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-Seeker
Most people have very little difficulty with faith and indeed pay it very little attention. They have faith that the sun will come up in the morning, they have faith in the love of their family, faith in the loyalty of their fellows and faith in the rightiousness of their moral code, whatever it might be. They have faith in GodEssence; based, one hopes, on intuition as well as teachings.
That faith is a precious gift, nurtured by their culture, their parents and their religion since the earliest days of their childhood. That faith is no mere decoration; it's the foundation for their psyche. It is the cornerstone of a stable personality. So to lose one's faith in any of these things is a devistating blow.
We can but imagine the distress of some, who due to unstable brain chemistry, cannot have faith in the reality they percieve. Most of us have experenced the loss of faith in a friend; the bitter pain of betrayal still sharp though years have passed. Blessedly few of us have experenced the loss of faith in family, or perhaps worse, were never gifted it in the first place.
The loss of faith in GodEssence - that would be terrible indeed, though it is part of the journey of the seeker to shed all-too-simple answers. GodEssence is tremendous and mysterious and
cannot be compassed by one pamphlet, one medicine circle, one church, one religion, one scientific discipline. The seeker learns that no lesson may be ignored, for even obvious fallicies tell us much about the purposes of those who crafted them. The seeker learns that no lesson may be accepted uncritically, for even the truest teaching is incomplete.
So we see that faith is meant to evolve and grow from the fundimentals towards greater wisdom. Where once we acted from simple fath we now act from understanding. It is not a betrayal of the early faith to seek that understanding, rather it is a fulfillment of it and a blessing to be dilligently persued.
For the most part this principle is followed the world over because it makes a good deal of sense. We see it expressed in diverse cultures and contexts, from Zen to Avionics.
But far too many of us retain a child-like faith in a simplistic moral code. Probably this is because we can see all too easily the consequences of living without one - the news is filled with the results - and rather than risk losing what we have or weakening the lessons we pass on, we cling to the very simplest expressions of that faith. But a faith that is unexamined is as crippling as a faith that is lost. The simplicity that is appropriate to a six-year-old is insufficient to the understanding required of an adult. And the conseqences of that are as much responsible for the state of the evening news as the consequences of the other.
Seeker is a component of Firewheel Vortex.
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