of an external higher power we trust in, so you can step into an open, innocent reflection on it.

When we are on a path of spiritual awakening, we are required at some point on that path—and perhaps at many points on that path, or perhaps you could say at every point on the path—to take a leap of faith.

The spiritual path is a path of learning to trust in something that we cannot see, that our mind cannot know, and that we cannot control. From one point of view, trust and faith are the entire path.

One way to understand what a spiritually awakened life looks like in action is that it is a life in which we have decided to trust and to put our faith in a mystery that we’ll never be able to directly see, know, control, predict, or grab on to.

One of the hardest things for us human beings is to get to a place where we’re willing to live in trust and faith and walk forward into life without the security of our old navigation system telling us what to do. Within that old outdated system we believe we know how to get through life and what the right thing to do is, and who we are, and how it all works.

Living an awakened life means making a decision to leave all that behind and say “I’m going to live in the unknown and let reality reveal itself to me, moment by moment. I will let my responses reveal themselves, moment by moment. I’m going to leave behind the known, the familiar, the illusion of certainty, the delusion of control. I’m going to live in what the Christian mystics called “the cloud of unknowing.” I will live my life in a cloud of unknowing so that something so much greater—a life of super-ordinary and profound significance, meaning, and purpose — can begin to unfold out of that mystery that I’m making room for.”

Letting Things Be Is an Act of Faith and Trust

For us to get to a place where we’re willing to live in this way is arguably the greatest challenge of human life. That’s what all our practice is for. That’s what the great work of self-transformation is all about. Letting things be is an act of trust and faith. We each decide, “I’m going to let things be, and I’m going to trust that the world won’t fall apart when I’m no longer trying to control it.”

Of course, during meditation, if you look at things rationally, you might say, “Gee Craig, aren’t you overdramatizing? Of course the world’s not going to fall apart. I’m just sitting here in meditation, as if I were the one holding it all together.”

But in reality, what do we come up against when we try a practice like this? We come up against a big No and a great fear. We come up against resistance. Sometimes it is a resistance of epic proportions against simply letting it all be. All manner of distraction and drama can arise within us to keep us from doing this most simple thing, which is nothing.

Engaging a practice like this, wholeheartedly and consistently, is one powerful way to cultivate the kind of trust and faith we’re talking about. And if we can do it in meditation, we soon start to realize we can do it in daily life.

The Challenge of Stepping Into a Life of Trust and Faith

But in addition to practicing meditation in this way, it’s also worth taking some time to reflect on this challenge of stepping into a life of faith and trust.

Why is it that we don’t already inherently trust life in this way? And where does our innate lack of trust and faith come from?

I don’t necessarily mean in a historical sense, although maybe that’s worth taking a peek at. But we want to become aware of this just in ourselves. We have a kind of viscerally held sense that life might not be so trustworthy, and other people probably aren’t all that trustworthy.

We may even have the sense, “I don’t even know if I’m trustworthy.”

So we think this whole thing needs to be controlled. We need to know as much as we can about every situation beforehand. Why? So we can accurately predict what’s going to happen and premeditate our response to ensure the best possible outcome. This kind of relationship to life where we know, predict, and try to control it, runs deep in us.

The Problem of the Negativity Bias

I don’t know if you know this from the neuroscience field, but one thing that’s been documented through research is that our brains put far more energy into focusing on negative events than they do on positive events.

Think about a day of your life. Let’s say you have one hundred positive encounters with people: friendly conversations, kind interactions with strangers, productive meetings with colleagues, pleasant intimate moments with your partner. We all have all these positive interactions that can fill up a day. That may be the experience of most days, having positive interactions when we’re engaging with other people.

Now let’s say you have one negative, intense interaction where somebody said something critical to you, or you butted heads because you had different ideas and there was some negative energy expressed between you.

What’s the one interaction that you go to bed thinking about? What’s the one interaction you wake up the next morning thinking about? Usually it’s the negative one. This is a universal tendency. Researchers have studied this. This is just the way we’re wired.

1. Evolutionary Adaptation
When you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, in the early days of our human evolution and pre-human evolution, if something negative happened, that typically could potentially kill you. For example, some food you ate that made you sick might have killed you.

Back then, we also didn’t have laws and we didn’t have a very evolved morality. So if someone was hostile toward you, they might have killed you. Or an encounter with a wild animal might have killed you. Whereas the positive events that occurred, like friendly exchanges, weren’t necessarily things that were going to save your life or save you from danger necessarily. They were just positive encounters.

You can see why our brains and our personalities evolved to be very guarded against anything negative. And, therefore, our brains emphasize and amplify the negative. They amplify danger and particularly an imminent sense of danger.

2. Childhood Wounds
Then, of course, we all have our own childhood wounds, which get amplified through life if we were raised in a situation where we didn’t feel safe. That also amplifies this negativity bias.

3. Negative Media
Our news media today also amplifies this tendency. If you watch the news or read the news or even watch television shows and dramas, don’t you often get the sense that the world’s a dangerous place? That there are bad people doing bad things all the time, and that’s kind of what the world’s like?

Throughout our life, we all have millions of positive interactions, and only very occasional, truly negative ones, relatively speaking. But we still have this deep sense that the world’s not very safe, and it needs to be predicted and controlled, and other people need to be guarded against.

Without getting any deeper into the psychology of it, I want to take a moment to invite you to reflect on this. Because I think what’s spiritually required for us is to go through a paradigm shift around the innate trustworthiness of just about everything.

