Faith Mind Sutra

This is part of an online discussion with my Locals Community in November 2024 on the famous Asian text The Faith Mind Sutra. For this discussion I used Bart Marshall’s excellent translation (which can be found at the note at the end of this article). This was a question and answer format. I read the first 7 sections, then took the group into breakout rooms, had them discuss that segment of the text and come up with one question to ask from it.

The title LM stands for “Locals Member,” while my name is in full.

HOWDIE- We’ve got everyone back and ready to go? We will begin by asking each of the groups what they decided to be the question they would like to share from this section of the material. Who would like to go first? I think we had six groups, so we should have six questions.

LM – I’m happy to go first. I think we were group three. Okay we had a few but we agreed on this question. How does this test apply to us dying and dealing with after death? So, in the after-death experience, does everything dissolve much easier because we know this? Does that make sense? Is that okay?

HOWDIE- I am going to share something for you to think about. When you wake up from going to sleep at night, and you’ve had a dream, and you can recall the dream that you’ve had. Okay, you can say, I had a dream. I had this experience, and this is what happened. What happens when you wake up from sleep and you’ve had no dream? Your memory was, you fell asleep and the next memory you had eight hours later, you woke up. Did you exist during those eight hours you were asleep? This is a very serious question. This text, if you use it properly will generate questions. It will generate inner questions. That’s really what it’s doing. It’s giving you the end point but it’s giving you something where you can begin to examine. The text is very clear. You can’t experience what it’s talking about as long as your mind/thought is active. If you’re still thinking, you’re not having this experience. The only way you can potentially get to the other side, is to bombard your mind with very deep questions. Questions that in fact it can’t really answer, but it can kind of begin to unravel, if that makes sense.

LM- The question from our group was how can we put all of this into practice in a dual world?

HOWDIE- So, that’s one of the challenges that comes across when someone first reads the Faith Mind Sutra, I that it is discussing the seeing after a realization. But the majority of readers, today anyway, will not have had that realization. But the text is still valid, as I believe that everyone at some point, often as small children, had a drifting moment and touched emptiness, even briefly. No matter, emptiness is at everyone’s core, thus we all if we stay open to it, have a bit of a feeling of what it is, thus the text can operate like a pointer as in “here is what something like this could be like.”

It’s kind of like the text is sectioned into particular pieces of information. A lot of the section we just read is about not having opinions, not having choices, not having preferences. So, what does that mean? How can you not have preferences? So, to say it this way; to turn it into a practice, to turn it into a way of being is not saying that you as a body mind won’t do things. Just because I’m going to sit here and I’m going to make a choice between: Am I going to have green tea, coffee, or water? There seems that there is a choice. From the stand point of the body thing, the body will have a preference. I have a preference right now for green tea. Okay. So, someone can say “well you’re not following the Faith Mind Sutra.” You chose one thing over another. Why didn’t you just, you know, close your eyes and grab anything and that’s what you’re going to have?

That’s not what the text is moving you toward. What the text is asking you to show, is that you’re not actually making decisions you think you’re making. As long as you’re holding a preference from the standpoint of “if I have A then things will be good, but if I have B then it will be bad,” the text is saying that the matrix has got you. Because then you are defining yourself based on the outcome of such a choice.

The matrix has got you because as soon as you think you are making a choice, then here you are as an individual, separate important person making a choice; as opposed to beginning to see life as a scripted activity. Or better said various possible scripts. What you are is choosing a complete life script over another, not tiny individual things in each script. You might choose the script of fireman over surfer. Ok, but much of the fireman life will be scripted out, July 3, 1995 the fireman was scripted to have orange juice and toast for breakfast. And that’s what he had, even though it seemed like he chose it. I now see we are “choosing” but not things, but giant possible blocks of complete scripted material. And that does not mean any script will perfect, every script will have some good stuff and disappointing stuff in it. What we are doing is trying to move to a particular stream, a particular life flow, that suits our overall deepest intention and purpose with life. That is really the only choice we are making, after that the block of script has to play out.

