The Power of Faith

Thich Nhat Hanh translates the word faith into confidence and trust "because it is something inside you and not directed toward something external".

So I shift into a place of confidence that I am a being of integrity and that I have a right to be here.

Working through the night and the following day with this particular power enabled me to give up anxiety, to second guess and question everything I do and say.  What is that about? And - what was that?

After spending so many years looking to the external world for assessment of what is good and what is troubling, I can see how moving to a place of faith in my ability to create some goodness in a changing and unpredictable world, I can bring my focus back to my own energy.

For a start I told myself that I had faith that I could sleep through the night so that I could get up early the next morning to do what I had promised to do. It worked and I felt less like a creature oppressed by the whims of fate.

During the waking hours it soon occurred that mindfulness was also wedded to the power of faith because I need to be mindful of the tasks to do them satisfactorily.

This also reminded me of a time when I was younger and took confidence for granted, assuming I would always have that strength and ability.  How did I lose my confidence? Perhaps a few mistakes made me feel like a fumbling old lady and I questioned my abilities more and more.

Getting back to that place of comfort with the self is quieter, more peaceful, than the angst and apologies, and the continual self-reprimands grieving over a more youthful confident self.

The Five Spiritual Powers

In Thich Nhat Hanh's book The Art of Power he lays out five spiritual powers he teaches to  ground us in the power from within that many would not associate with power.

They are:

1. The Power of Faith
2. The Power of Diligence
3. The Power of Mindfulness
4. The Power of Concentration
5. The Power of Insight

Over the next few days I plan to write about these individually in the hope that I will learn how to access my own spiritual powers.

Not wanting to simply plagiarize Hanh's work, I feel it necessary to focus on my responses to what he teaches.

If I can’t rule the world I shall destroy it.

Who said that? Was it Hitler or Richard III? Is it the bad guy in any (pick one) action movie? Or the familiar fantasy of every child who can’t get her own way but which is soon forgotten when met with a suitable diversion?

The trouble is there are adults in positions of power, who I suspect operate as though control is a kind of revenge.

When our government eschews the professional knowledge of corrections workers and creates more tension within prisons by cutting programs and demanding prisoners pay more room and board; when they plan to shut down 10 of the 22 Marine Communications and Traffic Services Centres, which provide rescue and emergency services for boats; when they silence thousands of federal science workers for Environment Canada, because their research contradict Federal Government plans for economic growth particularly with shipping bitumen from the oil sands; when Jim Stanford creates a graph that shows "that in the last decade, Canadian petroleum exports grew by close to 2 percentage points of GDP ... but Canada's exports of everything else (manufacturing, services and tourism) declined by several times as much"— doesn’t it give you the impression that our world is ruled by ideologies arrested by rage because no matter how much power you have, it is never enough?

But we can develop a universal conscience and find our own ways to nurture from a place of love, gratitude, thoughtfulness and intention. These are things that raise the power of our lives through reverence and that celebrate the knowledge of those who work for the whole of this world.

Community or Asylum

In Chris Hedges article "Welcome to the asylum" he spells out the ways in which civilizations dissolve into madness.

"The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide."

The Western world who has wholeheartedly embraced unfettered capitalism, without any concern for social consequences, are rushing to follow in this suicidal spiral, and the good citizens question whether they can ever have a conversation with the mad bull-dogs whose jaws are firmly hanging onto any flesh linked to power, no matter how decomposed it might be.

Democracy is supposed to be that conversation that limits the damage done by megalomaniacs. But Lawrence Martin asks if we are still living in a democracy.

"... anyone who scrolls through recent media, conservative media included, might be forgiven for concluding that we have something more closely resembling the opposite. Something more akin to billy-club governance. Think of the ironclad controls, the scorning of accountability, the censorship, the smearing of opponents, the power unto one. The abuses are not just opposition talk. They’re writ large in Auditor-Generals’ reports, in internal documents and journalists’ investigations. Some of the abuses have happened in other governments but have they ever happened on the scale we’ve seen from this crowd?"

You may wonder, how did we get to this point where our elected leaders behave as though they feel contempt for democracy?  Well all you have to do is read a little history or speak to survivors of war to understand that power is based either on contempt for life or a reverence for life.

It will seem outrageously stupid to say that loving kindness or compassion is the only weapon that sustains life, until you visit or listen to some of our First Nations people who have survived the most terrible violence at a time when they were most vulnerable. They have fought every minute of every day of every year since, to mend their broken spirits by re-educating themselves and their children on how to live. The fight is never over as they now are fighting the threat of oil tankers and pipelines, as we all should be.

The tragedy of our age is that, on the one hand we witness the madness of violence and destruction designed by a controlling elite, and dismiss the goodness under our feet as benign.  This is the way power has corrupted our spirit by making us blind with anxiety. 

Anxiety will control and diminish our power as long we fail to stare it in the face, and ask our discomfort to speak to us on a deeper level. What does it mean when our governments have given up on their people and we can no longer hope for jobs, education, health care and a clean environment?

