Bad faith leads us away from God. Many roads do this, and not all call themselves religion. Science can be used as bad faith to undermine belief while offering no good alternative. This isn’t the same as labeling science the enemy of faith, because if your aim is to gain true knowledge of God, science may be a great help. You can identify bad faith, by any name, by its results. The God it puts forward doesn’t make life better.
Faith, like God, should be testable. A popular evangelist writes, “Faith activates God.” Is that true? I can imagine both sides of a football game kneeling to pray for victory (this scene often appears on television), and clearly one team won’t activate God, since it is going to lose. In horrific situations where lives are lost, we can’t say that those who survived were the ones whose faith activated God. Perhaps it should be the opposite. Perhaps God needs to activate faith. If he doesn’t, faith won’t have much to show for itself.
Because faith is private, it’s tricky and often unfair to say that someone else is guilty of bad faith. What we’re concerned with is the path to true knowledge of God. Faith should help open the way. If instead it blocks the way, we can call it bad faith for our purposes. This criterion seems to me limited and fair. It would be unfair to intrude where we don’t belong, just for the sake of pointing fingers at someone else’s strange-seeming cult. All religions began with a small number of the fervent faithful; therefore all could have been branded as cults until they grew so large that they immunized themselves. By our limited definition, bad faith opposes spiritual growth. The leading suspects are three:
Blind faith
Rank prejudice
Pseudoscience
Each of these gives us scope to distinguish between faith as a guide to spiritual growth and faith as an obstacle to such growth. I once had a distinguished patient named Eknath Easwaran who told me more wise things about faith than anyone else I’ve read or known. A person of refined mind and gentleness, Easwaran—this was his first name—came from Kerala in South India and emigrated to California, where he established a meditation center. (His Wikipedia entry features a picture of him lecturing to a full hall of Berkeley students in the fateful year of 1968. The caption says he was teaching the first accredited course in meditation given at a major university.) He died in 1999 at the age of eighty-eight, having spent his life in devotion to the classic spiritual literature of India.
I was raised by a religious mother and a physician father who placed his faith entirely in science. Over time, although my heart went out to my mother and her way of seeing the world, it was my father’s way that I chose to follow. This imposed a division inside me, and during my formative years I simply lived with a divided self—as most people do—paying almost all my attention to practical affairs. Becoming a doctor entails scientific training, and my aptitude for it came easily. I became a living example of something that Eknath Easwaran put very simply, so simply that most of us completely overlook it: “You are whatever your faith is.”
He wasn’t speaking in religious terms. By faith, he meant the core ideas and beliefs you live by. If you believe that people are good and that life is fair, those ideas don’t sit inside you passively like pennies in a piggy bank. They are dynamic; they infuse who you are. You won’t need to refer to them the way you look up ideas in a book—in a very real sense, you are the sum of your inner conceptions.
The implication, which I wish I had seen years before, is that everyone has faith. Faith lives through them. Human beings walk, talk, eat, and breathe their personal faith. It can be a negative, even destructive faith, as when someone lives for revenge. Defending one’s religion by killing infidels is a destructive faith disguised as a positive faith. Easwaran was simplifying a verse from the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna imparts to the warrior Arjuna the essence of faith:
Everyone’s faith comes from the perceptions of the mind.
O Arjuna, the ego-personality is the living embodiment of faith.
Your faith is your identity.
Suddenly faith is much more far-reaching than simply asking yourself, “Do I believe in God?” If you are your faith, almost nothing that happens to you can be left out. It then becomes vitally important to know good faith from bad. Bad faith embodies a set of core beliefs that are countered by good faith. Looking at yourself honestly, you will see a confusing mixture of beliefs that are rooted in bad faith and other beliefs rooted in good faith. Untangling them is an important aspect of making faith work for you as it was meant to.
Every religion has dogmas that become matters of faith, binding the religion into a community. A Muslim believes that the Prophet Muhammad recited the Koran at the command of the archangel Gabriel, who appeared to him one night as he was meditating in a cave above Mecca. Christians believe in the Resurrection and Mormons in the Book of Mormon. The faithful are not to question these exclusive beliefs—they are required to have blind faith.
