My recurrent theme here is, “learn it for yourself.” As long as you’re taking someone else’s word for something, you don’t know. Even if they are reliable, even if they are great reporters, even if they are experts in their field, and even if God almighty were to assure you that they were right in every particular, unless and until you experience it yourself, you won’t know. Belief is a valuable halfway point between not-knowing and knowing, but that is all it is. We believe because we do not yet know.
That’s not to say that everything we would like to know can necessarily be known. I have resigned myself to the fact that I am going to die ignorant, as are we all. But perhaps we can learn the things that are most important to us. That seems the logical place to put our effort, anyway.
My friend Richard has absorbed experience that includes Monroe Institute techniques and, more recently, the shamanistic techniques taught by Hank Wesselman. Richard has his own blog, “The Sacred Path” — http://thesacredpath.wordpress.com/ — which is well worth your time. I mention him here because of his most recent post, “The Power of Intent and Commitment.” No point in my summarizing it for you when you can go to his site, which I highly recommend.
Yes, it’s still second-hand. Reading and understanding and believing are not the same thing as the knowing that can only come from first-hand experience. But, like faith, other people’s testimony may serve to keep the spark alive against the time when first-hand knowledge is to be obtained. That’s what this site is about too.
Yes, Frank!
Well said and passionate! I found I can read and read the accounts of others on end, but unless I experience it personally, it is imagined in the mind, unknown in the heart. Head is the intellect, heart is the knowing, eh?
Naomi
No, that isn’t the distinction i am drawing. The intellect may suppose or theorize, but only experience will provide first-hand knowledge that transcends theory.
I like what you said about belief is the half-way point between knowing and not knowing. I hadn’t really thought of it that way before, but that is exactly what it is.
And “we believe because we do not yet know.” That is so right. You have an amazing way with words. I would envy you, but that would be useless.
Sherry