If you begin to start seeing the life you are currently on is a record groove, and it’s going in a particular direction, and as long as you’re on the record groove the next song is going to play. That takes a lot of the stress and anxiety off because all you’re doing is unfolding the next piece of the song. I’m not trying to say this in some sort of new age kind of like ‘go with the flow’ because some god is leading you towards your wonderful destiny and you’re going to find all kinds of love and beauty and whatever else. I don’t mean that at all. The direction that things are going might be really garbage might be crappy, might be difficult, might be painful. But it’s already there. The point being is to realize this, rather than using up a ton of energy, allowing more loosh to be extracted, because that’s sort of what’s already happening. When you’re in a state of anxiety, you’re generating a fantastic amount of loosh for these archons to eat. They love it. They LOVE when you have a problem making a decision. Sounds great! But if I know when I sit down, I’m going to have something to drink and it just like at that moment…oh I guess it’s this. There are no preferences. I’ve had a preference in the sense I’m drinking the thing I want now, but without any time before hand to go over that preference. So how to say it slightly different?

Really, the only preference I think you have to check on is the totality of your life. Not the moment-by-moment elements of your life but literally the entire direction that your life is on. Like okay, I’m pretty sure there are perhaps thousands of potential lives. Right? The character in The Adjustment Bureau has thousands of potential lives in those books that those archons can get them to move along. The archons don’t care which one it is. Just as long as you’re on one of them. The archons would probably prefer that you chose life number 574, but if you choose number 675, yeah they don’t really care. Whatever. It…it works for them. Right. So, what we’re doing is …all we’re doing is kind of recognizing, what is our ultimate goal? What is the thing that is most important to us. What is the one life path out of the 10,000 that could lead to our ultimate goal, and not anything the archons want for us. What is the life stream that will get me to Kansas City?

Now, a lot of other roads are going to be much nicer. They’re going to be much more enjoyable. There’s many more stops, more interesting places, more restaurants, but they’re not going to get us to Kansas City. So, when the text is saying, not to have preferences, not have opinions…what it’s asking you to do, is step out of your constant day to day contemplating of ‘I need to make the right choice within life,’ it just wants to choose the one overall direction.

As soon as you understand, the matrix wants you to grasp onto reality. It wants you to say this place is important, or more importantly I’M very important. I’m very important and what happens to me is extremely important and in fact the world needs me to be a particular way or bad things might happen to this place. We really think this way (laughing softly in derision) at the core or our being we actually do. We say we don’t but we do. Part of moving closer to emptiness is the releasing of this self-importance, and the importance of reality and instead moving towards the next stage which is focusing only on the perception of reality and the perception of oneself. Not so much what is actually going on in reality but what is the perceiver perceiving about this reality. That would be stage one, is beginning to focus less on what’s going on there and begin to see who or what is the thing that is having the perception of the reality that is being perceived.

LM - But there is a time to stop? Just stop?

HOWDIE – One of the most important Taoist texts, we’ll get to some of those as the year goes on. One of the keys is the book of “Stopping and Seeing,” - famous text of about 100 AD. The word stopping is referring to stopping delusion, so that you can see ultimate reality. Isn’t it interesting that Carlos Castaneda called the two main elements of his work, “stopping the world,” and “seeing.” Basically, he’s taking the knowledge of the ancient Taoists and not even changing the name. He’s telling you the exact same thing that these ancient texts did – “stopping and seeing.” The Faith Mind Sutra is suggesting that you move in that direction with very few words. Stop the delusional mind, and then you can see What Is.

LM – Miyamoto Musashi calls a state where you are just physically reacting and not making choices and achieving perfection, the “void state.” We also hear about it being called “the flow state” like when you’re surfing or for example your experience when you’re in hockey. You know when you’re competing at a very high level or you’re riding a motorcycle very fast, or climbing a mountain or in a gun fight or whatever. You’re not making choices if you’re in the right state, you’re just doing. You’re removed from it. There’s no time, and it’s in those moments I found, where the highest level of achievement occurs. I think what the Faith Mind Sutra might be referencing here is getting to that state without this physical impetus requiring it, so that you’re just simply existing to the flow of your illusion. That’s all I had to say.

HOWDIE- I see. One, I fully can recognize what you’re talking about. It is a mystical state. It is available to everyone to potentially achieve but no, the Faith Mind Sutra’s not talking about that. As soon as you say “you’re achieving,” there’s a you, and there’s an achievement. It’s duality. The Faith Mind Sutra is moving someone to the point where they see that what they are as a totality has nothing to do with the body mind, has nothing to do with the matrix, with duality So, it actually doesn’t matter whether things work out or not.

