How to Believe in God
It is the act of faith itself that gives you the experience of God. And so, it is the act of faith that allows you to elevate yourself from the muck of whatever hand you’ve been dealt; it is what is there to accompany you through the dread and anticipation of life’s clobbers. There is no ladder. No staircase. Just a leap of faith.
It takes faith to have faith because it will always waver. No attempt is a failure though for they are all opportunities for creativity and novelty; for the conception of life-shifting epiphanies. It is through faith, rather than “God Himself”, I’ve found, that God’s grace exists.
Let that implicate God’s utility and nature of being.
Faith guides us true through the firmament, but I can’t tell you whether it is leading us to the kingdom of heaven, the sun himself, or if its trajectory has something to do with how the stars are aligned. I can tell you that God is the conclusion. It is home. It is no conman because it is not a man. It is unyielding law that we give human rationalization to; it is spontaneity and grandiosity that we offer a human sentimentality.
It is counter to our nature, it seems, to believe in no god. Whether one keeps the prefab ones offered by adjacent cultures or ones from our own kin. Even the people who disown all religious ties, transfer that need onto something else, and quite often people see fit to crown themselves. We erect figures as gods in place of a God because we have a deep reservoir of meaning inherent in us that is nearly impossible to contain.
The stories we use — the theology, astrology, and folklore — are all expressions of the human condition. The rotating war against religions may be argued as a righteous thing, but it has not caused even a superficial scratch on our stories. That is because organized religion is not synonymous nor is it mutually exclusive with the religious experience.
I grew up hearing that it was blasphemous to depict God in human likeness. How paradoxical is it that we aren’t to personify the gendered “Him” yet “He” is already a personification of our collective mind! We seem to casually dismiss the fact that we do, in fact, depict God. The physical depiction of a drawn image of God and the emotional projection that answers your prayers before bed are, in principle, the same thing.
I would argue that the projection is more harmful. Harmful, because it is in that form where God goes beyond a symbolic figure on an artist’s canvas to a God that is actualized from a fragmented and imperfect perception (yet still bowed down to as if it were pristine and whole).
As a child, I looked at the physical depiction as equivalent to spitting on a person’s grave. Now I see how it is wrong because you are misconstruing God. Every time you dictate or define it you mislead. It is inevitably a great human fallacy (as is this). God is re-delivered to the people, strained through another’s perception. Yet, they already had one better within themselves!
And with that, I understand better why it is considered profane.
It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just moral god they could put their faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves.
John Steinbeck
But what God? What aim should I put my faith in? People use God in defense of many horrible things. Morals are great but they’re subjective. People rationalize differently. Different people have different images of God.
And so it is subjective. That is the good and bad about it. It allows harm to be done in the world because of people’s belief in the devil — the ‘other’. We pin each other as opposites if another insults our conceptualization of God, instead of allowing the confrontation to develop it. It is the farce that creates a divide within the spiritually inclined.
From my understanding, the Devil is to be understood by division. As in, what the devil is, is predicated by what God is not. God removes farce. It sweeps away the small distractions that inadvertently compile to clear your view, to allow you to create something. And where God represents this reductive view of yourself, the Devil is an additive view.
The Devil adds layers to your faith to create an outcome. In doing so it misconstrues your feelings and your direction. It’s like the entire cause and effects are precognated by merely entertaining the idea. By saying yes to it you are getting the satisfaction of the coveted ending but not the ending itself.
The result isn’t the point here. The point is an undeserving sense of accomplishment. This will ultimately leave you in the position of “the fool” (the classic bullying tactic). That isn’t to say you can’t truly accomplish whatever it is, but what you see is a mirage. The feeling you have for it? That is fabricated. It is a manipulated, fantastical imagining that is dangerous when you give it a higher priority than the collective reality.
Although difficult to achieve in a harmed mindset, if we allow ourselves to feel the experience of being a fool, we can move on quicker. If you can accept that you are not alone in your foolish times and that we are all outcasts, incidentally by the happenstance of life’s clobbers, you don’t need a definition of God’s grace because you already know it.
The idea of us as separate beings and deserving of our individual experiences and choices is beautiful and freeing in a sense. It has its own value that is worthy of being explored. At the same time, it is that idea of individualism and how it takes form in our lives that deepen the root of me and Other.
