Faith’s an interesting animal. It can lead you to do some pretty stupid things, can inspire you to accomplish some pretty amazing things, and just get you through some pretty crappy things. Some believe it moves mountains. Others argue that it only really distracts, deludes and makes money for the dishonest. I dunno – when people manage to ship the equivalent of a Buick through 352 million miles of bitter cold, radioactive emptiness to perfectly land, via rocket-powered hovering skycrane, exactly when, where and how they planned with spectacular precision, I think it’s fair not to shitcan the faith concept altogether.
But then you got morons who walk on fire and get themselves burnt. And who later, while suffering serious burns, insist that their failure was that they weren’t in “peak state”. I’m sure basic thermodynamics played a role as well, but whatever.
Obviously one breed of faith gets better results than the other.
The only thing that surprises me about the Tony Robbins thing is that he’s still, after all these years, doing the very same schtick. Seriously, dude. Haven’t learned anything new since 1987? Still hawking NLP, positive thinking and firewalking? When I was a very much younger man – 1990 or so – I went through my own positive thinking phase, a period in fact kicked off by Robbins’ book “Awaken The Giant Within”. He blathers a lot in that book about Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), natural hygiene (popularized by the book Fit For Life, also a fad in the late 80s) and motivational stuff in general.
It was a period of my life characterized by only partially knowing myself. For reasons too lengthy to go into here and now, by that time I’d been fairly well conditioned by upbringing to believe in magical elves. Faith healing, apocalyptic supernatural melodramas, demons living in the shadows, the crushing whims of fickle fate were all part of normal life for a long time. I’d rejected most of it, but was still left with the hole remaining from the absence – the fervent desire to believe in magical things, comforting fairy tales. I became one of those seekers who flittered from one irrational load of nonsense to the next, lifting a few points from each before discarding the rest for the next way station.
The Robbins phase was no different. Really, the dude’s nothing but a secularized faith healer. He’s a charlatan, a fraud. I started to realize that when I went back and started reading Bandler and Grinder’s original work on NLP from the ’70s, which actually really did uncover some very interesting points about cognitive therapy and how our minds work. Robbins, however, gleaned what he wanted and made up much of the rest. I moved on. His tricks no longer impressed.
And of course, the firewalking trick is just that – a trick, mainly of thermodynamics. Coal doesn’t conduct heat too efficiently. And heat doesn’t burn instantly. You don’t burn from the temperature, you burn from heat transfer, and heat doesn’t transfer as easily when you’re moving quickly across the source. And if you know that, if you realize that the “magic” is really just having a somewhat nuanced understanding of how the world works, you can indeed do amazing things. If you don’t know the trick and instead think it’s all being in the right frame of mind, you’re going to get hurt – that’s not the faith that turns into good things.
The faith that works is the faith in answers. The faith that there is a way. The faith that the way is within our grasp, if we’re willing to think hard and work hard for it. The faith that it’s worth doing. That’s the real mind over matter, the faith that just successfully landed mankind’s most ambitious space mission to date on Mars. Or the faith to build a new life when the old one gets suddenly stripped away. Or the faith of a parent whose young child faces monumental health challenges, and the faith to face those challenges with her, and the same faith of that parent to continue forward when their child passes away. Or the faith that sustains a strong marriage for fifty years or more. Or the faith that reestablishes family connections after too many years, and suggests that there is still a way forward for everyone.
It’s the faith to truly build when everyone around you is simply content to throw away.
Compared to that, the faith of the firewalk is little more than cheap theatrics for dull minds. I look at those first Curiosity photos of Mars, and then at the photos of our very newly arrived family member Landon – Jason and Paloma’s first child, who also came along last night – and just see Robbins’ antics and shake my head.
Such a sad, cheap knockoff of the real thing. Disposable faith for desperate hearts. And not worth the price.
(Inspired by a recent evening conversation with Sheila. Our chat’s still knocking around my head.)