Photo by VeSilvio
Apropos the name of the label putting out my first single (Milan’s Gotta Keep Faith Records), I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of faith these days. In my past, faith, besides having all sorts of “yucky religious overtones” to it, always seemed to mean believing in something that wasn’t guaranteed or really all that likely to happen in many cases.
It’s kind of like betting on a horse at the track. You hope your horse will win, and maybe you even have faith that your horse will win based on the odds given by the horse racing authorities along with the horse’s stats and so on and so on. (Clearly I know absolutely nothing when it comes to horse racing but I think you get the point.) Sprinkle that logical justification for a positive outlook in with some good old fashioned wishful thinking and you have my own earliest conception of faith in a nutshell. Basically, the word represented a shot in the dark littered with what I considered to be “creepy church stuff.”
But what’s really comforted me throughout my life has been experience. For example, I don’t find myself drinking booze anymore, but when I used to, I knew through experience that when I took a sip of wine, it was 100% guaranteed that I would feel different. There was never a single deviation from this particular experience, so it was very quickly built into my consciousness that wine is 100% dependable when it comes to changing the way I feel. Faith need never come into the picture when it’s wine we’re talking about because the un-falteringly concrete experience I’ve had with it completely negates the need for this flimsy and undependable faith nonsense.
Almighty experience has been downright invaluable to me. But what if, say, I want to experience some other things besides a wicked buzz? I’m talking about things I’ve never experienced in my entire life and have not the slightest clue as to how to bring about.
What if I wish to experience a great job making great money?
Or what if I desire the experience of finding true love that grows year after year?
How about experiencing peace in my mind as opposed to the non-stop circular monolouge that had occupied my thought-life for as long as I could remember?
Does that mean that I must go back to that crummy third-string boobie-prize of an f-word, faith - when I could enjoy the warm solace of experience giving me exactly what I expect exactly when and exactly how I expect it?
My own experience tells me that the answer is both yes and no.
(Don’t you hate it when the answer is “both yes and no”? It seems like that’s always the answer to everything, right?).
I’m coming to see that when there’s something I want in my life that I am not currently experiencing, this faith business really isn’t as flimsy as I once thought. Sure, I may have absolutely zero experience when it comes to putting something totally new in my life, so at that point I really have no choice but to take that proverbial “leap of faith.” And sometimes that leap is a gigantic, seemingly illogical catapult. But I’ve learned to take that leap anyhow, knowing that in my experience, enough of this passionate-yet-blind faith has produced some amazing results.
Within the last four years, I’ve gone from living in a dwelling that barely qualified as “indoors” to living in a beautiful apartment in a yacht-filled marina, my income has more-than tripled itself, and I’ve found that elusive love that grows stronger with each passing day. Much, much, much more importantly, I’m finally experiencing peace in my mind and in my heart.
I’m not saying all of this to glorify myself, but rather, to glorify the oft-forgotten miracle of Faith, which has opened more doors for me than my supposedly-logical mind could have ever conceived of.
What I’m talking about here is not religion. Although I consider myself to be a spiritually-focused person and have benefited greatly from every single religion and philosophy I’ve ever been exposed to- from Christianity to Buddhism to Hindusim to Taoism to Atheism and the list goes on ad infinitum, the only area in which I claim expertise is that of my own experience.
What I’m talking about here is what I’ve personally experienced so that I may further energize the application of scientific faith in my own life. If it helps you, then that’s even better!
With Love from Marina del Rey,
Doron