Enemies of religion tend to conflate blind faith with faith itself, quite unfairly. Innocuous examples of faith get blurred into the extreme wrongs that are justified by blind faith. Christopher Hitchens writes about a defining incident in his boyhood. At school one teacher, a pious widow, was in charge of nature studies and the Bible. She fused the two, Hitchens recalls, when she said one day, “So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be.”
Most of us can recall hearing similar silly things being told to us as children. Adults are guilty of talking down, and it’s not hard to imagine that this woman, described as harmless and affectionate, had some fanciful religious ideas (no more fanciful than the notion of heaven as a place where good Christians will one day sit on clouds playing harps). But Hitchens says that he was appalled by what she said—and he had an atheist epiphany.
My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its rival.… I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way around.
The last sentence is arguable, but what strikes me about a little boy’s epiphany is that something like it occurs in every childhood. The moment comes when you realize that adults make mistakes. This moment is disappointing because life is simpler when parents and teachers are perfect, but it also opens the way for developing your own self. In short order, Hitchens began to question other “oddities,” as he calls them.
If God created all things, for example, why should he be praised for doing what came naturally? “This seemed servile, apart from anything else.” If Jesus could heal the blind as he chose, why didn’t he cure blindness itself? As for Jesus hurling out devils that entered a herd of pigs, “that seemed sinister: more like black magic.” These questions are precocious, but Hitchens also had more commonplace doubts. “With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner? Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic?” Certainly these troubling questions have led many people to a loss of faith, although that doesn’t mean they cannot be answered. Hitchens made the leap into total shutdown in matters of religion thanks to another school incident:
The headmaster, who … was a bit of a sadist and a closeted homosexual … was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one evening. “You may not see the point of all this faith now,” he said. “But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones.”
This may seem like another example of harmless piety and a correct insight into human nature. It could have come from a kindly teacher who wasn’t a sadist or closeted (presumably those tags were gratuitously thrown in to impugn the speaker’s character). Millions of people have sought solace from grief through their faith. But Hitchens recalls that he felt a stab of indignation and disbelief. The headmaster was basically saying that “religion might not be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible.”
It’s good to go back and reexamine the ideas that occur to us as children—especially if they are delivered, as Hitchens’s was, as if from a higher authority. But children are impressionable, and formative experiences stick. In this case, even though he was a professional writer and thinker, Hitchens never abandoned his first bout of indignation. He didn’t consider that religion might be simultaneously comforting and true—the two are mutually exclusive in his view. Blind disbelief has this in common with blind faith: Both turn to zealotry through black and white thinking. (It’s worth noting that contempt and indignation became signature tones in Hitchens’s writing career.)
Blind faith and blind unbelief have other things in common. They both refuse to be tested. They condemn the other side. They depend on strong emotional attachments. The main difference is that unbelief disguises its blindness behind a veil of reason. Thus Hitchens says that prayer brings “no result.” This discounts the countless people who declare that their prayers have been answered. A reasonable person would take this into account as evidence. Yet the fact remains that most articles of blind faith are not subject to testing for truth or falsity. The Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, Muhammad’s ride to Jerusalem on a flying horse and subsequent ascension to heaven—the call of atheists to reject all religion on the basis of its unproven dogmas misses the point. Dogma is like an entry pass or club membership. Most people are born into a religion and therefore automatically have a pass.
Only later do they have a chance to examine the dogmatic side of their faith. Then three salient questions arise: What do I have to do? How much does it matter? Will I be affected? Take the most basic of Christian dogmas: that Jesus died and was resurrected from the tomb. This isn’t a belief that can be tested; you accept it blindly if you want to be a practicing Christian in most (but not all) denominations. To an outsider, accepting the Resurrection may seem irrational. But if you subject it to the three questions listed above, this article of blind faith exists for more reasons than its believability to a rational person.
What do I have to do? For the vast majority of Christians, the answer is nothing. Belief in the Resurrection is passive except when Mass is taken, and that is voluntary.
