Faith and reason and our progress
Underlying topic(s):
- This page is part of an ERW course: Internal Guidance, section Faith.
- By John Eagles, February 6, 2007.
Think of a new skill that you want to master. You have some kind of guidebook, but it is old and it is very difficult to understand. Suppose the skill is to learn to drive a truck. It is almost impossible to learn to drive a truck when you don't have an instructor who shows you what to do. You trust the teacher, that means you have faith that you can learn this skill by learning from the instructor.
After you have learned to drive the truck, you once again read the manual for truck driving. It all makes perfect sense to you now. You could even write an improved version because you have had your own practice.
Now suppose that the skill you have to learn is to steer a spacecraft. The spacecraft is computer-linked to a base on earth. Again, there is a guidebook for how to perform all functions on the ship, but without having good communication with your home base, you will never be able to control the craft.
To progress in our spiritual and religious life, we are very much in the same situation as the astronaut. We can read many guidebooks for how to live life in the best way. To understand these books we need our intellect and to conclude from them how to proceed in life we use reason. But in this way we will never arrive where we want to be.
We were created to have a relationship to the Higher, to our Creator. I believe that God has arranged the universe in such a way that the only way that we can grow spiritually is by improving our love. The origin of love is in the Creator. Before we can learn to improve love in human relations, we first must deepen it in our relation to God. This is only possible by living a life of faith, faith that must be centered on the Higher.
In daily practice this works in the following way. We pray or meditate and our intuition tells us what we should do in life. What we do is based on faith and faith is trust in God, is accepting God in us and above us and guiding us. When we have done what we had to do, the insight comes about the situation that we were in. We come to understand some of the universal principles of the universe because we can draw them from our own experiences, just like the truck driver can write down how to drive a truck only after he learned it.
Reason is very useful to understand our own experiences of growth and also to teach other people, but it is never the major tool to advance on our path of growth. To mount new heights and dig new mines of love in us, we need to go the path of faith.
When we want to grow spiritually, we want to explore the unknown. Because the essence of spirituality is love and the source of love is the Creator, we need to go the path of having faith in the Creator. The Creator cannot just be a word in our dictionary or a concept in our religious books, but the Creator is the Great Spirit who in love for us wants to guide our lives all the time.
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