Thursday, January 05, 2006

the book

Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be. ~Alan Watts~

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite True.
But thats hard to draw the line between having faith in the sense of trusting the water when swimming and holding tight.
How do you think?

Wendy said...

You know because when you hold on tight you sink and drown. And I don't think it is a question of drawing lines and reasoning out what amounts to trusting the water and what is clinging. Because faith understood in the faculty of reasons equals to holding tightly.