I would put it this way. What makes someone believe in love?
It’s not really a “belief”—you either experience it, or you don’t.
If you were to be really rational about it, and ask, “does it really exist?” – you can try to break it down and say, “well, you see, my heart pounds fast” or “look, this mother threw herself instinctively on her child with an incoming car.” And of course there are counterarguments, this is pure biological impulse (e.g. take the Shaky Bridge psychological study; which talks about how we can misatribute arousal, or the field of psychobiology, which attempt to explain things on a pure physioloigcal level.) But is love purely physiological? On some level, when you love, you couldn’t care less. You act in love.
In the same way, I think you really have to experience God to know there is God.
When I was fifteen, I was in a small village in China, and I had this ‘flash’ – this sudden sense of the interconnected nature of things. I could feel that the world has meaning. I think it changed a lot of how it understood things.
Each of us have our own narratives as to how we make sense or navigate the world. I would say trusting in the universe is a huge relief for me. It’s sort of an assumption – for example, a few weeks ago suddenly I felt as if I was getting all these signs to tell me that I needed to focus on my tai chi practice. People whom I had just met, or friends who don’t usually discuss this topic with me, started to initiate a conversation about this. Now whether this is pure coincidence, or whether I am in a time of my life where I subconsciously desire this, and am therefore more prone to noticing these things; it can be the case. But it’s kind of fun to say, “Ok, I think the universe is trying to tell me, this is what I should be doing, right now.” So now I’m in Poland, teaching tai chi. And this kind of faith – assumption, if you will – allows me to drop my worries, and focus whole heartedly on the task at hand.
So that is what my ‘faith’ is giving me.
So how does one experience love? Very simply: by allowing yourself to be open to the experience. I woudl say the same for God.
Actually if you are very curious about if these spiritual experiences really exist, certain paths [like branches of Buddhist meditation] introduce a system in which you can experience this.
I think by asking this question on fluther your mind is very open already. So I would say, experiment. Throw yourself into life. Whether you end up calling it “God” or not, is in some cases, less relevant than the depth of your experience in this life. And perhaps you will touch something that you cannot help but calling it “God” because there seems no other word for it.
