Meditation and Religious Beliefs

A couple days ago, my friend Sahar asked me what my religious beliefs were. As you know, that’s a fairly common question in several cultures, including both mine and Sahar’s. I am American and Sahar is Egyptian, and neither one of us will get through life without being asked a million times what our religious beliefs are.

Yet, no matter how common the question is, I’ve never had anything but difficulty answering it. Which is why in recent years I’ve shamelessly retreated into declaring that I follow the religion of Girls On Trampolines. Stating you religiously watch girls bouncing on trampolines turns out to be a good way to escape from the discomfort of stumbling around for hours looking for the concise words to sum up the thoughts you’ve had on religion.

I couldn’t take that approach the other day, however, because Sahar is a bright and earnest young woman who never gives up until she gets a satisfactory answer. Kids these days! They have no respect for their elders when their elders lie to them! What is the world coming to?

So, I was forced to give Sahar a serious answer. But the very moment I began thinking seriously about my religious beliefs it hit me that I don’t have any. Precisely, I don’t have any religious beliefs in the exact sense in which Sahar was asking about them.

Of course, I believe in many things about religion, but what I am lacking in are beliefs of the sort Sahar was probing for. I believe, for instance, there is a genetic basis for at least some elements of human religiosity. But that’s not the sort of belief that Sahar wanted to know about. Simply put, I don’t have any beliefs that I think will bring me salvation.

Most Christians, for instance, would agree it’s difficult to be saved unless you believe in Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. And, unless I am mistaken, most Muslims would agree it is difficult to submit to the will of Allah and be saved unless you believe in the existence of Allah. So, in Christian and Islamic cultures, at least, beliefs can be very important to salvation.

The trouble is, I don’t believe in the efficacy of any of my beliefs to bring about salvation. And that would be true even if, for instance, I actually believed Jesus Christ was the lord and savior of this world. Even then, I would still have a hard time believing my belief in Jesus Christ as the lord and savior of this world could do anything to save me. In my silly view of things, beliefs are irrelevant to salvation.

So, I was stumped for a moment when Sahar asked me what my beliefs were. Then it flashed through my brain that, instead of beliefs, I only have practices.

Most important, I practice goalless meditation. That’s to say, I meditate more out of idle curiosity than to obtain anything through meditation. Although in the past, some of those meditations have turned out to be transformative, I’ve learned that I cannot count on them being transformative, and I do not try to make them transformative. So I meditate just to see what’s going on.

That doesn’t seem like much compared to, say, an elaborate belief in the nature and existence of deity, but it must do for me because I just can’t wrap my brain around the notion that mere beliefs bring about salvation. Rather than believe, I meditate.

Perhaps you are wondering, though, whether I think meditation is a path to salvation. The answer is, no, I don’t think meditation necessarily leads to anything. But I bring it up because it is the closest thing I have in my life to something as significant as religious beliefs in Sahar’s life.