We are often told in life that if we want to be successful, we simply have to have faith. Faith in ourselves, faith in others, etc.
I find this, of course, awfully naïve, and I’m sure you do as well, because if I don’t know who I am, gosh, how can I have faith in anything? Of course, right?
But faith is an element that’s associated with hope, which of course is very, very necessary if we’re going to live out a constructive and positive life.
So to me, faith is broken into numerous areas, and I’d like to probe some of them today, if I may. The first faith, of course, is I must have, as we said earlier, faith in myself, but I don’t know who I am.
Many people I speak with that are young, speak like this. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m graduating.
I’m just finishing a class at the moment. Grade 12, just graduating now. Biggest concern, I don’t know about the future.
I don’t know who I am. So how can I possibly have faith? I mean, it’s insane, really, isn’t it?
So where do I start? Where do I start? Well, I’m a big believer ultimately in discovering the me, right?
Or uncovering, rather, the me, because it is inside of me, isn’t it, really? So I must say to myself at some point, at some point that I’m worthy of this mission called me that I’m going to undertake.
And it’s going to be one heck of a journey, this mission. So I have faith, remember we talked about this, that ultimately I’m going to pull it off, whatever this is, whatever this mission is. And here I do not know, I’m 20 years old or so.
I could be 40 years old, doesn’t really matter. All of us experience at times loss in life. Perhaps a circumstance has radically changed, someone has passed away, I’ve just gotten out of a relationship, major relationship, and I’m lost.
I don’t have any faith in me. And if I wanted to find the faith, who is this person? Well, I think then we need to begin to realize, who is my teacher in all of this reality that we occupy?
Who is my teacher? And the answer, of course, is me. I’m my own teacher.
And if that’s true, then I can have faith in me and slowly begin to unpack this being called Leon.
I could get my notebook out, begin to make a few points about me, some of the habits that I have that are different from other people’s habits. And then I really believe I need some solitude, not loneliness, but some solitude.
I need to go for a lonely, solitary walk in nature, or for that matter, in a busy thoroughfare. It doesn’t really matter, but I must be alone with me. I must come to discover who I am.
And then once I slowly begin to uncover, discover, uncover, unloft, if you will, me, then I can slowly have faith in that person, right? Faith in that person. And you know, I’m going to give myself these small wins, aren’t I?
I’m going to say, this is the task that I’ve been entrusted with in my life. I believe, given all the data I have at this moment, this is the task.
So let’s say, for instance, the task, my mission at the moment is to finish university, finish my graduate degree. I’ve experienced this. This is what I must do.
The rest of it behind is kind of foggy. I really don’t know. I have an idea that I’ll have a job later, but at the moment I don’t.
But I have faith. Yes, I do.
I have faith barring everything, barring economic uncertainty over my tuition, barring relationships that are dynamic and change, barring a professor that might not truly like me and won’t help me, barring lack of friends, whatever it is.
I have faith that I’m going to pull this off, going to pull this off. And then of course, from personal experience, I ultimately do. And my faith is reinforced.
It’s reinforced. And there are some thoughts about turning hope into faith or turning faith into hope, whichever you prefer. But either way, these seem to be symbiotically linked, faith and hope, don’t they?
Right? Bedfellows, in a sense. So, then I’ve done that task, I can go further.
I have faith that I will ultimately, perhaps, find a good career after being a wage slave for a piece of time, period of time. I will find a mate, someone I can love and admire, and they love and admire me. All of those are elements of faith.
And, you know, it’s interesting because along this way, I also am going to suffer, as we spoke about, I’m going to suffer some crippling loss, for sure.
My girlfriend, at the last moment, when everything seems fine, she’s going to say to me, Gosh, you know, you’re really not the man I thought you were. I don’t love you anymore.
And this, inevitably, is before some major event, always, always in life, it seems to be, maybe it’s a major test or a book launch or whatever, something that is crippling to the average person.
But then you realize, wait a moment, I’m not the average person, am I? I’m a winner because I have faith in me, in me. When other people tell me it can’t be done, I have faith in me.
