A mental belief in a collection of reassuring thoughts and ideas does not reach the depths of the heart that can take one into the higher stages of spiritual development.  These are the higher stages of spiritual development where one becomes a knower and not simply one who settles for knowing about the God one professes to believe in.  This belief in a set of ideas and collection of thoughts is what most people take to be religious faith.  This belief, however, is only one of many stages of faith development.  It is that stage of faith development where the individual takes the wisdom teachings literally.  This stage of faith development is called childish literalism.  This is were the words of the wisdom teachings are taken literally as written.  For example the idea that the world was made in six days is taken to mean that the world was in fact created in six week days.  The creation myth of the Garden of Eden is taken quite literally as place where there is a tree that bears fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Stages of Faith Development and Doubt

How does one develop what are called more mature stages of faith?  The paradoxical answer is through doubt.  One begins to see faith and doubt not as opposites but as energies that invite the higher stages of faith development.  Without the experience of doubt you would not begin to ask deeper questions of life and you would thus not take the quest that ultimately leads you to knowing rather than believing.  Without the experience of doubt you would avoid the quest into a more expansive dimension of faith.  Without the journey, into and through doubt, you would not enter a mature faith that would be able to move such mountains of doubt.  Doubts force us to stop accepting half truths and false security.  Doubt makes us question the authority of those who tell us what we should believe.  Certainly, without this form of questioning, one simply remains an individual who never claims their own authority in matters of the highest value.  Doubt forces us to stir ourselves out of bed and take the road of trials that is a stage of the spiritual development map known as The Hero’s Journey.

The Road of Trials means that we follow the call to claim our own truth as written within the heart.  Doubt can be seen as a precursor to higher levels of faith development.  This is the road of trials that takes you through disbelief and into communion with that which is beyond belief.  It takes you into true communion and into the direct knowing of that truth that really sets you free of doubt.  A crisis of faith, is thus an opportunity to deepen your spiritual development.  A loss of faith can bring you to discover what is beyond belief.  This crises of faith often takes place around the age of forty and is that stage of life referred to as midlife.     There is guidance along the road of trials but it usually arrives in new and unique ways.  This guidance comes from within and then manifests without.  The life stage called midlife crisis is that stage of personal and spiritual development that asks us to place our faith in the inner.

My own crisis of faith is not just a one off experience but a developing journey of experiences.  I am no longer so disturbed by experiencing times of doubt and confusion.  The real issue for me personally is not so much the issue of doubt but the issue of impatience.  I am now moving into the second half of life as an elder and mentor and have a deep desire to be more effective in this way.  I also have doubts about how I might most effectively move in this direction.  This is the direction where my heart lies and thus this is were my treasure is also.  It is in the process of trusting the still small voice within that I experience impatience.  Impatience is another form of doubt.  If I where to have infinite patience then I would be able to manifest what I desire instantaneously.  This struggle with impatience is my road of trials.  In my own quest I am asked to be ever more patient and this is one aspect of my character that I really do struggle with.

Echo and Narcissus – John William Waterhouse

I have been graced that  stage of faith development that I call Knowing.  This is a state of Godliness.  This means that the mental construct referred to as belief no longer holds any attraction for me.  A believer is someone who is a believer in a God of Love whereas the knower is in fact the Lover.  What have these stages of belief and faith got to do with personal development and beyond?  In this blog I write for a certain age group.  This is the age group who are thirty five years or more and who are approaching midlife.  These individuals will transition into the second half of life and begin to quest for deeper meaning and purpose than the narcissistic pursuit of ideas of success versus failure that are often the focus of the first half of life.  These are the individuals who are at a stage in life where their questions become more universal rather than self centred.

This Western culture that I live is has its primary focus on productivity, consumerism and the culture of youth.  This leaves the individual who questions this purely material focus in the dark as to how they might transit this time of midlife that I call the Will to Meaning.  This period of will to meaning that includes the struggle with doubt versus faith is often a time when one finds oneself in a metaphorical dark forest.  However, even within dark forests there are signposts that point the way into a clearing.   These signposts are contained within the myths that are shared all around the world.  These signposts are contained within the wisdom teachings of all the worlds religions provided.  That is provided that you do not cling to the signpost that is the stage of faith development of the one who believes about God and who will not take the journey into doubt that paradoxically develops their faith.

These blog posts are this writer and storytellers attempt at guiding you into a more expansive understanding of belief, faith and knowing.  It is the experience of knowing that is the culmination of true faith.  You only need a small amount.  One glimpse will do it provided that following that glimpse you pay fidelity to the invitation within it.  Your work is to pay fidelity to that experience of knowing and how it is intended to be expressed through you for the highest good of all.  In this way you deepen your spiritual development and you move through stages of faith development until your faith is a direct knowing of the universal.  This is the rock that is not moved by the shifting sands of a childlike literal belief system that one has adopted but never questioned or spend time avoiding questioning.  Without doubt one is not invited into a struggle of deep authenticity and interiority where one becomes not a believer but a knower that one is Love.

For this writer and storyteller these words, belief and faith seem interchangeable to many people. When one studies various stages of faith development writings you will find that often writers use these words interchangeably.  However, there are certain other writers  who are very clear that the words belief and faith designate two different experiences. Allow me to share with you a passage from The Five Stages of the Soul by Harry R. Moody and David Carroll.  Here is what is written about that stage of spiritual development referred to as ‘the struggle.’ It is subtitled “The Struggle of Faith and Doubt.” Here is what is written

If we’ve come this far, and if we find ourselves in a spiritual Struggle of some kind we must believe in something.  Why else would we make these efforts?

