Faith is choosing what you don’t see.
Faith is fundamentally the act of choosing a reality before it becomes visible to the senses – including the sixth sense. It is a magnitude of intention that exists independently of evidence, outcome, or intellectual reason. While often seen as a synonym of belief, the two operate on completely different levels:
- Faith is Effortless: It is a quiet pull that requires no maintenance, defensive arguments, or external proof. It is the quantity of Higher Power available to the individual. Faith is decision, intention, alignment.
- Belief is Forced: It is a push mechanic characterized by constant effort, the need for mental reinforcement, and a reliance on personal emotional energy. Belief is tryingness, manipulation.
This distinction is best exemplified through courage. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision to act beyond it. Courage is faith in action – the decision that a deed is good or right in itself, regardless of the eventual outcome.
We chose light when we see darkness.
Human experience is defined by a natural alternation between clarity and blindness. There are seasons where surrender to a higher will feels natural because external conditions – wealth, love, and health – provide positive feedback. However, the true utility of faith emerges during periods of spiritual “blindness,” where reasons for happiness, love, or surrender vanish.
Spontaneous states of terror, despair, desire, sadness, anger, or pride often arise with or without an apparent external cause. These are not signs of failure, but rather an opportunity to process of leftover emotional energy. When projections are surrendered, the energy can be felt as it is, without mental images of remembered or imagined events, and it eventually runs out on its own accord. In these moments, faith is required not to understand “why” the darkness exists, but to choose the reality of light despite its temporary absence.
Subjective Realities and Fantasies
Subjective realities are different degrees of the fundamental qualities: truth, presence, love, and knowingness.
Only fantasy seemingly contradicts and fights reality, reality doesn’t fight fantasy, just as light doesn’t fight darkness.
Darkness is not an opposing force but merely the absence of light. Similarly, fear is not the opposite of love, in fear there is simply too little love to be positive, supporting or sustaining. Through faith, we do not struggle between two opposing qualities; we choose more of a single quality. Choosing love in the presence of fear is an instantaneous decision that, through repetition, becomes one’s natural state as if shifting from visiting church on Sundays to living in it.
Practical Anchors: Memory and Authority
When personal understanding reaches its limit and the “why” is no longer visible, we rely on two primary anchors:
- Memory: the imprint of prior dedication. We choose to be happy or to love because we remember a time when we knew those things were good, even if we cannot feel that goodness in the present.
- Authority: When our own vision fails, we rely on the sight of those who have transcended the gap – such as Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna. I have been using the Lord’s Prayer, for example, as a strategic investment in the vision of a Higher Power who knows better than my current limited perspective. I can’t know better than my personal understanding, so I follow those who did. If Jesus said that’s how I should pray, then that’s how I shall pray.
Faith comes before experience.
The common mantra “I’ll believe it when I see it” is a reversal of spiritual causality. Belief is a personal, finite energy subject to error and fantasy. Faith, however, is a decision that opens the “eyes of the soul” to a different subjective reality.
The progression of consciousness often moves from belief in the finite to faith in the infinite:
- Belief in the body and physical strength.
- Belief in one’s intellectual capabilities – true or imagined.
- Belief in humanity and collective effort.
- Belief in God, which matures into Faith.
In the period between the choice and the manifestation, the only required action is relaxation. Once the decision is made, the manifestation is a matter of universal conditions meeting, not personal striving.
“All sentient beings live by faith.”
David R. Hawkins: Transcending the Levels of Consciousness
Even the scientist operates on faith – faith in the methods of the intellect to discover truth before proof is manifest. The mature scientist recognizes that logic is a finite tool that points toward an infinite Ultimate Truth.
The primary obstruction to faith is not a lack of evidence, but internal resistance. We often do not lack love because it is unavailable, but because we are terrified of its implications. Making a decision for a higher quality than ourselves will bring up all unconscious resistance to it. That resistance is then felt, and relaxed into, thereby not becoming subject to it.