Conditioning the Mind
An important part of developing faith in Buddhism is doing what I can to decondition my mind from materialist indoctrination, and to recondition the mind with views that actually support happiness and maybe even sustainability and harmony.
Something that has become increasingly clear to me in my saddhā research is that a major sticking point in the cultivation of Buddhist faith is the worldview I inherited as a Westerner mostly unconsciously. So I started researching worldviews themselves, and have come to recognise that any cosmology/worldview I might hold is a choice,
conscious or unconscious — even the Big Bang and evolution are only hypotheses that have become accepted as scientism dogma (Sheldrake , Harpur).
Whereas my worldview has been previously inherited without much question, I can make a conscious choice to adopt a Buddhist cosmology, knowing that the beliefs therein at least promote wholesome behaviour, even if they are not strictly “true” descriptions of something we can verify. Such a position is supported by Pascal’s Wager, and is the moral argument for and from a Buddhist worldview that has been discussed by Bodhi as well as Dostyoevsky, called [LM]
By making this conscious choice I empower my own agency to interpret my experience of the world in a way that makes sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to me that once there was nothing, and then there was something - the one-free-miracle model of the cosmos. It also doesn’t make sense to me that there was nothing (except for something, a god) and then there was something made by a being-thing without a cause. I don’t believe there is no first cause - I believe everything existed always, and will continue existing always, just in varying forms and according to various trajectories of evolution.
This may or may not be true, but either way it doesn’t actually matter - I cannot know the whole of reality, only a portion, so I have no way to verify whether we live in an eternal multiverse or a finite universe. This is metaphysics. All that matters is how one worldview over the other impacts my conduct - I choose the worldview that most supports being a good and happy being.
For example, do I believe it is possible for a person to become awakened in this lifetime? Generally speaking, yes I do - however, this belief is a choice and I don’t yet have any empirical evidence for it, so for now I take it on faith, or saddhā, meaning I believe I have good reasons for believing awakening is possible in this lifetime. If I didn’t believe this were possible, it would radically impact the amount and type of effort I apply in my practice.
Alongside considering what I think of the Buddhist worldview, it might help for me to outline what I understand about the ‘dominant Western worldview’ 👉🏻, but this has been hard to pin down.