How much does it matter? This is a more ambiguous question, since the Resurrection is connected to the forgiveness of sins, a subject that presses close to home for Christians. Also, as a matter of conscience, believing in the Resurrection is a pretty fundamental test—it’s hard to consider yourself a Christian if you wholeheartedly disbelieve that Jesus rose from the dead. Yet even here the either/or thinking of militant atheists doesn’t apply. Modern theology makes room for faith that lives side by side with doubt, and many denominations long ago turned away from mystical events like the Resurrection in favor of doing good works and living a moral life.
Will I be affected? Just because it is mystical, the Resurrection affects Christians after they die, primarily, and go to heaven. Only then will they discover if Christ redeemed them from their sins. Even then, dogma isn’t uniform. Some denominations don’t teach about sin and redemption and they place little emphasis on Judgment Day. You can be a practicing Christian, in short, without being affected by the Resurrection.
A popular evangelical saying holds that “Faith activates God.” If that’s what it takes for God to be present, the stakes are higher than the minimal faith that many Christians feel. Without faith, God will remain inert; the Almighty, who has asked you to take things on faith that in your heart of hearts you don’t believe, will ignore you. I reject this quid pro quo setup. A God that accepts one person and rejects another cannot be divine, because, as we’ve seen, he would be just imitating human nature. In this book, the criterion of faith is different from blind acceptance. Faith is a stage on the way to true knowledge of God. By that standard, blind faith is questionable but not fatal—far from it. As a mystical act, blind faith can open up subtle aspects of the mind. It can lead to an expanded view of reality and allow a person to see himself or herself as multidimensional, existing on other planes beyond the physical.
Blind faith has served such purposes for many centuries. No doubt the rise of science has lessened the power of dogma. On the whole, that’s to the good. Testable faith will be much more valuable than untestable. We can’t contest the damage done by superstition and ignorance in the history of religion. On the whole, blind faith deserves to be considered bad faith. But equating religion with spirituality isn’t valid. You can question blind faith and reject it without doing harm to your spiritual journey. Indeed, you would probably help yourself along the way.
When religion creates divisions of intolerance and hatred, it is obviously guilty of bad faith. Southern churches—piously justifying slavery before the Civil War, then turning a blind eye to racial injustice for a century afterward—used God as a mask for rank prejudice.
Some religious teachings actually consider it necessary for faith to be prejudiced. Several years ago I was doing research for a book on Jesus and sought out the writings of a recent pope (whose name doesn’t need to be singled out). I casually turned to the index reference under “Buddha” and read the following opinion: Although some people see parallels between the lives of the Buddha and of Jesus, this is a false belief. Buddhism is a form of paganism, believed in by those who have not yet accepted that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world. Another pope, when he was a cardinal, wrote the encyclical condemnation of Eastern meditation that became church doctrine, on the grounds that meditation took Catholics away from praying to the Virgin Mary as intercessor with God. This reactionary posture saddened me. It is all too prevalent in dogmatic faiths. Whatever the Bible or Koran condemns—be it infidels, gay people, eating prohibited foods, or treating women as equals—cannot be challenged. Orthodoxy, when it turns into rank prejudice, is proud to ignore the changing times. Attitudes never evolve beyond the date of ancient scriptures.
Religious intolerance has to be dealt with in every society and kept from harming other people. Most believers won’t feel that the issue comes near to their lives. The courts will be there to order blood transfusions for seriously ill children over the religious objection of their parents or to uphold women’s rights. Religion, in all its variety, will step into the marketplace of ideas as one voice among many for cutting-edge change like gay marriage. Yet for all that, these issues do come near us as trials of conscience. I must state my own bias here. Any form of us-versus-them thinking strikes me as bad faith. Religions draw into tight camps where their God is the only true God, for racial, tribal, political, and theological reasons. I find none of them justified.
We all know true believers who reject and even denigrate other faiths. Radical Islam has done great harm to general tolerance for all faiths, just as anti-Semitism has for many centuries. My aim isn’t to impose my bias on anyone else. People remain prejudiced for irrational reasons; the best that can be said is that religion is only one ingredient in the mix. Family upbringing often fosters more intolerance, I would imagine, than Sunday school. Rank prejudice belongs to the underbelly of religious culture far more than to its official teachings. The wise course is to let prejudice be what it has always been, a test of conscience. Each person must decide his own limits; each must take a stand according to her own circumstances. As a general topic, rank prejudice is bad faith in its most egregious from. The fact is known to everyone, so not much discussion is needed.