So, from that place where the Faith Mind Sutra is pushing you, If a good life is happening for you, great! Like, you know, I don’t think some Zen master would not say “well if it’s going great for you just continue!” Because at some point in time, you’ll hit the wall and life is not going to work out anymore. Just the way it is here. Then what? Of course normally it would be thought of that if things stopped being perfect, then there must be something wrong with you. You were doing it right before, but now that it’s not working the same way you’ve made a mistake. There’s something wrong with you. We need to fix you. This is the basis of our spiritual self-help tradition of the last 80 years. There’s something wrong with you. We need to find out how we fix it and if you just buy my book and go to my lecture and take my workshop then you’ll be fixed. I can pretty much guarantee, well we have 60 people here now, everybody’s been in that place, right? One way or another we all started with that. We all heard the message, like, oh it must be me, something must be wrong, and we went from place to place, person to person and book to book. So many of the people that are here finally got to the point and said “this is f-ing horse shit!” “This is total bull shit!” It’s one gigantic scam is what’s going on and you see through it! It’s like, “now what?” Certainly, in the last 20/30 years in the field, here’s all the stuff. Once you give up on religion and once you give up on the spiritual new age thing, what do you have left?

In a sense here’s where the Faith Mind Sutra starts to even have greater power because it says ah, there’s an answer beyond all of it and a state beyond all of it. Your job is to start literally dropping all of this other stuff to get to it. Now, as I said at the beginning of this; this is 50% of the pathway. This text is explaining that 50% very, very well. It’s not touching the other 50% at all, which is again why I don’t want to get anyone overly thinking, like I only have to focus on this and everything will be fine. Some of this stuff like (name of LM) was just talking about, that’s a valid part of the path too, right? It’s like pieces of the puzzle but you can’t talk about the whole puzzle at once. You have to talk about it in pieces. That’s what we’re doing today. We’re talking about this piece. Next month we’re going to talk about a different piece.

That’s the strangeness that starts to happen when you have a realization of emptiness, at least for me, was seeing how much work I had been putting in trying to achieve something, trying to get somewhere, trying to get this person to like me, or fixing this problem. And after the realization it was like why am I putting all this effort into a video game. How could I even have been so fooled into thinking like this? Why has the screen tricked me into deserving so much of my attention?

I realized pretty in time that the dream deserves some of the attention, because if you don’t give it any attention at all and think “oh I’m just going to sit in my house and drink tea,” the matrix is going to steam roll you. It’s got tricks beyond belief. Usually some of the worse times people get run over is after they’ve had a deep spiritual or mystical experience and think they know everything. Man, the matrix will hit you hard. So, it’s a continuing life long process of having these experiences and integrating them. Part of that pathway is the removal of this programming that’s telling you that you need to control reality. That’s really what it is right? It’s a mechanism of control. I need reality to be a specific way and the people in it to do specific things, act in particular ways, talk in a particular way. We are spending a massive amount of our energy trying to get the matrix and the people around it to act in the way we expect them to act and do what we want them to do. That’s just exhausting. Eventually you can get to the point where you’re just like oh yea, I really don’t care what anyone does or doesn’t do, thinks or doesn’t think. They can do whatever they want because 99% of the people around me are still insane. They’re still operating under a pattern of insanity so why worry about it? I’ll just sit here and wait for the next urge to do something. If the next urge doesn’t come…I’ll wait. I’ve got lots of time. And yet I have no time at all…

LM – So you’ve sort of answered the question in a way but, the thing that popped up in our group was the very specific line “do not seek truth,” but this whole journey is really about seeking truth on one hand. You even said a few moments ago that we need to flood our minds with really deep thoughts and deep questions to have the experience or to get closer to the experience.

HOWDIE – The deep questions are to blow up the mind. It’s like you’re putting so much into the computer that it can’t function anymore and it blows up.

LM- But is that not seeking truth then?

HOWDIE – I’m just looking for the exact line. What verse was it?

LM – Verse seven, last line.

HOWDIE – Wait, I see it. “Do not seek truth, just stop having opinions.”

