Belief, Faith, and Knowing Page 1 of 6

Be still, and know that I am God.

Psalm 46:11

BELIEF, FAITH, AND KNOWING

Julie Redstone

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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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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