Faith is knowledge. The reason people think it is something else is because they are superficial and live on the sandbank of themselves. And if they ever pause to peer into the deep crystal water around them they rarely penetrate beyond the dancing illusion of the sunlight on the surface.
You use faith all the time. It is your faith in the world that gets you through each busy day. But the trouble with worldly faith is that it is subject to error and the Mars element.
Real faith is knowledge of yourself.
‘Have faith,’ the preachers cry. You might as well cry ‘Be hungry’ to someone with a full stomach, or ‘Be happy’ to those whose hearts are heavy with sorrow.
Have faith? ‘But I do not have faith,’ a man may say to himself, as his puzzled child asks ‘What is it? How do I do it?’
No one can explain faith except to say ‘Trust me,’ or quote the Bible; though if the truth were being lived, the words would not be quoted.
The fact is you cannot tell anyone to have faith.
You may say you do not have faith in God, Jesus Christ, or any other deity; but that is only rejection of the concepts that have been presented to you. Not to have faith means that the concepts of other minds are unacceptable. And so they should be. You cannot learn truth; you have to discover it in experience. Your non-faith or agnosticism is only the rejection of canned ideas.
All knowledge, all faith, is within you now, at this moment. That is why I have said you must not believe me. If you go inside yourself and know yourself through observation and awareness, you will know the truth of this and the truth will set you free of doubt.
You cannot be told any wisdom, any truth, that is not already waiting to be discovered just below the surface of what you call your conscious mind. A word of truth, an illustration of truth, can bring the dormant knowledge to the surface.
People can recite words of great wisdom with drama and never understand them, for the words have to match what they have discovered within.
The only test of what you know or believe is what you live by acting on. Anything else is imagination. The world is full of ‘I believers’ and they really believe they believe.
Professional ‘I believers’ (politicians, broadcasters, newspaper pundits) know they are liars and poseurs. But what about the others?
If you pin an ‘I believer’ with an inquiry to discover whether he lives his belief, and he does not, he will equivocate, make excuses and lie; or if trapped he will indignantly declare ‘I know what I believe!’
You have two honesties. The one you believe in and the one you live. You cannot adhere to the code you profess because your honesty changes with nearly every challenge. But because you are unconscious of this fact you excuse your inconstancy with the explanation that ‘it was justified in the circumstances’ — another expression of dishonesty.
There is no truth for the man-machine in a code that says ‘You shall not kill. You shall not cheat. You shall not lie’ — beautiful as that might sound. A moral faith is a static thing in a world of ever-moving desires. It is a denial of the fact of man’s life.
‘You shall not lie’ — but you lie to hide the person you really are so that you will be liked or respected, or to give yourself the appearance of having more power or prestige than in fact you have; and also to give yourself the appearance of being more honest than you are. If a stranger came up to you and told you that you are a liar, that you cheat, deceive, hold bad will, are unkind and cruel and cannot control your passions, you would probably defend yourself vigorously. If he kept probing, you would probably lie some more and make excuses — all because you profess a code of honesty you do not live. Because everyone does it, everyone expects it. Eventually the lie becomes the way of life.
There is a permanent unchanging honesty, but you cannot know it until you rise above the man-machine that does not live what it professes to believe.