LM- Yes

HOWDIE- By saying “not seeking truth,” my sense is what they’re referring to is do not seek truth from the standpoint of seeking so that there is something for me to get. As in I’m seeking because I’m going to be improved, there’s something in it for me, as opposed to one who has an intense desire to know what the truth is.

This need for truth, no matter how wonderful, strange, great or disappointing it might be can only come out of, things have been so painful, so confusing, so difficult, that someone is willing to say: “I’m shutting the doors to all of this until I know what the hell’s going on.” Until I actually know for sure what this is, who I am, what if anything this means, everything else doesn’t matter. I have to get this answer. That’s kind of how it works. It’s not so much you’re saying, “I need the truth,” right, because as soon as you say that word, and we use it in language, right? It’s usually got an undercurrent of, I’m seeking truth to be special. I’m looking to know everything, not for my own personal knowing, but just so that I can then start telling everybody else what they should think. Or they’re seeking the truth so they can fix the world.

LM- Guilty!

HOWDIE- Like, okay the world’s crazy and insane, let’s find all the ways that we can make a very happy, wonderful, loving world. The original Chinese characters might say something like “do not seek just stop having opinions.” In a sense it’s unraveling the seeking process, from the standpoint of what’s in it for “me.” But on one level some type of seeking has to occur. You can’t stop seeking as an action, but as a response to what the seeking has revealed.

This is where particularly Advaita gets itself into trouble. At least modern Advaita (not the ancient version but the modern line), where such a teacher would tell you your problem is that you are seeking. So just stop. Drink your tea. Seeking is the problem. In a sense that’s true, actually. Seeking is the problem. Trying to get somewhere else as if somewhere else will fix something, yes, is a delusional idea. There is an exact time on the pathway when that has to be realized. It’s like, oh yeah, my seeking has been the problem because it has been designed to improve myself. And I have not yet verified there is a “self” to improve, so why am I putting in all this energy to this search. If truth is my goal, that is something else.

Buddha stops under the Bodhi tree not out of the state of great inner fortitude and will, where he’s able to resist all the temptations of the devils. He stopped because he realized that he had tried everything, every tradition, every text, every practice. He did everything he could possibly do and they all failed. He stopped out of sheer exhaustion and sheer disappointment. So when the devils kept tempting him with whatever they were tempting him with, either beautiful stuff or ugly stuff, he could “I’ve tried that.” I’ve tried the money and fame route. I’ve tried the girl route. I’ve tried the spiritual route, I’ve tried the fixing the world route. So, it wasn’t so much a rejection because of will, of because of faith of his path.

There is some similarity to the story of St. Anthony the Hermit , which is also a really important story. The resisting and rejection can come from seeing that you tried that before, and it failed. It all leads into the same sewer. So, I’m done. It doesn’t matter what you tempt me with. I’m just not doing it because I know it fails. So, in that final state of ultimate failure, you might say that the mind will start to get a crack in it. That crack is the space where you might say that which is outside the matrix can finally come in, can finally get the divine spark (woosh), awake. We’re working on a pathway that is getting the divine spark a little bit more awake, a little bit more awake, a little bit more power but there will be a particular moment where literally you might say we stop the focus on us, and so everything goes to the divine spark (woosh).

But we can not stop early. We have to walk as the prince for a while. Constantly getting stuck in the forest, stepping on something, falling over something, wasting time by a nice lake,. getting chased by wild animals, and not turning back. We have to keep going even though we finally get to the point we’re at the castle and we can’t get in. Where there’s no door, no nothing, no way to get in there. We’ve done everything we can do. We have exhausted every possible option. And in that moment, finally, that thing can open up that we’ve been blocking all this time which is just a part of human nature. Just that reality of what we are. So, part of the pathway is kind of exhausting yourself as best you can.

Now some people might get there without the complete exhaustion process. I love listening to some of these stories of people who share, possibly a true realization of emptiness. So many will say: “I did nothing for this to happen. It happened totally by grace. “It had nothing to do with me and my seeking” they will say. But if you actually read their story, you find out they worked really, really hard one way or another for a long time. They’re dismissing it now, because they’ve seen the final point and in one sense they realize, well actually, they don’t correspond when you’re at that point but before you’re at that point, and from that end seeing they are correct. But trying to impersonate the end seeing, is not the way to get there. You have to seek, to exhaust the seeker, to realize emptiness, and see on one level you never had to seek. I know its confusing, but sort of the way it seems to be.