Imperialist nations that thrived on oppressing other nations for their resources are now feeling the violence of the system that fed and controlled them through propaganda and ideology until there was no ideal left uncorrupted, untainted. We live in an age now where we can't escape the immense depth of violence which we once supported through loyalty.

What can each one of us do to re-create new systems?  What do we possess that we can choose to build upon?  What can we believe in?  These are questions to ask ourselves for our answers will be our legacy.

While socialist and capitalist governments have abused power, Pickett and Wilkinson tell us (in an article published in StraightGoods)

"the evidence shows unmistakably that more equal societies — those with smaller income differences between rich and poor — are friendlier and more cohesive: community life is stronger, people trust each other more, and there is less crime and violence. So the deep human intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive is true.

People in more unequal societies have worse health and lower life expectancy; they are more likely to have drug problems and to suffer more mental illness. Measures of child wellbeing are worse and children do less well at school. Rates of teenage births, obesity and violence are all higher, and more people are in prison."

It's time we stopped working for our oppressors by examining the power of institutions and the frames they contain us in, and then by re-creating the world based on social justice, compassion, freedom and responsibility.

Re-aligning the Future

What can we do in our one short life to create a sustainable, just, future?

First we need a 'level gaze' at the global situation as it is today - the wars, the marginalization of people, the economy, the gap between haves and have-nots, the environment, and all the other problems threatening this planet.

And then we need to look at how things work. How do movements begin and how do they affect change? Do they have to be funded by corporations and governments? Is it possible for grass roots values to emerge and challenge the status quo, staying true to the original cause?

Given the endless examples of corrupt power that began with good intentions, it would be easy to turn away from the world and entertain ourselves to death. Anyone who dares to utter ideals is likely to be laughed at or viewed with suspicion. That is the problem - we have lost faith in humanity's  ability to solve the big problem.

Imagine an alien nation visiting this planet after everything has been destroyed, scrambling through the ruins looking for clues to the final cause of our demise. The answer might be that we were smart enough to build rockets, write symphonies and create political systems, but couldn't work together for the sake of our survival.   Humanity showed signs of being experts on what was wrong, and what or who was to blame, but in the end, were unable to identify their own culpability.

Each age has its own allusions of grandeur and every nation its own conceits, and these are the blessings and threats to our survival - the tragic flaw.  It's not a solution or an invention that we need now, it's humility and compassion.  The way to the future cannot be mapped out onto a blueprint. 

It is, I believe, a spiritual quest where we learn how to honour the other equally with the self, to recognize when we are misguided, acknowledge mistakes and then recalibrate the journey.

We have the scientists, the healers, the visionaries, the artists and musicians, to guide and inspire. There will always be the optimists and pessimists, those who say too much and those who don't speak up, those who give and those who take.  And we have communities that work because of the focus and commitment of individual members.

We have the capacity for empathy and to read between lines. We have emotional intelligence and rational objectivity. We share the bond of one mother.  Our home provides enough air, food, water and shelter for us all.  So what is holding us back? What is muddling the discussion and obfuscating the goal?

The answer, I feel, can be rendered down to one simple flaw which possibly goes back before history, to the beginning of patriarchy, when men sought control over women and women sought protection from men.

The muscular male body appears fit for the hard labour of social construction, and the softer female for nurture, and so each has been socialized to fit into one gender or the other. Other primates with similar social systems remained close to earth, but we, with each century magnified power, worshipped it, extracted it from the life force and turned it into a god. Graded all elements into a  hierarchy through rituals that keep beings in their designated place.

What we need now is to align our sights, to see how ideology and socialization that breeds false illusions of superiority, is the cause of our inability to live together, to find a way through.

We need to understand that power belongs to all in strength and responsibility, and not be diverted by the attempts of the few to intimidate the masses. Or to hope that saints and saviours will rescue this global human project. Nurturing a place for the future is our task, our power.

What each one of us can do, in our one short life, is dis-invest in power-over and re-invest our goals and hopes in power-from-within in terms of influence and responsibility.

The Prevailing Epidemic

The trial of Anders Breivik, a man who believes he is saving Norway by bombing and gunning down innocent people, begins this week.

"Breivik is expected to deny terrorism charges at the start of his 10-week trial on Monday. His logic, according to his legal team, is that he carried out the attacks on 22 July last year in "self defence". He has said he intended his attacks as punishment of traitors whose pro-immigration policies were adulterating Norwegian blood." The Guardian.

He is clearly sick even if he is not found criminally insane. Thankfully, most of us could not carry out a mass killing of young people, let alone live with ourselves if we did. We have a conscience, an inner safety valve that keeps us from doing harm to others. Yet he boldly proclaims he is on the verge of making his manifesto, which I refuse to read, a new world order.

Such delusions are not new. There have been many killers who believe they have a ‘divine’ role to play in the world. But it’s not just that these people exist, it is the way we become fascinated with them. Or the way the media focuses exclusively on violence while ignoring the peaceful struggles and aspirations of a perceived normalcy.