On the other hand, there is much to say about pseudoscience, a form of bad faith that occupies believers and unbelievers alike. Dawkins and company label someone else’s serious inquiry quackery if its thinking contradicts their narrow brand of science. In turn, militant atheism misuses the scientific method for its own agenda. The term pseudoscience changes depending on what angle you look at it from.
You can make the argument that science should be atheistic in the most literal sense: It should leave God out entirely. God can’t be squeezed into a scientific model. It isn’t possible to subject him to experimental testing, and therefore Dawkins’s claim that God doesn’t meet the rigors of science is a blind alley. By the same token, the universe can be measured and explored without bringing in matters of faith.
But of course the simmering feud between science and faith runs deeper than the rise of militant atheists or their avowed opponents, the creationists. Their sideshow has little resonance in the laboratory. Bestseller lists don’t necessarily reflect reality. By any realistic standard, the number of people who crusade for either side is small. It distresses scientists far more that so many Americans—more than half, according to one poll—believe that creation could not have taken place without at least some participation by God. (If it helps at all, I imagine that this belief is passive, much like believing in UFOs and the yeti.)
The deeper reason for science facing off against religion in our day is that reality has become too difficult to explain using even the most complex mechanistic models. The hard and fast line that used to divide science and mysticism has become hopelessly blurred. Could the universe be as alive as we are? Might it be capable of thinking? A hint comes in a quote from the late British physicist David Bohm: “In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.” Humans have always looked to nature as a mirror of ourselves. If we really are a microcosm, then the macrocosm—the universe at large—must be seen in terms of what makes us human.
Suddenly one sees a rash of books by credentialed physicists arguing in favor of a conscious universe, a living universe and even a universe shaped by human perception. This poses a radical challenge to scientific materialism. It might seem that Einstein was in a poetic mood when he declared that he wanted to know the mind of God. It’s a serious speculation, however, when Freeman Dyson writes, “Life may have succeeded against all odds in molding a universe to its purposes.” In other words, since the only universe we can know anything about comes to us through our minds, it may be that our minds shape reality. A red filter makes everything look red, and if other colors exist, they can’t be known as long as you are looking through a red filter.
Looking through the human mind is more complex than holding up a piece of colored glass, but the same limitation holds. Our minds look at a baseball player hitting a home run and, being linear, perceive that the bat has to hit the ball before it can sail over the fence. Simple cause and effect tells the tale. But we know from quantum physics that at a deeper level time goes backward, and that the cause can be assigned after the effect takes place. So it is possible that cause and effect wouldn’t exist without a mind geared to see things that way. If you are wedded to an outdated kind of materialism, such a statement sounds absurd. The habit of looking into the mirror of nature stopped making sense when everything “out there” consisted of bits and pieces of data—all breadcrumbs and no loaf.
We need to be clear about a very basic point: The visible universe isn’t the same as reality. When solid objects are reduced to atoms and then to subatomic particles, they are no longer solid. They are clouds of potentiality. As physics defines it, potentiality is neither matter nor energy but completely intangible, no matter how solid a mountain may be or how powerful a lightning bolt. Particles in such a state aren’t even particles anymore. They do not have a specific location in space; instead, every particle emerges from quantum waves that can extend infinitely in all directions. Even if Dawkins could rescue the notion that what you see is the benchmark for what is real, the most recent theories of the cosmos propose that only 4 percent of the universe is made up of matter and energy that can be measured—the remaining 96 percent consists of so-called dark matter and energy, which are little understood. They cannot be seen, only inferred.