Personally, I believe the marker of a diminished state of mind is choosing to harm yourself or others as a “godly” act. It is sinning against yourself, which is in itself blasphemous.
By creating the great divide, the contradictory parts of you that are muddled together, are separated right down the middle. This helps you compartmentalize your emotional experiences; it helps you make sense of them. But if you remove the human imposed divisions and allow the neat-and-tidy to melt back into one? That is what God truly is: Everything.
Take note of all the good things you see in life. Now overlap them… That is how your God exists, or, that is what God wants you to see. Or, better yet, what God has spent its everlasting life moving toward, aligning with, to reveal something to you.
However, you choose to conceptualize it! However, you best understand.
Watch the things of life that grow, prosper, and help. That is your example of how to live a godly existence. Embody that essence. To choose to see and follow the best in you is God’s way. And that is subjective. And it is through following that path that you experience divinity.
So use the stories you tell yourself with your human need to organize and deduce things to create a well-formed and adaptable configuration. This is your hand in life, and there is something lovely. God is too frivolous and fun to leave you without anything to discover and share.
By practicing faith you give yourself a focus with the breadth of great intent. In so doing, you handcraft a life practice to build your new experiences on. These new experiences are provided with your reverence and your love and patience in which you experience God. You build a ritual and immerse yourself in it.
You experience it in how you do everything.
How do you do it, though? You ask. That all sounds nice, but when it comes down to it, what is the process of having faith? What does faith feel like? How do you use it?
There is a discrepancy between yearning to be able to do a thing and the ease with which you actually do it. When something feels hard, nonsensical, and unobtainable no matter what advice, simple or complex, is given, it simply is not achievable. Instructions and personal anecdotes from others seem too simple or too complicated.
Interestingly, once you’ve reached the summit it’s hard to recall the definite moments which defined one state from another. Once the theory has been internalized it becomes a habit and enters the realm of intuition. Despite the derision of the climber, that ease isn’t proof that their mentor didn’t have to struggle “endlessly” as they currently feel they are.
The process is, as I see it, a hypnotization. Now, understand that when I use the word hypnotization, the definition I’m using is not forfeiting your self will. Your will remains true and strong, stronger even than it was before. It isn’t in jeopardy. You can slip out of the hypnotization willingly. In fact, a simple hesitation is all it takes.
The act of hypnotization is one of directing your own will to something else; subsiding it into something greater. To do you must suspend thinking (long enough to initiate the action, at least). Another way of looking at it is suspending disbelief. It’s putting your faith in the hands of the unknown — and that is scary, but that is why it is so powerful an act. As Daniel Wallace wrote, “You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it…you’re just supposed to believe in it.”
A simple example of hypnotization is when you listen to a person who asks you to do something. When you agree to something. You have no reason to, no lack of will not to, it is simply the choice to do something. It doesn’t have to be any grand deliverance. It is in the fact that you submit. Simplicity is the key to understanding the mindset. All actions in their moment of genesis are simple.
That’s what makes it so hard and so easy at the same time. It takes less focus and forethought than we’re used to (the execution, not the planning. We have a hard time separating the two stages). As soon as you hesitate for one more run through or analysis, you lose it. Luckily, it isn’t a competition to be constantly in flow or uninterruptedly proactive — and you can always recommit to it just as easily as you lost it.
Let that indicate its utility and nature.
By doing what feels like relinquishing your control, you actually give your direction more stability because your path is no longer dependent on fickle human emotions. Your goals become in line with the laws of nature we intuit and there is much more power behind them when we do so. You have the weight and velocity of Life itself behind you to help you get further in any given direction, faster.
The utility of the symbol is found in the firsthand experience, not a retelling or step-by-step guide on how to be worthy of it. The latter renders you inherently worthless, fruitlessly striving for something forever out of reach, rather than something that you are a constituent of.
Always.
“…do not indicate only the union of celestial and terrestrial astronomy but also of theology, a very high discipline, but less commonly used. It represents the knowledge of ethics which is the ability to distinguish virtue from vice. It also figures physical considerations of all creation.”
Tycho Brahe in a letter to Rothaman in the 1590s.
