Faith or Faithless. End your Inner Fracture Lines. - GODSEARCH Episode 3

Hi, this is Michael Chevak. Welcome to God Search. This is podcast number three. Three is a very, very sacred number. Three, you have the Trinity. You have the Trinity in Kabbalah. You have HaKmukh, Beena, Keter.

Very, very holy. You have the Trinity, a triunity in Hinduism. You have three, which is like the number for building and like a geodesic dome, where we can build anything from a simple triangle. Three is a powerful number when it comes to building.

And many times in our God search, we don't want to be alone. We just don't want to have a God search on the inside of us and be alone. We want to share our God search with other people. That's how religions came about.

That's how spiritual disciplines came about. That's how organizations take place that foster new ideas and new thinking and new adventures so everyone can have the experience of God. You have to build something, but that's a problem.

Traditionally, there is a difficulty when it comes to building spiritual experiences, and that is something that I'd like to deal with. It's the issue of what's commonly called faith. Do you have faith?

Do you have faith and therefore you're good? Or do you not have faith and therefore you have doubt and therefore you are bad? Take that to an extreme. You have heaven for the faithful. You have hell for the lack of faithful.

And what happens on a spiritual quest on a God search is that on the inside we become split. We become split when faith is either or saved not saved good bad Kind of like a Santa Claus. God knows when you've been bad knows when you've been good What happens is we divide we become split we can't experience The unity which is part of the God search experience We can't experience truth and we'll talk a little bit about truth later on And we can't experience the full power of being a causal agent to participate in the causality The cause and effect the sowing the reaping the doing and the receiving The that is part of the dynamic aspect of a God search.

It's called being alive Faith when it's used as a criterion To split people in part to pit, to pit one religion against another, one view against another, and create a war between different religious authorities, political authorities, human authorities.

That kind of faith is a poison, and we need an antidote to it. We need an antidote to it. So let's just talk very, very simply about faith. That's what I'd like to do. Now, you cannot achieve anything in life without faith.

There is no God search without faith, because you can't discover something, you can't uncover something, you can't recover something unless you have an intention to go about and do it. There is a faith, a kind of oftentimes blind faith, that one has to have before one enters into a spiritual adventure of any kind, any kind.

Even a scientific experiment doesn't function unless you have faith. You can't discover the atom unless you have a kind of imagination and maybe a possibility that it might be true. You know, like Democritus had that vision that there was things called an atom, and based on that exploration and based on that faith, we began to discover it.

Now, we've actually seen it. We know for a fact that atoms exist. Faith is part of every human adventure of learning something that we do not know already. Faith is a toddler, and we're all toddlers.

We are all learning how to walk. We're learning how to walk by star. And we're stumbling a lot until we get our little sea legs and we know how to continue walking if not then learning how to run and learning how to dance and do all sorts of wonderful things with our legs.

Our legs are what we stand on. There are our understanding, in a sense. So faith is a normal part of human life, but when the faith becomes identified with a specific teaching, and it is not put in the context of truth, it became a poison.

And when that happens, oftentimes the religion has trouble. They have splinter groups that take place inside the religion that begin to explore pieces of the truth that the main religion was ignoring.

These are commonly called heresies, and whenever you see a heresy, Where there is a mainstream religion and then there is a fragment of that religion that starts to rebel, it's because the full truth was being ignored.

And a kind of truth war takes place to begin to expose the missing pieces of the puzzle. One has to be very, very objective about truth on the spiritual path. When religions became excessive in a way that denied scientific proof, such as the rotation of the earth around the sun, then certain fragments in truth took place.

We were no longer dealing with religious truth or spiritual truth. We now created a different discipline for truth, another building, another building called scientific truth. When scientific truth got to the point where it produced amazing technological miracles but is now destroying the air, the water, and many scientific, you know, achievements are undermining the goodness of the God experience.

Well, people are now looking to spirituality to come back in and rebalance. It's very important to have faith and to trust the unknown with a certain blindness of faith, meaning a belief in your heart that there is something out there, a belief in your heart that an experience called God can be had, that it can be yours, that it's your right as a child of God.

It's your right as being made in the image and likeness of God. But one always has to balance truth claims with a certain amount of objective rationality and clarity. Now, one of the problems that religion has had is they've asked you to believe these things and believe it alone.

with the religion at the expense of forfeiting your own dignity and your own reason and your own sense of your own self. No, because as we said in podcast number one, there's another aspect besides truth that's part of the experience called God.

And that's unity. So if you're splitting on the inside and you're sacrificing yourself for an idea that somehow doesn't make sense to you and you are falling apart and you are not feeling a sense of unity, you're feeling an inner sense of turmoil and disunity and scattering.

That's a pretty good sign that something's wrong with what you're being taught. So be very, very careful about that. Remember, the whole purpose of living in truth and living in unity is that you become an effective causal agent, meaning there's causality in creation, sowing and reaping and, you know, good stuff and actions that bring effects and there's a dynamism.

A produces B, B produces C, C produces E, and we're all part of this dynamism of creativity and causality. It's what makes us a creator, makes us ability, gives us our ability to create our dreams. This is a really, really important thing.