This suggests a rupture in what we understand as reality in terms of the larger issues, and the reality of our local epistemic landscape. We know, through experience, that life is easier if we try to cooperate and get along with our family members, our neighbours, our co-workers. Yet the headlines upstage our knowing by framing the world in terms of winners (competing for the most of what each of them wants) and their victims.

Media enables us to believe we are ineffective in creating change or sustaining our values by becoming informed of critical issues, by doing what we believe is our duty as citizens. It implants in the psyche a larger, more distant tribe, and the message is one way – from them to us. So we in our individual and specific locations decide to increase or hold back our public selves according to how meaningful the commons appears to us.

I have heard over and over again "Oh I don’t take any notice of our politicians these days – they are all a bunch of liars". Or confessions that we live in a sick world. This is quite understandable when we listen, watch, read, a never-ending list of the bleeding that leads. So we replace the commons with the mall and trade community for gadgets, and in this way, by our own choice, we make trends more trendy, and things more worthy than life.

Through media and the market people become things—personalities, celebrities, intellectuals, leaders, political parties, ideologues. The more we invest in things, the more powerless we become in our own value system. The more powerless we feel the more sympathy we have with extreme views. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key!" "Send 'em back to where they came from!" "Let 'em starve – that'll teach 'em to get a job!"

The more we cut off our civic selves, the more we fill ourselves up with self-medicating slogans, and the more we look to the powers-that-be to fix what we cannot face. The more we look to power the more we fear love, and the more suspicious we become about our own experiential knowledge. The more we fear love, the more we look to punish the other to keep away the shadows of uncertainty. The more we look to punishment as a solution, the more we retreat from our own power to care for the world. The more we retreat from caring, the less informed we become, and the more contempt we feel for humanity.

As we watch governments cut funding for social programs in favour of sophisticated weapons, despair increases and depresses our problem solving capacities.

Guns, bombs, war, and punishment are the addictions of a species who have, generation after generation, been traumatized by the structural violence that teaches us to be suspicious and feel contempt for the natural power of love, nurture and the creativity that we possess, and to replace it with the prevailing propaganda that power must intimidate, destroy and rebuild.

This is the most contagious epidemic of our age, and this is how we shall die if we cannot heal. The good news is – the power to heal is within our minds, our words and our actions. The power to heal is ours to choose.

Power is stupid!

The first definition of power in Dictionary Dot Com, "the ability to do or act; a capability of doing or accomplishing something" suggests that power is essential to the survival of sentient beings. As long as it is a capacity used cautiously and mindfully by complex, intelligent beings, it's good. But when it is a value separate from life, worshipped for power's sake, then it becomes stupid! It is incapable of understanding what it does or what it destroys.

Yet we live in a post-Orwellian world where power is isolated as something over and above all else.


Mohammad Shaffia who was found guilty of killing his first wife and three daughters could have been motivated by that separation of power from life, and those who were not killed possibly lived in constant terror of that power. Any father, tormented by his own addiction to control, may end up by destroying the lives of all those he feels bound to protect.

The publicized response by other Canadians, in the safety of their own living rooms, was predictable - they called for the end of honour killings, for immigrants to adopt good Canadian values. Some blamed Islam saying it was a sign of the primitive nature of the religion, but I doubt these critics would blame Christianity for the crimes committed by Nazis who identified as Christian. And will these commentators hiding behind their online identities be engaged when there are discussions around supporting families at risk on a social level? Will they question our society at all, in terms of how it glorifies power for power's sake? The assumption of moral superiority, by association, without sacrifice or reflection, enables this superficial disembodied sense of power.


 A study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found lower intelligence scores in childhood were predictors of greater racism in adulthood, and the tendency to adopt the kind of unexamined right-wing ideologies that create illusions of power. This was given much media coverage a few months ago.


George Monbiot weighed in with his own applause for this story, quoting a former Republican ideologue, Mike Lofgren, who notes that the party, has inflamed an anti-intellectual hostility to science, appealing to the “low-information voter”. Lofgren doubts that the leaders believe in their propaganda but are happy to “feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.

There can be no doubt that powerful interests feel they are winning when they fund and support the dumbing down of Western societies, with lies, doublespeak and propaganda, but destroying the commons in this way, ultimately makes intelligence and life, redundant.


In the quest for power, our own federal government seems bent on destroying Canada and Canadians' sense of social justice by overwriting complex systems with new laws, that enable "low-information" citizens a fleeting sense of power by association. Feelings of spurious power for the masses replace the power invested in human rights and systems of justice.


No doubt, the young minds we are raising almost exclusively on violent entertainments in hostile communities, where heinous acts get front page and citizen's struggles to do the right thing are invisible, will grow up with little other than contempt for humanity.

But power doesn't mind at all. Power is not a living entity with a brain and nervous system, it is a tool for complex beings that must be handled cautiously to create a cooperative sustainable future. Otherwise, as we have seen, century after century, it destroys the living communities who worship it.

Love is powerful, but in its true sense it is based on nurture and care of and for other sentient beings. Love is hurt by what it harms. Love is moved by the power of love, whereas power alienated from life does not feel joy or grief.