Faith and Reason

Most of the confusion about ourselves and our relationship with the outside world comes from faith and reason.

This is most vividly expressed in our lives whenever we find ourselves in difficult situations. When we discover suffering in our lives, we treat it as if we don't know where it came from. It's as if we magically manufactured our suffering while being asleep.

Similarly, while we're half-awake, sleepwalking through our actions, we are unprepared to deal with the turbulent storm of stress coming from our unexpected problems. Some of us become paralyzed with fears and doubts. While others react by not having  a clue about what to do.

Whenever we reach points in our lives when powerlessness overwhelm us, we seek solutions from powers outside of us. In these situations, many of us turn to our faith to rescue us.

Our faith is that invisible force existing inside of us, awaiting to help us overcome difficult problems.  For many of us, faith is our belief in God, The Creator, or confirmation of the utility of our religious beliefs.

So what is faith and how does it compare to the reasons we use to place ourselves in difficult situations?

For our purposes here, let's say, "faith is our belief in an invisible power, who, when presented with the right approach -- prayer or meditation -- will empower us to overcome our problems."

Reason, on the other hand, is based on our knowledge of mathematics, science, language, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, which include moral and spiritual principals, and so forth. And we typically use our faith to supplement our reasoning capabilities.

Similarly, we can imagine people who don't belief in traditional faith. In other words, they don't believe in the existence of God, or believe that God doesn't play any part in our lives. For them, faith is irrelevant. However, they too rely on reason, which means they are victims of their beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a natural conflict between faith and reason that transcends the spiritual and logical beliefs. The conflict arises when we attempt to communicate with our higher power while holding on to our core beliefs and values, which are the primary source of our actions.

Nevertheless, it's important for us to remember that the powers of  minds mitigate faith whenever it's convenient for us to do so. This is not an egregious exculpation of our power. It's simply our recognition that we are powerless to overcome the beliefs and values acquired from our parents, society, and confirmed by our life experiences.

Unfortunately, for many us, faith is nothing more than an escape mechanism we use to escape personal responsibility from problems caused by our reasoning. And it means that the more we cling to our faith, at least in a public sense, the more we ignore our responsibility to change our beliefs and values.

Whenever we rely on our faith, we must be cognizant of it as being a part of our beliefs and values. At least, we should be aware that we are using it in the sense that's consistent with our core beliefs and values. 

In other words, our interpretation of faith, or the lack thereof, is based on our current beliefs and values. This means that when we define God, our invisible power, we are using language and other information from our existing beliefs and values to do so.

We have become too accustomed to going along with the crowd, to get off the crowed road of life and search for the higher power in our minds. This intuitive power, our invisible power, is the God in us that we praying to.

It's what keeps us feeling that there is something greater in us than we are currently aware of being. We have this power in all of our minds because it's the source of our connection to the God that we are praying to, or meditating on, for assistance with our problems.

Now is the time for us to stop settling for less when we have within us the power to have more. The Christ, the Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna, and others found this great power in their minds and used it to overcome what they had been taught by others.

Meanwhile, for those of us who seek to become one with our intuitive consciousness, we must use our faith to inspire us to continue to do the work to remove everything from our minds that's distorting who we really are in this moment.