👈🏼 previous note, 00. Introduction
The state of my faith determines the extent, nature, and direction of my effort. The classic example is about going to the park: one would not set out if they weren’t convinced they could make it and that doing so would be worthwhile. And if I see something along the way that seems equally worthwhile - like helping out, or doing projects - I might get distracted. Like if I saw a bookshop and there wasn’t someone around to pull me by the hand away from there.
If I don’t believe it is possible to become awakened in this lifetime, or that such awakening will benefit others, I might ‘hedge my bets’, splitting my time between bhāvanā and social work - or between bhāvanā and writing a book, or endlessly fiddling with this garden essay. I am more likely to try helping in ways that are ‘more direct’, not in ways reliant upon obscure metaphysical mechanisms I might never understand (cf. AN 10.95, Uttiya Sutta).
Depending on my worldview, it sometimes comes up that achieving a literary goal (or even just the process of writing) will make me happy, or that I have only this life, so I need to make a contribution before I go through some form of social work. As much as I can say honestly I don’t think the former will genuinely make me happy, or that the latter is true - I can know this objectively, but sometimes the thoughts come up in meditation, so having a place to work through reflections on that conditioning will be helpful (to me).
If I believe that working on my own spiritual development over many lifetimes is possible, I may be less pulled toward social work and more confident my agency resides primarily in developing an increasingly purified, refined mind and heart. This will naturally impact the choices I make about the extent, nature, and direction of my effort.
As well as being concerned about how compromised faith was impacting my effort, there were other doubts that would surface now and then, and which I wanted to essay my through - so the essaying has been an exercise in surfacing those doubts 👉🏻 to have a better look at them.