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"Meetings with an Anonymous Sage" -
I used to know what I believed. Now, I don't. I'm confused. Is that normal?
It's a sign of maturity when you grow into not-knowing. The first sign of transition from belief into not-knowing, rather than rejection of belief, is confusion. Beliefs begin losing their hold on you long before they let go, and they don't all drop at the same time. Belief must be grown beyond, not leaped beyond, like a toddler learning to crawl rather than trying to go from rolling on the floor to climbing a tree, or an acorn planted at sunset becoming a tree before sunrise.
What do you mean by "let go" or "drop"?
Beliefs lose their power to remain, like a leaf falling from a limb in Fall. The limb does not drop the leaf, the leaf drops. You might try to revive a fallen belief, and you will for a time, but at some point, a belief will no longer hold any inspiration for you. Beliefs grow flat. The letting go or dropping does not mean a belief didn't serve a purpose or was untrue; it means you've grown no longer to need to rely on it. At some point, trying to revive the belief is like trying to catch air in your hand - it's gone.
You mentioned "not-knowing." What's that?
Not-knowing is when you know without it being a thought, an idea. When most people say "I believe" or "we believe," they mean they think an idea is true. Their faith is in a thought about something. Not-knowing is intimate; it's not experienced as an external object of faith. One can say, "I know, but I don't know how I know." You know, but you know non-conceptually, non-linear. When you touch something, you don't have to believe something about it; you have an immediate, spontaneous recognition, bypassing thought. If you hear a dog bark, you don't think, "I believe a dog barked because..." No, there's instantaneous, intimate knowing. Someone could ask, "Why do you say a dog barked?" "I say it for a dog barked." This knowing isn't by explanation or intellectualizing but encounter, meeting-with, revelation. Truth meets you. You don't go and get it. Revelation means something shows you itself, rather than you deciding what it is and isn't. This that shows - Truth - is prior to how our brains shape it into a belief, one based on prior experience, not Truth itself. See, belief is always past tense even when in the present, while Truth isn't based on experience, though experience may prepare one to receive it. One can't say Truth is past, present, or future. Truth is. That sums it up - Truth is.
So, I can grow to have no belief?
If one says, "I don't have any belief," that's another idea, another thought. Not-knowing means intimate, objectless knowing replaces dependence on a thought about reality. Beliefs can continue to help orient you. We all need some signs, and that's what beliefs become - flexible, potentially changing signs. Your beliefs, then, issue from your not-knowing. How can you know until you don't know? Likewise, you come to see the relativity of all beliefs. The absolute is pure faith, or not-knowing.
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Sometimes, when we lose faith, we have not lost faith in what we believed in. We no longer believe, or have faith in, our belief about what we believed in - a subtle distinction easily missed. For me, the concepts "God" and "Jesus" and "love" and "I" and "you" are much different than what they used to be. Simply because my belief about God has changed, that does not mean what I believed in - God - needs to be abandoned. God is totally free of my belief about God, so is everyone among my acquaintances and friends. The way I see a person might change suddenly, yet the person is the same person. See, I cannot trap a person, anymore than God, in my head. As I change, how I understand changes. As how I understand changes, I change. This is transformation, not merely changing my mind about something.
Rather, to believe in, as contrasted with belief, is relational. Jesus, for example, never gave a dogma, a creed, or a list of things we must believe. He used "believe in" to describe a relational encounter, or intimacy, with the One he called "my Father." "Believe in," also, is an action, it is not something you have, it is something you do. Believing for him was grounded in not-knowing, the same way you can deeply love someone and have no idea why. There is no explanation. "I don't know" is, then, a profound faith-ing, as action arising from closeness with Truth. Thus, faith-ing in is always fresh, never solid, never past tense.
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In some societies now, the reaction against naive religious belief has resulted in widespread naive denial of religion, usually by persons who have not believed enough to be prepared not to believe. People who have a religious belief are considered stupid, while those who point the arrogant finger consider themselves so smart. Sure!
Ignorance is as present in non-belief as belief. Irreligion has as much ignorance as religion. And not to believe itself rests upon belief - in philosophy called a performative error, by which one denounces something based on a like something. It takes as much faith to deny as to affirm. We cannot escape belief. If we try, we do so by belief itself. However, the spiritual being can enfold belief in a more evolved not-knowing.
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There is a space of not being for or against what anyone thinks about matters of ultimate concern, a space in which what you believe can appear and disappear. A belief only exists when you are thinking about the belief. Otherwise, as all thought, it has no grounding. You are most free when what you think to be true is absent. Then, you have an intimacy with Truth, without even giving any thought to a thought of Truth.
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