Deconstructing faith and belief is possible by living through seamless clarity of awareness, knowing correctly in the right context without associating with the known or unknown.
Faith or belief in ideas is not knowledge. You know and understand your experience through your natural or artificial faculties of knowing. You do not need faculties of knowing for faith and belief. For example, you do not need microscope to believe in the idea that supreme creator creates epidemics. You need no personal experience in order to have faith or belief in ideas.
Experience should give rise to understanding. Understanding should arise from experience. Experience first, then understand. To understand experiences correctly, you need a detached seamlessly clear awareness, the matured phenomenon of knowing correctly in the right context.
Difference Between Faith, Belief and Knowledge
Faith is trust in the unknown, for example God, or faith in astrologers or faith in ones own destiny. Due to faith in the unknown, you may not focus on what is the reality of cause and conditions. As a result, faith can eventually disappoint you if it does not fulfill your expectations.
Belief is to live and act upon an idea assuming that it is true. You may believe in the ideas of supreme creator and spend time and efforts to pleas the “supreme creator” for happiness rather than know to improve the cause and conditions for your happiness.
Knowledge is something that you know through experience, validation and verification through various means including but not limited to your physical sense organs, psychological sense organs like mind, memories, emotions or through science and technology. Knowledge is established to be true through evidence, application, demonstration or at least personal experience.
Right Knowledge Deconstructs Faith and Beliefs
Ideas are artificially created by humans for some practical reason. Ideas are psychological point of views in some context and they do not represent the complete reality. Ideas can eventually become outdated, irrelevant or useless.
You have faith and belief in the ideas. Faith and belief are not knowledge or experience of reality like knowledge and experience of pain, disease, old age and death which are true whether you believe them or not. To have faith and belief in ideas without knowledge and experiences is to deceive yourself knowingly.
You have faith and belief does not necessarily mean that you know, or you have the experience. Having faith or believing is not equivalent to knowing the truth or reality.
Knowledge on the other hand is to know the truth established through personal experience, experimentation, validation, verification, application or demonstration.
When you know, you need not believe. However, the knowledge has to be correct in the right context. Faith and belief established through knowing miracle without knowing the constituent cause and conditions of miracle is not correct knowledge. In order to know correctly, you need seamless clarity of awareness without associating with the know through faith or beliefs.
Rigidity and Burden Due to Faith and Belief
Faith and Beliefs are ideas or assumptions accepted to be true or untrue. Faith and belief can create unconscious bias affecting your decisions and actions.
Rigid Life and Actions Due to Faith and Belief
Due to faith and beliefs, you may live and act in a very rigid manner in order to confirm with your unreal faith and belief rather than live and act harmoniously with the reality of cause and conditions.
Your association with faith and beliefs gives rise to self and eclipses seamless clarity of awareness, the phenomenon of knowing correctly in the right context. Faith and beliefs are artificial, giving rise to artificial self in form of self-ideation, self-identification, self-conception, self-image, inner self etc.
Due to association with self, you live and act in a rigid manner according to self rather than live and act harmoniously with the reality of cause and conditions.
Psychological Burden of Faith and Belief
Consciously you have faith and belief but deep inside you are ignorant. Faith and Beliefs contribute to your stress of ignorance rather than the wisdom of not knowing. Faith and belief add to psychological burden that is unnecessary while keeping you off-guard about truth and reality.
Faith and beliefs can wrongly influence the process of life and actions without your knowledge. For example, due to early life belief in god and his judgement, you may continue to live in fear and anxiety but not know the source of it. Such early life beliefs can influence the processes of life and growth at young age and impact physical and mental health in later life just like a poorly developed lamb due to constant fear of a tiger.
Early life beliefs can be forgotten but continue to stress the involuntary process of life. It is like accidently believing rope to be a snake and getting stressed over it or accidently believing rope and snake and remain gullible only to meet an accident unknowingly.
You are carrying many such forgotten faiths and beliefs that stress the process of your life by adding to your psychological burden. Reality of eternal immortal inner Self or inner Being is one of such beliefs affecting the process of your life and your actions.
Such beliefs can create unconscious bias due to which you may devalue present life. “Supreme Creator and Controller” as “God” or “Super-soul” is one of your faiths. Such faith can create unconscious bias which can negatively affect your sense of accountability, transparency, responsibility and social justice.
Why Do You Believe or Have Faith?
Many of your faiths and beliefs are not your conscious choice. You have faiths passed down to you in the early life before you knew to question. You may believe in ideas due to desires or lack of options.
In early life, since childhood, you get ideas and you believe in them through hypnosis, without your knowledge or expressed consent. For example, religious and cultural beliefs.
Most of the time you dwell in mind, living in a trance, neither fully asleep nor fully awake, neither fully relaxed nor fully alert.
In such a trans, especially during childhood before maturity and psychological independence, you are highly suggestible and vulnerable to hypnosis, you are also highly impressionable and vulnerable to conditioning due to delicate nervous system. The foundation of your life is laid on your habits, beliefs and attitudes formed during early life through your experiences and upbringing.
Early-life beliefs become part of your physiological and psychological conditioning. Your life gets controlled by your early life beliefs. Due to early life belief, you suffer from “bottle gives milk” syndrome.
You believe in the ideas if you like, depend, or trust the source of those ideas, for example parents, friends, teachers, charismatic personalities etc. You believe because everyone believes and not because you know.
You also adopt beliefs based on your experiences if you are too lazy to examine their truth and reality. For example, if you never saw cow giving milk, you may believe that dairy gives milk if you are too lazy to investigate the truth of this beliefs.
Belief is due to lack of knowledge and experience. You may believe without knowing. You may believe without empirical evidence obtained through right means and methods including experimentation, validation and verification based on understanding of empirical evidence.
Beliefs are not the universal reality or absolute truth. Nothing should be accepted as true without investigating into it by yourself on basis of experimentation, application, demonstration or empirical evidence or experience.
Rather than belief or leap of faith, have trust and leap of confidence based on experience, knowledge and understanding.
Knowing (or not knowing) Through Seamless Clarity of Awareness
By being aware you know correctly in the right context as it is without associating with the known or unknow and without giving rise to self through association with faith or belief. You get seamless clarity of awareness by living life with a beginner’s mind like an original explorer without any preconceived faiths or beliefs in ideas.
By being aware without associating with the known, you know and understand your experiences correctly in the right context through all the natural and artificial means. Such seamless clarity of awareness, the phenomenon of knowing as it is without activities in the mind or reacting to the known is necessary to learn living without faiths or beliefs.
Right practice of meditation, that is not based on faith or belief, can help you to cultivate that seamless clarity of awareness necessary to deconstruct faith and live life authentically with a beginner’s mind like an original explorer.