But be very careful when you are told beliefs and are told to believe them, when there's a sense in you that there is a falsity to it and you deny yourself in favor of another person's authority over you.

That is not in consonant with our era. We live in a democratic era. If you look in the Constitution, we have rights endowed by the creator. We go directly to the source of all consciousness and all spirituality.

Government doesn't get in the way. Religions don't get in the way. We go directly to that source. Be very, very careful with old-time religion that forces you to deny yourself for the sake of a truth which is wider, because any truth that is wider also includes yourself.

It also includes yourself. So honor your doubts, honor your doubts. Now, there are some doubts that religion and the teachings of religion can help in spectacular ways, spectacular ways. One example of that is, who am I?

That's a doubt. Where am I going? What happens to me when I die? Do I live? Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? Is there a reincarnation? Some religions believe it, some religions don't. These are existential doubts.

These are doubts about what is the existence of a human being. Many religious teachings, even when they get overboard with authority and misuse faith, many religions have a lot to offer you in terms of learning.

And that's because embedded in the stories and embedded in the teachings are layers. They are layers of knowledge, layers of consciousness, layers of wisdom, layers of truth. And as you begin to think about these teachings and meditate upon these teachings, whether they're in scripture or whether they're being taught to you by somebody, what happens is it begins to open doors and it opens doors to your own increased experience of God.

Now, it doesn't make a difference. And this is the irony around faith and the irony around belief and doubt. Pay close attention. It doesn't make a difference whether or not it's fact or whether or not it is in fact.

This is the strange thing about beliefs and faith. There are, for instance, if I gave you a book by Dostoyevsky, which I know is fiction, he's one of my favorite writers, there are deep, deep levels of human wisdom and knowledge that are embedded in that book.

It's an astonishing books on human truth, but it's fiction. Now, some people swear by the Bible and swear that everything in the Bible is absolutely true and absolutely fact and God bless them. That's a wonderful thing to explore on your God search.

If that's your nature, it is wonderful. There are other people who do not believe it to be fact. But if you look at these stories that are in fact and you think about them, you will find that embedded into these stories a kind of a mystery code.

And under the surface of the story are all sorts of questions that speak to your heart, that open up your heart and open up your mind and begin popping doors inside your being and expanding who you are as a soul, expanding who you are.

And they may not be fact. They may not be fact. They could be fiction, meaning they never occurred as an event. They never occurred as an event, but that doesn't mean it can't be valuable. Tools of instruction and that is why many religions say believe it Believe it even if it's not true believe it Well, it is true It's existentially True, it may not be fact and by believing it and letting it in by letting it in Doorways open up passages to new ways of thinking new ways of feeling that will empower your God search So let's not be too prejudicial Against any bad experiences of religion that you may have had or any bad experiences of religion You're currently having just be aware the most important thing is to maintain your sense of truth and of unity and your Effectiveness as a creative person in the world Make sure you take care of yourself and you honor the the the great blessing of being in a spiritually democratic world right now because it took a few thousand years to get us here and I,

for one, am really happy I'm here. But I want to also, besides dealing with this whole issue of faith, it's really also important to distinguish between two kinds of truth. And we get a little confused because when religion went over the top and science took over the truth battle, that was one thing.

And then science became itself a religion of scientific visim, meaning everything has to be provable. Everything is provable. A proves B and B proves C and the whole thing until you had a kind of scientific cult.

And that didn't hold water. We have to distinguish between two kinds of truth, which we don't do, which is why we get into arguments all the time. There is a kind of thing that we use all the time called the propositional, I would call it a propositional truth.

You know, I'm a good fond of Bertrand Russell, fond of Bertrand Russell. So I call it a propositional truth, meaning if A then B, okay, if A and B, you know, if it is a sky, then it is blue, assuming a nice pretty day.

Okay. Now in the propositional truth, I contested very easily. If I have a sampling of people who are not colorblind, I can put little samples of colors and across the board, there will be no doubt in my mind on a nice beautiful day with the sun shining.

The vast majority of all people on the planet will simply pick the color swatches that are closest to the sky and we'll be able to call it blue or some word that means blue and we'll all have an agreement.

We can even have a more refined description of it where we don't even use color, we just... lose use a little mathematical number that you know is the wavelength of the colors and similarities of the wavelength will say oh yeah yeah that's my wavelength so you can have a kind of proposition the proposition is true the proposition is false okay and that's a kind of propositional truth but when you're on a god search that's propositional truth is a wonderful thinker you use your mind to reason and if you use your mind to reason doors open through the door of reason your god search is empowered by every single faculty that you have every single faculty can be turned to increase your god search but there is another aspect of truth which is much deeper and much more part of what a god search is and that's what i would call substantial truth you see i can't really prove very readily what my hands feel like when they rub each other.

It's very hard for me to quantify what happens when I see someone I love, and I beam, and then I receive back that feeling from them. It's a reality that is beyond quantifying. It's a reality that it's just part of living experience, which is why I say if you're already alive, you're already on a God search.

Substantial truths are what God searches deeply about. What is the life experience of coming to know God as your very life experience? What is that like? It's substantial. It's not up for debate. It's just a reality beyond our ability to prove or debate or say have faith or no faith or believe or don't believe.

