My Faith is Now Flickering

Reddit Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/enlightenment/comments/1rapduu/comment/o6m15ef/?context=3 Lack of faith and faithlessness is itself a mental obscuration that can be burned in the candle of wakefulness. It itself is its own fuel for moving forward, as you start to see that it's another discursive thought with its own energy that feeds on itself.

My faithless period was quite long, about 14 years. It took a while to undo it once it became clear I was just running another cycle of mental constructs. At its most extreme point, I considered ending my life. So I speak this not pedantically, I mean it from a place of knowing that it is a very difficulty path to maintain the openness of compassion in the light of a challenging world.

When you can undo the knot of doubt, then deep faith is your true nature, because how do you argue with the true reality? The outside is still just a dance, a play. But until you are at that degree of seeing through the illusion in real time, even the most horrifying or painful illusions, without your heart sundering and your compassion failing because you're still holding onto a solid ground or the true existence of living beings, you need to shield yourself.

There is also a level of discernment where you bring the energy of yourself to situations, not more or less. Boundaries at the provisional level are useful because you're still developing; you can use aspects of your ego against other egos to keep yourself protected to the degree that is required to continue nurturing your inner realm before it merges with the outer realm.

You're still seeing yourself as a separate and different entity, which is totally fine, it's just at that perspective, the aspects of other beings' actions and virtues are still real to you, rather than just autonomous, passive, and a function of cause and effect (like a spark causing a forest fire, which is ultimately not good or bad, just is; but we see it as bad from one provisional angle because it destroys homes and kills humans, which is also relatively true. Holding both is very difficult.).

Individual beings just are, until enlightened action meets them through circumstance and they are given the grace to wake up. You don't have to worry about it, it's another form of clinging.

That is why monasteries and spiritual systems arising in the material realm are useful constructs in the beginning, even if they're ultimately not necessary at the tail end. But even there, as one advances, the loneliness increases.

Eventually you will find even the loneliness vaporizes because you realize there weren't people all along, or at least not in the way that was as solid as before. And compassion is just a spontaneous meeting with the arising in the moment when it is needed. Just things arising and passing away. Losing people that you love helps loosen that perspective of individual solidity, but it is a painful lesson to learn.

The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva, if that speaks to you, was very helpful for me in the last few years to maintain a stable view of the emptiness of beings. It still hurts when humans act a certain way, especially family or my wife, but it helps loosen the foothold of it being personal in some way, so that one can keep practicing even if there's a sense of despair. You forgive the slings and arrows so you can keep going.