| |
Getting ahead in a
difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to
sustain yourself against
staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why
some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further
than people with vastly superior talent.
 Sophia Loren
Faith is the highest degree of hope, belief, confidence, and trust
in something.
 | Hope.
 | Degree of certainty. Hope is usually just wishful thinking. in
contrast, faith implies more certainty that we will have a particular
result. |
| Amount of emotion. Hope is emotional. Faith can exist without emotion. |
| Passivity. Hope is passive. We wait for something good to come
to us. In contrast, faith is generally a part of an active system. We move in
faith. |
|
| Belief.
| Focus. |
| Amount of intellectual content. |
|
| Confidence.
| Basis. We are confident in something because it has proven that it
has particular abilities by which it can accomplish tasks. In contrast, we
can have faith in something that has not yet proven itself. Our history with
that thing can even include many unanswered prayers |
| Placement of evaluation. Confidence is generally based upon an
evaluation of our own aptitude. In contrast, faith is based on evaluation of
something else's aptitude. We have faith in a deity. We generally do not
have faith in ourselves, simply because we are very aware of our own
fallibility. |
|
| Trust.
| Basis. |
| Equality. We have trust among other people. in contrast, we have faith
in something that is greater than we are. |
|
The productive aspects of faith.
| Faith helps us to make a leap into a consideration of new possibilities
when we have created illusory limitations through our misinterpretation of
input from the intellect, feelings, or intuition. Faith helps us to disregard
other types of faulty input such as public opinion. |
| Faith helps to diminish mental and emotional distractions such as doubt,
fear, or anxiety. We can therefore, focus our attention on our task. |
| Faith facilitates our basic ability to function. We would be
paralyzed into inaction if we did not have faith that the sun would rise tomorrow, and
that our sensory perceptions are accurate, and that our mind is processing data
reliably, and that a restaurant's food is not poisoned, and that the people who
are walking past us are not going to kill us. We are continually exposed to
uncertainties. It is our faith in the goodness of life that allows us to
proceed. If we lived in a state of total doubt regarding everything, we would
hardly be able to interact with life at all. |
Techniques for managing faith.
| Design-work. We can generate energy tones such as confidence and
certainty.
| Affirmation. "I test the things in which I invest my
faith." "I allow myself to have faith in things that have proven
themselves to me". |
| Directed imagination. We can visualize ourselves acting in ways that
express our faith in something. |
| Modeling. We can act as if we have faith. |
|
| Intuition. Intuition can tell us whether something is worthy of faith
and it can warn us when something is going to betray our faith. |
| We can develop courage. Faith requires courage, because we are venturing
into new areas, perhaps in contradiction to our reasoning and our experience. |
| We can recognize faith as an intermediate stage in our education in life.
Faith helps us to consider new ideas. As we learn and test those new ideas, the
faith is replaced by knowledge and experience. However, we can never know or
experience everything. We are always using faith to take us into new areas. |
| We can increase our faith gradually. When we recognize that faith is
necessary in order for us to interact with things, we develop our ability to
have faith. We start with low risk issues, to test something's worthiness of
faith. At each step, we can risk more. As we increase the risk, we increase our
protection against occasional lapses, and enhance our attentiveness to the
thing's activities. |
| We can accept our doubts. |
| We can be willing to accept changes in our faith. The thing is
essentially the same, but our perception of it changes, and so our experience of
it changes. Sometimes, we must cease to have faith in something, if that thing
has proven itself to be fundamentally unworthy of our faith. |
| We can protect ourselves. When we have faith in people and material
circumstances, we will be betrayed occasionally. We therefore need to follow the
guideline "have faith, but buckle your seat belt anyway.". Some people
are more faith worthy than others. We can discern their worthiness through our
intuition, our experiences with them, and other people's experiences with them. |
Faith is a continuation
of reason.
William Adams
Next topic: Optimism
|
