On Faith & Belief

I come from an evangelical Christian background and was a true believer until five years ago when my beliefs literally fell away. So many of the ideologies and stories in the ancient texts, both Old and New Testaments, began to ring as insane. I didn't want to let go of my faith. I just couldn't continue to believe. It was as if the decision was made for me. It occurred to me at that time that a belief is just a thought, and yet we hold beliefs to be this incredibly important thing. Why are beliefs a source of identity? Have you ever heard of someone's religious beliefs just falling away? What are your thoughts on beliefs and consciousness? Thank you. Now, obviously you believe. When you believe that something is the case, it implies that you don't know. You have no evidence for it, but you believe it. So you wouldn't say, I believe in this table. I don't have to, because I know it's here. Well, we call it table. Who knows what it is on other levels? But you don't need to say, I believe in this flower. I know there is a flower here. At least that's on this level of perception. So belief implies you don't really know, but you would like something to be. Or. And that's interesting, in religions, those things are regarded as very important. You believe in certain things that have been transmitted to you from generation to generation that are in the books, and then you have a certain belief structure. And since you're not free of ego, it becomes incorporated into your sense of identity, the collective identity of we, the believers in these particular kinds of stories. There is, in the English language, there's the word belief, and there's also the word faith, and they're quite different. But sometimes people don't realize the difference. In some languages, there's no difference between these two words. In Spanish you have fe, which is face, and clenzia, which is belief. But if I remember correctly, in German, you only have one word for faith or belief, and that would be glaube or glauben, but they're very different. Faith is the true meaning of. Faith is a deep sense of trust. And what you are trust. And you have that deep sense of trust because you are connected with the essence of who you are, which is one with the essence of the universe. I forgot to mention that before. You are connected with the essence of who you are. That's a vertical dimension. You realize yourself as consciousness, and that consciousness is not yours. Although I sometimes call it your consciousness. It's not yours. Because if I said my consciousness, I would have created a duality. There would have been Me, an entity who has consciousness. But there is no me without consciousness. I am consciousness. It is the essence of who I am. So when you know that you are connected not only with the essence of who you are, but that essence of who you are is linked to the very source of all creation. It emanates from there. And when you are therefore connected with that, then what arises is this deep sense of trust in life. And what is trust? Well, one definition of trust would be absence of fear. There is no more psychological fear if you only inhabit the horizontal dimension. Fear. Fear is inevitable to a greater or lesser degree. It is your companion as anxiety, as worry, and the many other manifestations of fear, including anger, which in most cases, hiding underneath anger is fear. So faith is something wonderful that does not require belief, Although in some languages, as I said, they are the same word. So when Jesus talks about faith, it is about that, that state of connectedness with being, with the essence of who you are. And yet something infinitely greater than you could call you. For a long time, when human consciousness was not all that developed, the only way millions of humans could be reached with some kind of spiritual truth was through stories. And so there are stories that contain truths that are not literally. These stories are not literally true. They have actually a deeper truth than a literal truth. And this is the sometimes called mythological stories. Let's give another example of literal truth or historical truth. And there is a deeper truth than the historical truth. If you read a great work of literature, that all the characters, they might have been inspired originally by certain historical events, or they might have been inspired by people that the author knew and observed. But basically, all the characters that are described in this great work of literature, whatever it may be, they never existed as such. These characters never exist. It's not an historical account of what happened. But in fact, this tells you more about the human condition than any historical work could do. So it contains a deeper or higher truth than if it had been a historical account. Something. And so there are many things in the old religions that are of that kind. And they have had a useful and continue to have a very helpful function of transmission of truth. Which people, if you express them in a more abstract way, nobody would have understood a word. But if people can identify with certain stories, they are more than stories. They are expressions of a deep truth. And then there are the literalist interpretations of these things. In Christianity, for example, evangelical interpretations, they take everything absolutely literally. And then it can easily become an ideology in the mind. And there's no depth anymore suddenly. So this is something that the questioner grew out of. Now it's important not to throw out the baby with the. What's the baby with the bath water Into a funny expression. I don't think it exists in Spanish. So it could then suddenly rise. All this is just nonsense. If plumody suddenly grows beyond the stories, sometimes they arrive at the conclusion. All this is all nonsense. But that is not the case. There is a deeper level on which these things can be understood. And in the case of here, there are certain churches, of course, where you might not be able to continue. If there are mainly ideologies, then you may not be able to continue in a particular church. It is possible to deepen whatever your religion still is. You can see a deeper truth as presence grows. And in some cases it may happen that you leave it behind completely. That's possible too, even in Buddhism. You have to separate the mythology from the essence teaching, the very profound teaching about the human condition. And then you have the mythology which says, when the Buddha came out of the womb of his mother, he immediately uttered the word, I have come for the salvation of the world. That's a lovely story. On the downside of the story, on the one hand, it's a way of transmitting certain things, but on the downside, it confuses form and essence. And then the Buddha becomes a kind of God, godlike figure to be worshipped. The Zen masters recognized that. And that's why there's a story of when the Zen master was getting cold in the middle of the winter and he ran out of firewood. He used the wooden image of the Buddha for fire to keep warm. There's a. So I have certain respect. I know it can be terribly misused, the religions in the service of the ego, the personal and the collective ego, and they have been misused by the. Used for egoic purposes over the centuries, been. Have become part of the insanity in many ways, of the human ego as it was growing. But despite all that, there is something there that is of value, of great value. It might be deeply hidden, but it's still there. And that's for example, why, although a conventional Christian would probably. I'm not a Christian in a conventional sense. Well, I'm everything. I'm a Buddhist, I'm Christian, I'm Hindu, I'm a Muslim, I'm a. All religions, you know, the essence that underlies them. You can say I'm all of that. And although I'm not a conventional Christian, I have the Jesus is something of profound significance to me. And some people believe that he didn't even exist. Some people. There are some books that provide convincing arguments that actually he didn't actually exist. And even that, to me, doesn't matter, because Jesus exists in the collective human consciousness. And there was a time when they made a movie many years ago that the Monty Python team, they made a movie called. I think it was called Life of Brian. And that was a kind of parody of Jesus. There was a man who spoke and behaved like Jesus, but he wasn't Jesus. But. But anyway, I read about it, and I could not get myself to see it. I just did not want to see it. And to this day, I would not want to see it because I have too much respect for what that means in the collective human consciousness. It.