When We Don’t Trust, the World Is a Scary Place

I want to invite us into a brief reflective contemplation exercise. And I want you to understand that the reason I’m doing this is because I want us all to look into our own experience of life — the life we’ve actually lived.

Because of the negativity bias that’s built into our brains for good evolutionary reasons, and because we haven’t emphasized the positive enough, we’ve tended to relate to life as much less trustworthy than it is. We’ve tended to relate to other people as much less trustworthy than they are.

We’ve tended to not trust ourselves that much, and so we don’t take risks. We don’t have the confidence to try radical new things without feeling completely sure we’re going to know how to do it. There are many different layers to this fundamental lack of trust.

Reflection #1: Discovering Inner Resources

I want to invite you into a brief reflection that has two parts to it. The first part is about trusting yourself.

When I talk about self-trust, I mean we’re trusting that if we let go and stop premeditating, there are resources within us that will rise to meet whatever challenges and opportunities life brings our way.

For this to manifest, we need to stop trying to know everything beforehand, stop trying to have everything figured out in advance. If we start to trust in our innate ability to meet challenges and figure things out and rise to the occasion, we will discover those inner resources are already there.

That’s one way of looking at what spiritual trust is, what this leap of faith is. It’s that there are all these resources within us that will show up to help us meet the challenges of life, if we let go, take a risk and jump into challenging situations, and see what arises.

So I want to invite you to look back on your life and to look for times when you took a risk to try something you weren’t sure you were going to be able to do. It might have been when you stepped up to a challenge, like in your career, that seemed beyond your current ability.

You took substantial risks to step beyond what you felt your perceived limitations were, and what was the result in your life? I’m not talking about what you feared would happen, but what you were afraid of, and what was the actual result.

Just reflect a little and identify a few moments where you took a risk.

Based on these experiences, what can you see about your potential to trust yourself much more? Could you trust yourself much more and if so, what is it that you could trust in? What would it mean to trust yourself much more, based on your actual experience here–not on theories?

Reflection #2: Trusting the Basic Goodness in People

Now I want to invite you to reflect briefly on your trust in other people, but I want to do it a little differently.

I invite you to survey your whole life up until now. No doubt, all of us have been burned by other people who we put our trust in. If you haven’t, lucky you! But most of us probably have been hurt, and some of us more than others.

There’s a judgment issue sometimes. Sometimes we put our trust in people we really shouldn’t have. The signs were there, but we did it for specific reasons because we wanted something out of it.

There’s a complexity to understand there, but here’s what I want to invite you to look at. Across the experience of your whole life, what percentage of your encounters, engagements, and interactions with other people have shown them to be trustworthy, conscious, kind, and positive, versus untrustworthy and dangerous?

What percentage?

If you reflect back on your life experiences, you can pick out those encounters where somebody really let you down. How many other encounters were there that were the opposite? Don’t count them, but survey the landscape from thirty thousand feet, from way up.

Most of us have lived lives of millions of positive encounters, trustworthy encounters with others, but we carry with us much less trust than is warranted by our lived experience.

I want to invite you to just see the truth of this in your own life.

The AirBnB Trust Experiment

An interesting phenomenon occurred several years ago around the world when AirBnB became a popular service. Suddenly the idea that you could rent your couch or your spare bedroom out to a total stranger through this online platform became a thing millions of people started doing.

Initially everyone who did it was a little afraid. “What’s going to happen? I’m going to rent my couch out to someone from the other side of the world or the other side of the country who I don’t even know. People aren’t trustworthy. I watch TV. This sounds dangerous.”

But there was a mass awakening among people who did it. You could read about it and hear about it. You’d hear, “Wow, people are nice, strangers are trustworthy. They’ll come and stay in your place and take good care of it. They’re interesting.” Our fear of the stranger got broken down around that one innovation.

There was a lot of commentary on it. Of course, there are a few bad apples, and when bad things happen, they get a lot of media attention. You might hear one negative story and think, “Oh, look what can happen when you rent out your house.” But again, of the millions of AirBnB encounters between total strangers, just a few bad things happened. It was an interesting phenomenon that suddenly broke through the mistrust of strangers we’ve all learned.

Building Trust and Faith in the Human Family

Let’s take a moment to survey the landscape of this world of strangers and realize that other people are just like us, and by and large people are not anti-social. Most people are pro-social, meaning they are positive people who want to live good, moral lives, and respect others, and treat others as they want to be treated.

That’s the norm for the human race. Yes, we all have egos and unconscious habits and ways in which we get in the way of our own goodness. But the world we live in is generally a trustworthy place where you can put yourself in someone else’s hands—even a stranger’s hands—and generally they’ll look out for you.

Sit in that truth for a moment, knowing that it doesn’t mean everyone is completely trustworthy. But humanity is a life-positive event — despite how it might look on the news. Feel the life-positive trustworthiness of this human family that we are.

How would your life be different if you stepped into that recognition and lived from there always? What walls could come down? What fears could be relinquished? What kind of faith and trust would you live in?

It’s my hope that reflecting on these various dimensions of trust helps to illuminate the way to the profound, unconditional faith that is the true bedrock of spiritual life.

I hope I’ve left you in a place where you can build your self-trust and your trust in the other. Then it may buoy you toward the ultimate trust, where you take the ultimate leap of faith that spirit calls for.