Physicist Joel Primack, who specializes in how the universe is constructed, offers the image of an ice cream cake, a “cosmic dessert” with a makeup that will astonish anyone. Most of the cake, 70 percent, is dark energy, sandwiched with dark matter (25 percent) like chocolate cake and ice cream. Primack chooses chocolate because it is dark, while in reality dark matter and energy have never been observed. This leaves only 5 percent of the cosmos that could be visible. Most of that (4.5 percent of the total) is taken up by floating atoms of hydrogen and helium, along with various mixed atoms in deep space—call this the icing. All other visible matter, which includes stars and galaxies by the billions and billions, are like a sprinkling of cinnamon on top of the cake. The universe upon which materialists base reality, in other words, counts as 0.01 percent of the cosmic dessert.
All the evidence points in one direction: We need a new paradigm for explaining the cosmos. We need to accept first and foremost that the last things to be trusted are the five senses. More than that, even cherished theories like relativity have become drastically unstable. Dark energy is enlarging the space between galaxies faster than the speed of light. So something beyond space and time serves as the major force for creation and destruction in the cosmos, and whatever it is, it will be as invisible as mind, God, the soul, and higher consciousness.
For decades, the outspoken British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has worked with courageous vision to bring about a new paradigm; in the process he’s made himself a lightning rod for materialists who cannot abide the notion that invisible things might be real. Sheldrake wrote a telling article on why bad science is like bad faith: “Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth. They believe that science has already solved the fundamental questions. The details still need working out, but in principle the answers are known.” This is exactly the position taken by Dawkins; he and his cohorts pursue a faith based on scientism, the belief that the scientific method will one day solve all problems.
As a brand of faith, scientism seems more appealing than, say, creationism, which denies the evolution of the universe and life on Earth. But as Sheldrake points out, scientism has the harmful effect of suppressing thinking and research in any direction that doesn’t conform to conventional guidelines. “Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system. But the ‘scientific worldview,’ based on the materialist philosophy, is enormously prestigious because science has been so successful.”
If science is a belief system, as faith-based as religion, then it betrays its own principles. It becomes pseudoscience. But the average person—including the average working scientist—has no idea, really, of how much faith science actually takes. Sheldrake writes, “These materialist beliefs are often taken for granted by scientists, not because they have thought about them critically, but because they haven’t. To deviate from them is heresy, and heresy harms careers.” Sheldrake has written brilliantly on the beliefs that all of us tend to take for granted because of the prestige of science. Let me condense these beliefs into a few sentences:
The belief that the universe is a machine whose working parts can be explained and diagrammed. Once that is accomplished, we will have a Theory of Everything.
The human body is also a machine, and science will one day understand every aspect down to the molecular level. Once that is accomplished, disease will be eradicated. In addition, all mental disorders will be cured with drugs.
Nature is mindless, the product of random activity at the physical level. Science will one day convince us to stop believing that life has any innate purpose other than survival.
The evolutionary struggle for food and mating rights explains how human behavior arose. Modern behavior is a direct result of Darwinian evolution. Our genes determined our destiny.
The mind can be reduced to physical processes in the brain. Since these processes follow strict laws of chemistry and physics, our lives are deterministic. Free will plays no part or perhaps a very minor one.
In this belief system anything tangible has priority over anything intangible. Dawkins belongs to the camp that traces every aspect of human psychology to natural selection. This, too, is pure faith. There are no fossils of behavior, which is fortunate for Dawkins, because none of his theories can be tested. If he claims that God arose as a survival mechanism, there is nothing either to prove or disprove the notion. The way is open for the most fanciful suppositions. Let’s theorize that Paleolithic women started to wear necklaces because that attracted more powerful males, who then brought these women an extra mastodon steak as opposed to women who wore only earrings. Dawkins’s brand of evolutionary psychology traces behavior back to nothing more than made-up stories like this one.
Unless you have faith that Darwin must apply to everything we think and do, it is obvious that his theory doesn’t. Natural selection means that a particular trait makes you better at getting food or fighting for a mate. In what way does cave painting achieve either goal, or the love of a mother for her baby, or the pleasure we get from music? The general public has no idea how rigidly the belief in evolutionary psychology is clung to. Religionists are accused, rightly, of arguing backward from God as a given which has to be true. Because God must exist, a fundamentalist Christian can see God’s hand in plane crashes, hurricanes, or the divorce of a Hollywood star. Anything at all can be made to fit their sin-and-damnation scheme.
