Be still, and know that I am God.
Psalm 46:11
BELIEF, FAITH, AND KNOWING
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Julie
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This article is one of the many resources of Light Omega for spiritual awakening.
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To know something,
to believe something, and to have faith in something are all different
things. They reflect degrees of involvement with knowledge that can
vary from the most superficial awareness to the most profound perception
of our deepest being. We can think something with only the surface of
ourselves, and we can know something with the totality of who we are.
How we know, and at what depth we know, determines how
we live. For this reason it is useful to ask: How do we know that God
is real? How do we know that Light is real? How do we know that the
process of purification is real? These are important questions for us
- questions that require reflection.
To begin with, let us ask: What
is it to 'know' something? What is it to 'believe' something? What is
it to 'have faith' in something?
We believe things with our minds. Beliefs are ideas. They are concepts.
They give us a picture of reality that others can agree with or disagree
with. Beliefs are thoughts that can be put into words and these words
can be communicated to others. Beliefs, however, are not absolute truths.
They are opinions about reality, not reality itself. In the realm of
belief we can have our own opinions, others can have their opinions,
and we can agree or disagree, remembering that the truth of our beliefs
is relative.
Having faith in something is different than this. Faith, in a spiritual
sense, does not have to do with relative truths but with absolute truths
- truths that exist for all time. Faith relates us to an unvarying,
underlying reality that we share in - one that we assume exists whether
we believe in it or not. Unlike beliefs which are of the mind, faith
is not just of the mind but of the heart as well.
Here is an example of the difference between belief and faith: We think
something with our mind about God. This is our concept of God. We think,
for example, that God is the creator of the Universe and that God must
have had a reason for wanting to create the Universe, that is, that
it was an intentional act. We can think that the reason for this act
is unknown, or we can think that the reason for this act was the wish
to extend love. Whichever we think, we are still in the realm of concepts.
We are still in the realm of opinions.
Faith comes into play when we
tell ourselves that our concepts are true - when we hold them
to be true even though we don't have any proof that they are
true. Then we have crossed the line. Faith is not concerned with proof.
This is because faith is of the heart as well as the mind. Faith occurs
not just because we think something is true, but because we want it to be true and our minds tell us that it may be true. Faith
combines our heart's wish and our mind's belief into an
inner affirmation that the possible is real. Faith is the affirmation
of this reality.
When we have faith, we believe in the invisible. In doing this, our
mind faces a clear choice between doubt and trust. Faith makes the choice
to trust based on the joining of mind and heart. It makes the choice
to suspend doubt and cynicism and to say "yes" to the thinking of the
heart rather than to rational thinking. In place of rational thinking
faith says: "I can believe in what I do not see, for it is not physical
sight that gives reality to things but heart and intuition that gives
reality to things." Faith is based on the willingness of the mind to
side with the reality of the heart which holds that what is subjective
can be equally real to what is objective, even though it may
not be proveable in a physical sense. Love is like this, a subjective
fact whose existence cannot be proven but whose reality is nevertheless
very real.
Those who take exception to faith as a way of perceiving reality, often
do so on the basis of scientific rationality. One of the most common
arguments against faith is this: if you cannot see it, touch it, or
feel it with your senses, you cannot know it exists. Further, if no
one else but you can perceive it, then there is even less chance that
it exists.
This is a very common argument against faith - one which
requires proof in order to believe something. This argument is
valid, but only within the realm in which proof operates, the realm
of science, not the realm of life. It is valid within this realm because
scientific thinking defines a methodology which is based on proof
as a way of dealing with externally verifiable facts. But a methodology
is not a cosmology - it is not a way of understanding life and
how existence came to be. For this, something else is needed. Science
as a methodology is only capable of understanding what is within its
domain - the domain of the physical. This is important to understand.
Science is not reality but a tool with which to explore a portion of
reality. There are many other portions to which it does not apply.
Scientific reality or the scientific mind, for example, can have little
to say about the phenomenon of 'knowing'. For 'knowing', unlike both
belief and faith, participates little, if at all, in the mind. Indeed,
if we say that belief is based in the mind, and faith is based in the
joining of heart and mind, then 'knowing' can be said to be based in
the body - in our very being itself.
Knowing is based on our
experience of something. In knowing something, we do not think or speculate
about it. We perceive it so deeply within ourselves as true that we
don't have to discuss it, and no matter what anyone else says about
it, it does not alter our reality. In this sense, we can say that experience
just is. It cannot be proved or disproved. It can go to more
and more profound levels of conviction, but it is generally only we
ourselves who can testify to it. Our experience is the most interior,
private part of ourselves - the part with which we feel the most certain
because it lives within us at the deepest place.
To experience something is to know it. To experience something deeply
is to know it with a degree of certainty that gives it more power and
influence over our lives than other things. Here is a common example
of our knowing something: When the sun shines on our skin we feel warmth.
We don't need anyone else to tell us what we feel. We know that
we feel something we call 'warmth'. In relation to the sun, we have
an ease with our knowing since others share our experience and can understand
it. But we can experience things that are just as real as the sun shining
on our skin that others cannot see, and know them to be true
with equally strong conviction. Our problem in doing so is that when
others cannot validate our experience for us, we frequently invalidate
it ourselves.
It is this way with the perception of God and Light. The experience
of God and the energy of light can be as real to us as the warmth of
the sun on our skin. Yet, because we are alone in our perception, it
is often difficult for us to appreciate that we know something. This
is complicated by the fact that it is also difficult for us to put such
experiences into words because we don't have the language to do so.
And so we try to do the best we can, knowing all the while that words
are inadequate in communicating our experience to others. We know that the experience
of God or Light can be felt in our bodies, and it is unlike thinking
about something or having faith in it. This is what purification teaches
us.
Here is the point that all spiritual life strives for and the point
of purification as well: to go beyond both faith and belief into knowing
- to bring each of us to the point of experiencing God in a way that
is so real that it will be impossible to deny. All of spiritual life
is directed toward this knowing. We seek it, we long for it, we search
for it, and when we find it, it leaves an imprint on our soul.
In the realm of spiritual experience, there are many people who are
afraid to know what they know. They may have had intuitions about things
that are quite deep. They may have had experiences of God's presence
that have come to them like a whisper or a gentle breeze that hardly
lets you know it's there. Yet, because an experience doesn't last, they
are inclined to say that it wasn't there in the first place.
Here is
fear speaking - the thought of being seen as foolish or crazy. Within
the spiritual realm, we can know something for a moment and it can change
our life forever. Many people have had such an experience and have been
afraid to claim it for themselves because of the lack of proof that
it actually occurred. As a result, they let go of something that could
have changed the rest of their life because they were afraid to claim
it as real. The imprint of spiritual reality does not exist in time,
it exists in depth, and if we claim our knowing, a moment is more than
enough to convey to us the impression of eternity. This is how powerful
spiritual reality can be.
Knowing something, then, can change our relationship to everything in
our life, because it changes us in the deepest sense of who we
feel we are. This is the goal of purification, to bring us into the
knowing of Divine reality through our experience. This knowing takes
us past faith and belief into certainty. It takes us past doubt and
cynicism into certainty. It takes us past opinions, discussions, relative
truths, and spiritual debates into a peace and certainty that nothing
can eradicate. Knowing of Divine reality is the single most important
event that can change a person's relationship to life. It is our future,
and what lies before us as souls.
Article Section - Purification
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