It's so far beyond that. It is the God sense that's beyond the Trinity. It's the mystery beyond any Trinity. It's the building that comes from the three. So it's very important to always remind yourself that on your God search, what we're looking for is a unity of heart and mind and will.

And thinking and senses and everything about you is part of the God search. These are all, shall we say, eyes. E-Y-E-S, but you could also say they're eyes, capital I. They're different views of self.

They're different views of who you are, all of which are information channels that help you to understand the amazing spiritual reality that is part of everyday life. That's that. They're all there. So, yes, faith has been abused by authoritarians.

Doubt has pointed its finger at you to make you feel guilty and ashamed. There has been tremendous misuse of these marvelous human understandings. The scientific viewpoint has damaged our relationship to Scripture and our ability to really take in the deep, deep spiritual knowledge that's embedded and encoded into these stories, whether they're fact or whether they're fiction.

But there is a substantiality to life, a substantialness to truth, that is beyond. anyone's measure of it or we become idolaters. And here we have to be very careful. These days, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on.

There are people who are saying that our reality that we live in is just a virtual reality. It's just a video game. It's a simulation. It plays by simulation rules. That's all it is. Here we have a difficulty.

Yes, it may be a simulation, meaning it is produced by certain laws of consciousness which give us a form and allow us to see things a certain way. An algorithmic kind of mechanism that allows for the representation of how life appears to us in our senses.

We'll talk about that later on. There's good knowledge in that. But we will run into a very serious problem on an authentic God search if we carry that kind of belief too far. So what does it mean? Is a baby a simulation?

Does it make a difference whether the simulation fades or whether the simulation lives? Whether the signal on the simulation wanes? Whether the baby suffers? I mean, you've heard energy is neither created nor destroyed.

Well, if we're all circulating energy in simulation, then what happens if someone dies? Does it make a difference? Does it make a difference if you have a genocide of an entire people? It's just circulating energy.

Be very careful. Those laws around physics, which say that there is no matter that can be created nor destroyed, they just change forms, are designed specifically for what's called closed systems like a beaker and it has a cork in it and then the energy in the beaker stays the same and the matter stays the same because it's corked.

We don't know if our reality is closed. We don't know if reality is open in which case the laws wouldn't apply. Be very careful with a lot of cheap scientific interpretation of spiritual phenomenon. It's extremely dangerous.

It's as dangerous as bad religion because it will do the one thing that the building of religions was there to protect which is the dignity and the identity and the specialness of each individual person.

Now maybe they didn't achieve it sometimes and they got carried away in their own human arrogance which happens to us all but nonetheless it was there to anchor the dignity of the person A lot of these new scientific philosophical insights are not doing that.

They are potentially dangerous, and we need to talk more about that because it will infect every single person in this world if we're on a God search in a way, where we're not teaching it properly. So faith is noble if it's taught with unity and truth, and for the purpose of goodness, with dignity of each and every single individual.

Now, last, you're an atheist. God bless you. It's most atheists are people who just don't buy stupid ways of thinking about God, and they just won't buy it. But don't be a dumb atheist where you deny that there is a meaning to life, that we're just a bunch of chemicals left on the planet.

Don't deny the mystery of human love. Don't deny the mystery of compassion and the importance and the dignity of each person, because a clod of matter on the road doesn't have any dignity. Don't be a dumb atheist.

There are many good and decent and humanistic atheists who simply don't buy stupid idolatrous ways of thinking about God, and I agree with them. On the other hand, there are people who are agnostics who are at least a little humble.

They say, well, I don't know if God exists. They admit their limitations intellectually. That's terrific. There's good to that, too. Atheism has its good. Agnosticism has its good. But agnostics also have to realize what's called the epistemological issue, meaning, how do you know anything?

How do I know that? that I can flick a light switch with absolutely perfect faith that the bulb will go on. Now, what are the limits of my knowledge about God? If God is a knowledge, and I cannot know all, what can I know?

And how can I know it? And how can I share it? In which case, we're back to an objective experience of God, an objective experience of truth that I can have, you can have, and we can share. And then we can go back into our scriptures.

And we can go back into the religions of our birth if we choose, or we can go into any kind of spiritual discipline that excites us that can open doors. And we can evaluate whether or not those things are teaching it properly and improve them like a spiritual technology.

If you're on this God search with me, what I am encouraging you to do is have a scientific spirituality, a spirituality that's a spiritual science that includes your mind, that includes your objectivity, that includes your discerning intellect, that includes respect for yourself as an individual, and you're not just circulating energy.

You're sacred. And we'll talk more about that in the future because it brings us way back to the very beginning of the truest of human insights that we are not merely creatures as ordinary creatures.

We are something very, very special. In any case, thank you for joining us on God Search. Number three, build something with your God Search. Build something. Share it with two other people. Build a triad of power.

Come to know God. Uncover God. Recover God if you had a bad experience. Discover God. If you're alive, you're already on your God Search. Thanks for allowing me to share it with you. Bye bye. Until next time.

Faith or Faithless. End your Inner Fracture Lines. - GODSEARCH Episode 3