Is Notes: Faith, Belief, and Knowing
Below is part of a series of spontaneous writings that began in 2009. Each one begins with the following: “We are vast, of many voices. We speak to you of what is.”
You ask about faith and belief:
Faith is about believing in the impossible, or the never experienced, something that one’s rational, scientific mind cannot accept as possible. Faith is acceptance in spite of the lack of evidence.
You don’t need faith to know you have a hand. You can see and feel it by your side. You are aware of its presence. You don’t need faith to believe that your hand can pick up things. You’ve seen it and felt it do that thousands of times. But, you need faith to know you no longer have a hand if your severed phantom limb causes pain to throb down into your fingers. You need faith to counter your perceived reality. You also would need faith to believe your hand can shoot out fire or lightening from your fingers because you’ve never seen or felt that happen.
Faith is intimately related to doubt. Doubt is a temporary state of forgetting faith. Doubt is merely an opposing state of mind, designed to keep balance in all things. Denial is the more problematic because it is rejection of belief in spite of the evidence.
Belief is acceptance of evidence outside of yourself that you do see or learn about. If something unbelievable happens to you, such as fire shooting from you hand, your faith in that possibility becomes replaced with belief. But if the fire never comes, you live in faith that it can or will. It is even easier for your mind to believe another’s unbelievable story, for the lack of evidence then becomes removed from your own experience. Belief is a fixed state only until something changes. When doubt occurs, you can call up faith if you do not wish to travel with the new experience.
Knowing comes from direct experience.
7/11/09