At times it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what we believe. But then, there’s something, some presence deep in our blood that keeps calling, keeps whispering instructions

we can’t entirely make out, hinting that the only road to self-contentment is through the very thing we can’t see or define; something, as a master remarked,

that wouldn’t leave us to our dreams and let us sleep in peace.

Contrast the above passage with the following quotations.

When you know there is no need to believe.

– Carl Jung

I am not a believer. You only need to believe when you don’t know.

- Jeddu Krishnamurti

It seems to this writer and storyteller that there are different stages of faith development here that might be better shown as:

1. Belief

2. Faith

3. Knowing

Belief versus Faith – The Etymology of word Belief

The word belief is broken down into two components. These are ;

1. Be

2. Lief

This is what the New Oxford Dictionary of English says about the adverb ‘lief.’

“archaic, as happily; as gladly: he would just as lief eat a pincushion.

Origin Old English leof ‘dear, pleasant’, of Germanic origin: related to leave and love.”

The word be is related to being. Neither of these words be or lief is a noun.  Each indicates a state which is related to happiness, to pleasure and love. Nowhere does the origin of the word belief indicate that here is some kind of something that you are to cling onto.  This then is the issue for this writer and storyteller.  The way the word belief and faith are made interchangeable is a misnomer.  In fact, the way in which the word belief is used for the most part is not a verb but a noun.  It is something the individual chooses to have as opposed to faith, which is the movement of trust in the no thing that creates all things.  This is the stage of faith development that knows life as a verb rather than as a noun.

This is what many believers do with religious teachings.  Spiritual words of wisdom are made into things that are then professed as belief. This is a stage of spiritual development referred to by Dr. Scott Peck in Further Along the Road Less Travelled as the “Formal/Institutional” stage.  Most of the religious believers of the the world religions are at this stage of spiritual growth.  They believe in the writings of their adopted set of scriptures.  They take the teachings of these scriptures as literal gospel.  They belong to a group and they often feel threatened by other groups who believe in a different set of writings. If you question their set of beliefs they often feel threatened and in many places in the world they react by threatening you.

Belief versus Faith – What is Beyond Belief?

Belief is the adoption of a fixed idea or construct.  That is, it is an attachment to a noun.  The belief as a mental construct is something to believe in but it is not a verb in the sense that it is moving.  The next stage of spiritual development and growth that is beyond belief is that stage I personally refer to as ‘Faith.’ This stage of faith development  is the stage of spiritual development that is characterised by direct knowing.  When one enters the stage of faith development called knowing there is no longer a requirement for the something to believe in.  There is, however, the longing to deepen the connection to that which is known -  not in any intellectual sense, but known in a sense of unification.

When Harry R. Moody and David Carroll write:

If we’ve come this far, and if we find ourselves in a spiritual Struggle of some kind we must believe in something…

Personally speaking, this need to believe in something is a stage two Formal/Institutional spiritual development stage.  It is where the individual adopts a formal and institutional statement of belief  or creed that they take from authority outside themselves.  This happens throughout the world in various religious and we see the results in religious wars.

Belief versus Faith – What is Faith?

Let me state here my understanding of the word faith and the connection between the belief versus faith issue.  Throughout this personal development and beyond blog I tend to transpose the words faith and trust.  For this writer the word faith means that you do not know whereas the word belief is often an indication that you do know when in fact what you know is simply what you know about.  When I say that I do not know, I am not writing about knowledge which is related to any intellectual understanding.  For example, I do not know what the experience that arises from the spiritual instruction:

Be still and know that I am God.

I can say that I trust the practice of stillness to reveal to me that direct experience that I refer to as knowing.  Indeed I have had the experience of the grace to be the knowing of that stillness that is the direct experience of God.  If I simply say that I believe in the word of God then that does not give me the opportunity to move into what is beyond belief and into the knowing of the living word.  The individual who is willing to give up belief for unbelief is in fact moving into the higher stages of faith development,  even though the vast majority of religious believers will claim that such an individual has been lost to the fold.  This stage of unbelief is what Dr. Scott Peck calls the Skeptic/Individual stage of faith development.  This does not necessarily mean that you leave your attendance of some formal and institutional religion, but it does mean that you begin to question the rigidity of any religious dogma you have, up to that phase of spiritual development, been deeply attached.

Beyond formal and institutional belief and unbelief is the individual who has attained to the stage of spiritual development referred to as the “Mystic/Communal” stage. This is the stage of faith development of an individual who is at least, in part, the knower.  This is the individual who has arrived at the ocean of Love  and sees the infinite possibility that has been graced them in living their one wild and precious life.  This is the knower who can honestly say that life, and their life of becoming who they are intended to be,  is beyond belief. This blog post is this writer and storyteller’s personal reflection on this question of belief versus faith.  This question of belief versus faith returns to me and asks me to become clearer about it. It is not my place to try and pull people out of their belief systems.  It is, however, my wish to invite them into stages of personal and spiritual development that  keeps calling them to be and to lief.  This is to live from being rather than from the separate sense of self attached to a formal and institutional way of life.

Anyone wishing to avail of a some free spiritual guidance with this writer and storyteller is free to contact me at storyteller@tonycuckson.com for support on the individual spiritual journey into living you ‘one wild and precious life.’  This free spiritual guidance will be conducted using Skype.