About Faith, from the book, "The Voice of Knowledge" by Janet Mills and Don Miguel Ruiz. It is a long post, but I love the information in it. It explains that it is not what we believe, but what we put our faith behind...that steers our worlds. It isn't what we believe, but that we believe it.
"Faith is a force that comes from our integrity. It is the expression of what we really are. Faith is the power of our creation because we use faith to create our life story and to transform our life story. Different traditions have called this power by different names. The Toltec call it intent, but I prefer to call it faith."
"Let's see if we can understand why our faith is so important. When we talk about faith or intent, we are also talking about the power of the word. The word is pure magic. It is a power that comes directly from God, and faith is the force that directs that power. We can say that everything in our virtual reality is created with the word because we use the word for the creation of our story. Humans have the most wonderful imagination. Beginning with the word, we form a language. With a language , we try to make sense out of everything we experience."
"First we agree about the sound and meaning of each word. Then just remembering the sound of the words, we can communicate with other dreamers about our virtual reality. We give names to everything we perceive; we choose words as symbols, and these symbols have power to reproduce a dream in our head. For example, just hearing the word horse can reproduce an entire image in our mind. That's how a symbol works. But it can even be more powerful than that. Just by saying two words, "The Godfather," a whole movie can appear in our mind. The word, as a symbol, has the magic and power of creation because it can reproduce an image, a concept, or an entire situation in our imagination."
"It is amazing what the word can do. The word creates images of objects in our mind. The word creates complex concepts. The word evokes feelings. The word creates every belief that we store in our mind. The structure of our language shapes how we perceive our entire virtual reality."
"Faith is so important because it is the force that gives life to every word, to every concept that we store in our mind. We can say that life manifests through faith, and that faith is the messenger of life. Life goes through our faith and then our faith gives life to everything we agree to believe in. Remember, we invest our faith by making an agreement. We we agree with a concept, we accept the concept without any doubt, and the concept becomes a part of us. If we don't agree with the concept, our faith is not there, and we don't keep it in our memory. Every concept is alive just because our faith is there, just because we believe in the concept. Faith is the force that holds all of these symbols together and gives sense and direction to the entire dream."
"If you can imagine every belief, every concept, every opinion is like a brick, then our faith is the mortar that holds the bricks together. The way we start getting these bricks and putting them together is by using our attention. Humans can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but with our attention we have the power to discriminate and focus only on what we want to perceive. The attention is also the part of our mind that we use to transfer information from person to person. By hooking someones attention, we create a channel of communication, and through that channel we can send and receive information. This is how we teach, and this is how we learn."
"As I have said, our parents hook our attention and teach us the meaning of words; we agree, and we learn a language. Through language, the word, we start to build the edifice of knowledge. Together, all of our beliefs form a structure that tells us what we believe we are. The Toltec call this shape that our mind takes the human form. The human form is not the form of our physical body. The human form is the structure of our personal Tree of Knowledge. It is everything we believe about being human; it is the structure of our whole story. This structure is almost as solid as our physical body because our faith makes it rigid."
"You call yourself a human, and that is what makes you a human. Your faith is invested in your story - mostly in the main character of your story - and that is the main problem. The most powerful part of you your faith, is invested in the liar who lives in your head. Through your faith, you give life to all of those lies. The result is the way you live your life in the present moment because you have faith in the main character of your story. This means that you believe in what you believe you are without any doubt. The rest is jut action-reaction. Every habit is a setup for you to perform the role of your main character."
"The storyteller has power over you because you have faith in the story that it tells you. Once you support the story with your faith, it doesn't matter whether the story is the truth or not the truth. You believe it; you are done. Thy will be done. That is why Jesus said that if you have just a little faith you can move mountains. Humans are powerful because we have a strong faith; we have the capacity to believe strongly, but where is our faith invested? Why do we feel that we have hardly any faith? I can tell you that it's not true that we have so little faith. Our faith is strong and powerful, but our faith is not free. Our faith is invested in all of the knowledge in our head. It is trapped in the structure of our Tree of Knowledge."
"The structure is what really controls the dream of our life because our faith lives in that structure. Our faith is not in the voice of our story, and it's not in our reasoning mind. Just because we say, "I will succeed," doesn't mean that our faith follows the words. No, there may be another belief that is stronger and deeper, and that belief is telling us, "You will not succeed." And that is what happens. It doesn't matter what we do; we fail."
"That is why you cannot change yourself just by wishing to change. No, you need to really challenge what you believe you are, especially the beliefs that limit the expression of your life. You need to challenge every belief that you use to judge yourself, to reject yourself, to make yourself little."
"I remember one of my apprentices asking me, "Miguel, why is it so difficult to change my beliefs?" And I told him, "Well, you understand the concept that what you believe you are is not the truth; it's a story. You understand that very well, but you don't believe it. And that is what makes the difference. If you really believe it, if your faith is there, then you change."
"So yes, it is possible to change what we believe, to recreate the dream of our life, but first we need to free our faith. And there is only one way to free our faith, and that is through the truth. The truth is our sword, and it's the only weapon we have against the lies. Nothing but the truth can free the faith that is trapped in the structure of our lies. But with our faith invested in the lies, we no longer see the truth. The lies blind our faith, the power of our creation."
"Blind faith is a powerful concept. When our faith is blind, we no longer follow the truth..." Don Miguel Ruiz