Science is supposed to be the exact opposite of arguing from faith, yet for Dawkins, the most improbable aspects of human behavior become survival mechanisms. I smile reading Oscar Wilde’s quip, “Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.” Nobody can possibly prove that humor developed in our ancestors through a random genetic mutation. And how did such a mutation help them to survive? Maybe they got better at picking up girls at Stone Age singles bars. When he scoffs at faith for not being based on facts, Dawkins could aim the same accusation at his own field.
Sheldrake dissects the unproven assumptions of materialism at length in his book Science Set Free, which goes a long way to dismantling a worldview that is seriously fraying around the edges. He is realistic about the shortcomings of human nature: “In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.” But his conclusion is that science is being held back by “centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.”
Does that really affect how we think about God? Yes, quite directly. A universe that is meaningless can’t be divine. Random activity undermines all sense of purpose. A mind that arose out of electrochemical activity can’t know revelation or epiphany. The choice, for once, does come down to either/or. To me, it is self-evident that spiritual experiences exist, that we act out of free will, and that our lives have meaning. One might claim, with deep conviction, that “natural religion” grew out of human experience, age upon age.
Which means that science has a perfect right to be a belief system, too. The only demand one can make is that scientists own up to their articles of faith. Science doesn’t describe reality, because no school of philosophy has ever proved that the physical universe is real. (Even Stephen Hawking, no believer in God, has attested to this.) We assume that physical things are real, on the evidence of the information that enters through the five senses. But that is the same as saying that we accept reality subjectively. Without sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, there is no reality to experience.
The surprising result is that God is on a level playing field with stars, galaxies, mountains, trees, and the sky. None of them can be objectively validated. “This rock feels hard” is no truer than “I feel God’s love.” But it’s no less true, either, since feeling is one sure way to navigate through the world. If feeling that fire is hot and should not be touched is reliable, then feeling God’s love has the same claim to be reliable. What makes it seem unreliable is only a shift in worldviews. We are all embedded in the worldview of materialism; therefore the assumption that spiritual experiences must be unreal has become an article of faith.
The enormous question “What is reality?” will figure prominently in later pages, when we get to the topic of true knowledge about God. All of us, whether scientist or believer, are led by reality. Wherever it takes us, we must follow. The discovery of fossils changed faith forever, as it led the mind into a new model of reality. At this moment, the same thing is happening thanks to discoveries in all kinds of fields, including biology, physics, neuroscience, and genetics. A new model of reality is being shaped, and in turn it is shaping us.
But change hasn’t overturned an ancient sentence from the Bible: “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). In other words, we are what our thoughts have made of us. My friend Eknath Easwaran was echoing that sentence in his view of faith as the invisible core inside everyone. Even older than the Hebrew Bible is the Indian concept of shraddha, which is usually translated as “faith” but which includes everything we value, strive for, and envision. Saint John of the Cross wrote, “In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.” In his world of Catholic devotion, the universe was created as a gift of God’s love, and our response to the gift indicates our worthiness to receive it. There is no need, however, to translate this truth in religious terms. Shraddha tells us that we live by what we love. To love God isn’t different from loving science, if that is what shapes your life at its very core.
In bad faith, we insist that our beliefs should define reality for everyone. In good faith, we make the most of what we love and desire no less for everyone. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna shows a sublime confidence in the power of reality to lead us where we need to go: “As people approach me, I take them into my love. All ways follow a path to me” (Gita 4:11). I call this the power of reality rather than the power of God, since an omnipresent deity must be inside every grain of reality, expressing itself through every experience. Sheer mysticism? Only if you choose not to test it. The highest use of free will is to see if it actually leads to God. Krishna limits his powers by saying that if a person chooses no path, there is nothing God can do. The secret of human nature, fortunately, is that all of us follow the path of what we love the most.
For the moment, faith is a way station. Eknath Easwaran looked deep enough into his own life to believe one more thing: When a person is devoted with complete faith, the object of devotion is achieved. It doesn’t matter that he found this idea in the Gita. What matters is that his life was long enough—and full enough—to prove that it was true.