And sadly, there are examples of people at this point that are broken, that fail, stumble into another bad relationship, stumble into drugs, stumble into alcohol, doesn’t matter, they stumble and they never recover in reality.
They tell you they’re fine, they tell you, oh, I can’t believe I’m so recovered, blah, blah, blah. But it’s just not true. You know it’s not true.
They didn’t make it, they didn’t really have faith in what God wanted them to do, their mission, if you will. Now, to be fair, perhaps the missions along the way are incorrect.
Perhaps you thought, for instance, that you really wanted to be a lawyer, let’s say, or a doctor, I mentioned this before, my friend Hubert.
You thought maybe external influences were there, you thought that you wanted to be something, and then along the way you discovered, wait a moment, I don’t want to be a lawyer, or gosh, I don’t want to be a doctor.
And then you change to a different career, and people, of course, that love you, are disappointed in you, so they say, because they thought you ultimately were going to be that kind of professional, but it wasn’t the right mission for you.
Then the right mission comes. And I’ll tell you the story again of my friend Hubert. He was a good student, got into medical school, first year, top of his class.
The second year, they brought the cadavers, and the cadavers, I’m told, have an odor because of the preservative, the formaldehyde, and when you cut into the flesh, there is some liquid that evinces out. I’m told this, I don’t know this personally.
Made him quite sick. He got more and more nauseated. This just went on, right?
And for weeks, then eventually he couldn’t do it anymore and had to quit. And everybody, especially his father, was very upset, disappointed, didn’t have a relationship again.
But eventually he went back to school and got his PhD in music, which was ultimately his first love. Bless him. He’s passed on now.
I loved him. He was a great man. But it shows you that maybe the mission is actually a contrived mission.
It’s not the mission for you, but still the faith in the mission until you’re really shown factors that change is very important, very important. Have faith.
And then of course there is the spiritual side that’s associated with faith, with God, Gaia, the universe. Now, of course, many people today say they’re not religious, they’re spiritual.
I think any type of faith requires, as I said before, requires work. You have to spend the time in some religious underpinning, some institution, to understand what is there, and then you can accept it or reject it. It’s up to you, up to you.
But you have to have, I think, this study. And then you can face the relationship that you want or do not want with God, honestly. You can then have faith.
Soren Kierkegaard, of course, famously said, the leap of faith, because you will see God, of course, in children and in animals and in nature, and you will, if you’re lucky, you will have that spiritual connectivity with God, with his energies, if
you will. The Orthodox tell us we can’t know his essence, but we can certainly feel his energies. And then you will connect, or not, or not.
But I think for the most part, successful people in life psychologically, as time goes on, really have faith in something higher than the self, for sure.
And then I think, to end this thing, this concept that we’re dealing with here, I think you have to have faith that the society in all its chaos will ultimately be fine.
There will be changes, there will be catastrophes, there will be bad kings, good kings, bad presidents, good presidents, anarchy, whatever it is. But ultimately, society will go on to its own perfection, to the geist.
And I think this is an idea for sure. If you put together the concept of science and you put the concept of God and you blend the two, Pierre Deschardins, right?
The Omega point in the future, I think it makes to me, it makes a lot of sense because it’ll give you a point once again in the future that we will all be fine.
So those three things, if you can think of, you gotta have faith in yourself, you gotta have faith in your mission, and ultimately you gotta have faith in God, right?
Now, there are people, of course, in the modern era that no longer have any faith at all. They look around and they say it’s chaos and society is declining and we’re getting all this negative news every day, it seems. Ad nauseum, too much.
I don’t even bother half the time anymore because it’s going to be the same doom, gloom and down, right? And ultimately, who’s in control of my mental state has to be me. I have to have the faith in me because, you know, why am I here?
What’s my mission? What happens when I leave here? All the way along, faith is really the glue that’s going to drive me forward.
So be positive, be happy, have faith in yourself, faith in God, faith in society, and just faith overall. Why not? It’ll make you feel good.
Every single day, take your blessing, have faith, gratitude, have faith. And you know what they say. You know what they say.
Critical thinking is everything, especially when you have faith in yourself and in others, and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless.
Bye bye.