Faith

When I first started exploring the spiritual life, I was listening to a lecture by a minister talking about our belief systems. He made an interesting blanket statement regarding spirituality and life in general, which was:

  • “It’s all in what you believe.”

Saint Augustine echoed this point saying:

  • A person can do other things against his will; but belief is possible only in one who is willing.

It made me think “exactly what do I believe about God?”. I had never thought about it like that and I came to realize that since I had never really experienced God, and, for that and a variety of other reasons, I was more agnostic than believer. I guess I believed that maybe I would experience God in the future. Problem is it was never going to happen for me since:

  • We don’t experience things “then”, we only experience things “now”.

The only way that we can ever understand anything is to have an experience of it, and certainly that’s true with spiritual things. All that we can understand about God is what we have experienced, nothing more than that counts.

But first, how do we even know God exists at all. I think the answer may be:

  • Music or what’s known as the the Law of the Octave. Music follows precise mathematical relationships that uniquely always cycle back exactly; octaves, harmonics, chord structures, all locked into a predictable yet expressive system of ratios. Nothing repeats perfectly like music does. Think about it, there have never even been two snowflakes exactly alike much less snowflake ratios that repeat.

While gravity holds everything together, music enables language, science, arts, virtually all of life. Where did it come from, we certainly didn’t create it. It had to be created by God. But, if you’ve never experienced God, imagine for a moment that He exists and then look up into the night sky, preferably with a telescope. That is incredible power.

Albert Einstein stated:

  • I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist (belief system where the universe and God are seen as one and the same) … I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

There is one God. But, since our understanding of God is based upon our experience, your understanding of God may be different from my understanding which may differ from Einstein’s. One vine and many branches.

Famous Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist Carl Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961) , wrote:

  • The four highest achievements of human effort [faith, hope, love and insight] are so many gifts of grace, which are neither to be taught nor learned, neither given nor taken, neither withheld nor earned, since they come through experience, which is something given, and therefore beyond the reach of human caprice.

But, James 2:17 states:

  • So also, faith, if it does not have works (deeds and actions of obedience to back it up), by itself is destitute of power (inoperative, dead).

And Thomas Jefferson echo’s this by saying:

  • It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

So, it doesn’t matter what your religious background has been, or is now, or if you have a religious inclination at all, because the system does not require you to be religious. This system is so powerful that it will change your whole life, and if you follow it feelingly and faithfully, nothing in you or around you will be left unchanged, and I mean literally nothing. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard the system sometimes does more for agnostics or atheists than for religiously inclined people, because agnostics and atheists are starting with a clean slate.

So it is clear, we have to have faith and keep working with Jesus’s system to experience God.

Faith