How trust potentiates the practice
Different ways to build your trust
[FYI - I’m changing the format of these posts to either be links, quote, or essay to enable some more long form content and spread out the goodness a bit more! I’ll try not to clog your inbox too much - P.]
My teacher taught that trust subsumed all the other preconditions for awakening. For tantric practice specifically, trust is essential but can be especially hard compared to other more secularized forms of meditation practice. This is because tantric ritual, which can involve visualizations, deity yoga, and confusing meditation instructions, ask you to literally merge with gods, past buddhas, spirits, or your teacher. If you bring a spirit of a skepticism to those practices, they likely won’t work. Of course for some, trust, in the form of a deep sense of self-efficacy or self-belief, can be found inherently inside themselves. In some sense, they allow that these beings can exist as aspects of themselves and are able to create conviction purely that way. For many others, especially those of us in the West who have no reason to really think these types of meditation practices can work (or are simply woo), trust requires some further grounding.
Consequently, trust is developed in the following ways. However, not everyone requires the same degree of development in all of these areas.
Philosophical - It is important that practitioners understand and accept the emptiness (constructedness) of at least some aspects of experience. More Theravadan-inflected, so-called Buddhist Modernism, Pragmatic Dharma and classic Insight meditation teachings will tend to emphasize the emptiness of self (anatta). In Mahayana philosophy, most famously Nagarjuna, you’ll find a more thoroughgoing philosophical account of emptiness that extends its reach over the entirety of human experience. There are a hornets nests of paradoxes here the deeper you go. Basically you need to somehow account for regularity, pattern — essentially how the human experience constructs itself— despite its utter ungroundedness / mind-constructedness. Philosophy in praxis does matter, however, because the way you construct your View on reality affects how awakening shows up for you. There is concern that some Views can lead to an excessively dissociative outlook. You can clearly see how an excess of an emphasis on the lack of ultimate meaning can lead to a kind of nihilism. On the other hand, an excess of emphasis on the way the sacred appears in the world can lead to an excess of confidence in one’s spiritual worldview. Nonetheless, some degree of conceptual understanding and assent is necessary.
Experiential - Obviously the experience of various peak experiences both during meditation practices, but also via other routes like psychedelics, can increase the degree of trust in the practice. It is said that psychedelic experiences are like a helicopter tour of the mountain — they can only show you the peaks briefly. There are other kinds of non-ordinary experiences that build trust, however, include seeming supernatural occurrences, carefully constructed rituals, and possibly a little bit of hypnotic suggestion. All of these help you hold a View with conviction.
Cultural/mythic - We tend to work better with a practice if its grounded in our own cultural and mythic symbology. It’s natural for members of Abrahamic religions in the West to find it especially powerful to connect to a set of nondual teachings from within their respective faiths. For Atheists or people that grew up non-affiliated, drawing upon Western collective unconscious (a la Jungian) can still be effective. Burbea’s soul-making project is consonant with this idea. Humans have the capacity to embody archetypical patterns spontaneously to be of benefit in the world. Learning those patterns and invoking them ritually can potentiate that way of being in the world.
Scientific - For some, especially those who simply don’t want to accept the possibility of anything beyond materialism, conviction can come in the form of certain scientific facts which could allow for non-ordinary experience. One can cite constructivist ideas about human psychology to support the idea that reality is a kind of illusion. The paradoxes of quantum mechanics may show that nothing exists independently. Holographic theories that attempt to be a unified theory of physics also seem to suggest that reality is a projection from a higher dimensional space to our lower dimensioned reality. These can buttress the belief that our consciousness could have capacities beyond what we ordinarily presume. There is a danger, here, however, that as facts change the support for emptiness could wane.
Social - Certainly the reported experiences of ones’ friends and teachers can build confidence in the efficacy of these practices. Although some harbor a taboo in discussing so-called attainments, benefiting from the positive actions of our spiritual friends as they progress on the path can clue us in that something is going on. This is one of the reasons the sangha is one of the jewels of liberation and it’s crucial to cultivate spiritual friends along the path.
In short, the development of these supports for trust in the practice can greatly increase the likelihood that the practice will work.