But deep seeking is not new age practices, yoga, mindfulness, or meditation practice. There is nothing wrong with them, and might be needed for certain people to get out of a particular current hole they might be in. But the deep work happens only when you begin to ask yourself some really deep questions. Like I would rather say, someone’s coming out of a really tough divorce, because their partner is leaving them because they were a complete asshole. And they realize this, that the problem was with them. And they start to question“How was I that guy or girl that drove my partner away?” “Why did I act that way?” “Why was I living my life in that manner?” That’s digging deep into unraveling the self. That’s putting these intense questions on the computer of the mind. So literally I would say that person might have a better chance of reaching the totality of what they are then someone who’s sitting there meditating quietly every day.

Are there any more groups? Any more questions or were the questions kind of already presented? (no response) Okay then I guess we’ll move on.

(HOWDIE now reads a second section of the Faith Mind Sutra, verses 8 to 14:

HOWDIE –If you’re okay with these words being read you might feel yourself drifting, not like to sleep but drifting deeper, almost like falling backwards into something greater. It’s okay. It’s okay to fall into that. That’s what this text is doing. If you choose to read it very, very slowly, many times over the course a few weeks, sometimes in the course of reading it you might just notice you just feel like you fell. Of course, you’ve just fallen into something more real than what you had previously thought. So, questions from that section?

LM- The verse if you will, that I find the most difficult to understand is verse 11 “Objects appear as objects because the mind believes it is subject. In truth subject and object are not separate. They arise as one from emptiness.” I just, my mind is just not wrapping around what that means. I always had difficulty with object, subject….

HOWDIE – Let me ask you this, what do you think it means? If you had to take a guess, what do you think it means. No worry about being right or wrong, just what’s your guess?

LM- The things that I see in this world, table, chair, people, events, are objects only because I deem them to be such. I am the subject and they are the object.

HOWDIE- Right, what it’s saying is the objects only exist because you believe that you are there perceiving them.

LM- Because I believe I am real, therefore what I see is real.

HOWDIE- Right. Right. Exactly.

LM – Uh, thank you.

HOWDIE – That’s why I mentioned earlier, this book can start getting you to feel like you’re falling backwards, because literally you’re falling backwards from your normal self, out of your normal mind, into the very thing which is projecting you and your mind. The first time that happens, and I know some of you have had that experience. I don’t doubt it. You’re working hard to understand your thought. You’re looking at your thought, and you’re looking carefully. That’s a big step. Just to be able to be in this perceiving space, looking at your own thoughts and feelings, then all of a sudden you pop into the next stage. You’re like oh wait a minute. Now I’m watching the thing that is watching the thoughts and the feelings. We shift away from my mind, my feelings and we shift into this place of, I’m the thing that can observe the thoughts and the feelings. When that next shift happens, you’re like, wait a minute. I can observe the observer observing the thoughts and the feelings.

How deep does this projection go? You won’t find this information anywhere anymore. They’ve hidden this. They present that the world you experience, this reality, all comes from what they call “mind.” Lower case m, (m)ind. That mind is currently focused on being located in your heart, built on feelings and emotions. So, the whole of reality is built off of feeling. What’s interesting, is our whole modern reality has put the focus on: “Oh, you don’t want to focus on your thoughts. You want to focus on your feelings.” You want to get into your heart. You want to feel more. You want to experience more love and more joy, let go of these fears. So, what they’ve done is they’ve actually taken people, placed them deeper in their projection machine to project more feelings and thus more thoughts. The Buddhist say that there is a true mind. They call it the heavenly mind or the heavenly heart. That’s how they describe it. They put that heart, right here (touches his forehead). They say the heavenly heart is in your mind. It’s a discriminating mind because it has no feeling. It has no emotion. It’s just seeing clearly and is able to perceive and understand from that place of clarity. So again, the inversion of our entire spiritual world, is that immense. The entire modern spiritual world says go here (heart) yet if you go to these very ancient sources, they want you to go here (higher mind).

NOTE Translation used can be found in “The Perennial Way” by Bart Marshall, Tat Foundation Press 2009

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