CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
What Is the Energy? - On Belief

What is the energy that suspends a thing in its own identity? What is the identity that defines a personality in terms of its greater reality?
What is that which swells the mind with life and love?

If we think of the energy that daily floods our planet, how the Sun bathes the Earth in its rays, and how this energy is absorbed planet-wide in the many life forms and chemical-electro processes that span the globe; is it any wonder that our small blue-green sphere is thick with life? To consider that only a small portion of the total energy that reaches the planet is reflected back into space or lost through the dark shadow of the other side, think how tremendous is the light absorbed and how this energy is manifested in the many living things. The planet through its multitudes of life, the great wealth of all its living things, greedily drinks in these rays, each life growing and perishing, evolving until one of its species can look up at the sun and sky and question the meaning of its identity. What is the energy that would fill our sky with its golden-blue light and fill the world with life and man and the mind with thoughts and beliefs?

Through the millenniums in man's quest for an understanding of nature, it was natural to turn to belief as a means of understanding what were mysteries to us. To believe, as in magic, is to seek understanding through similarity or allegory or parallels. It is to see through an understanding that is more oblique than rational and direct. To believe is as if one were to see something by looking past it or through it and thus taking in the whole and seeing it in terms of that whole. It is to understand through stresses, for it is to put oneself at risk, suspended between the known and the unknown, or even unknowable. Belief is associated with mystery, to understand with the use of a
new energy, to discover as an act of faith where error will extol its own price in terms of our being. If we are wrong, we may perish. Yet, how exhilarating it is to seek to believe.

When we seek through belief we raise up an instinctive sense of danger, of risk and of failure. This fear is also a vitalizing force, for it lends energy to our need for survival, to dare even with passion and adventure. It is stimulating to dare, to believe, to tempt existence with a bold act of defiance for the unknown in our abandonment of the secure and the known. How bold to place ourselves at the center of our universe and demand to be recognized! Yet, this is the demand of the ego that dares us to believe. This is how we place ourselves at the center of our identity's existence and seek to commune with our greater reality. To do as we believe, we must be willing to be as
we believe; otherwise we are but a shadow of our real selves, unable to truly occupy in space and time that identity that is our reality. To be at once one with the universe, we must risk to believe. Then, with that oblique kind of understanding, we are positioned to see in terms of everything else, to see wholistically. Thus we may liberate a new power of understanding, a new energy of our human belief.

This is the vitality of belief; it energizes because it transcends logic; it urges one to follow this belief until it yields to discovery and relieves that stress that had been built up until that final reward. It is a creative rather than a passive state of mind, though it may be contemplative rather than active. It is also what connects us to some vitality that urges one to go on even when the risk of failure is great, to have faith when all seems hopeless. It is what energizes that other side of the mind, that level of the irrational that seeks to understand on its own terms. When we believe, we become energized.

We easily understand our universe in terms of the three dimensional and thus are ill at ease in seeking to understand it in a multidimensional way, as in evoking belief. However, it will be our attempt here to show how this belief works in our three dimensional reality and to understand it there. Same as we had earlier been able to conceive of human identity in terms of space and time, so we should be able to understand human spirituality in terms of our identity in space and time. How we do will reflect how we are; how we
are will reflect how we are in our spiritual reality, our greater being. With that understanding we will seek to conceive of a universe where the interrelationships of reality are not physical or mathematical or metaphysical, but transcend them to a more spiritual form of energy. We may not yet know how to understand this, but we can begin by seeking through belief as a guide.

"I believe" is an expression of knowledge within the unknown. The statement is made with passion, with force and righteousness, of being as one with fortune and fate. It is in the deeds of heroes, the self-denial of saints, the quest of visionaries. Consciously we can say "I know" or "I am", but it is supra-consciously that we say "I believe". Once said sincerely, unashamedly, courageously, forgivingly, once it is said also intelligently, then we can enter into that domain where we can "know" because we "are" in communion with our greater being. By being at the center of our belief, by acting upon this being and thus placing ourselves at the center of our actions, we are at the
center of that in the universal order that has given the power to believe. In "I believe" is the beginning of our pursuit of our greater being.

If belief is a metaphysical state, as being in the mind is a metaphysical state of being, then what are the mechanics responsible for the energy released by belief? Is this energy in the form of a power of telepathy? Or is in the power of a life-after-death spirituality? Or is this energy akin to the life forces that surround our planet and tied to our universe? When we occupy our identity in terms of space-time, are we at once somehow based within this vast network of transcendental forces? Or is all this vitality best expressed as an energy of
passion and affection and of love? What are the manifestations of a human being calling forth the power of the universe in the mind's expressions of belief and love?

There is a connection here that should be coming into focus: We are in the mind when we are free to be as we believe; but we are in our personality as we believe in terms of our being. The mind believes and the universe places it in terms of its being as this belief reflects the greater reality that defines that mind's personality. The person believes as is in the nature of his or her personality to believe; the personality exists as is in the nature of his or her identity to exist; by being in the mind that identity and personality approximate one another more closely, as is in the nature of an infinity defined by interrelationship. We believe, we act, we are, and thus we become more closely associated with our identity. When this association is correct, that is, when it is correct in terms of the infinity interrelationships
that define it as an identity, then our belief is correct in terms of our personality identity. It is what is right for us, though we may not
know it in our mind; it is what is right in terms of our total being. Consequently, once this freedom of belief is established, as in the
freedom of occupying one's space in time, we more correctly occupy in our minds that belief that is our personality. This is so not because our belief is more correct than before; we may still be in error in thinking without being aware of this error; it is because by being free in our belief, we are in our reality more closely as our being defines our personality. The physical pressure of existence on our personality forces us to believe correctly, when we are free to believe. Then the existence that defines our identity and the mind that is our personality are more closely aligned with one another.

Assuming that this freedom of belief exists, even if this freedom is not recognized socially, even if ridiculed, and instead grasped at through a willed and stubborn refusal of surrender to an accepted disbelief in our belief; let us assume that we are free to be at the center of our existence. What now acts upon our existence is what is more closely associated with what it was that had brought us to that moment. The description that serves us when someone says of us "he has personality" or that our personality is in a certain way, or in the description of our physical traits, or our environmental and personal circumstances; these all describe our life as the pressure of physical existence has produced them in relation to our personal identity. The universe had worked on us from the beginning of creation until now to become as we are and where we are. The infinitesimal influences of interrelationship, ad infinitum, never spared us with a gap that would have disconnected us from our personal identity's development. We had no choice hitherto regarding our existence; it was with the awakening of a conscious mind that choice was first introduced in this existence; we were worked on by reality until the time of
our consciousness and only then came the ability to willfully influence our future. Now that we are human with conscious minds, by choosing, we can alter the course of our future development and evolution. The burden has shifted and, though reality has not relinquished on us its hold, we are now invited as participants. Each one of us individually and personally can now partake in the future development of our species, how we will. However, how we will is a contingency that will become increasingly evident in how and what
we believe.

From the center of our existence, in how we choose, we broadcast our being back into the infinite network of interrelationship in our universe. The more closely we occupy that center of existence as it is described at infinity in terms of our personality, the more closely does our physical existence resemble those characteristics that are our personality. We are, in effect, how we wish to be in terms of our personality. This being in terms of personality broadcasts back into reality our free association within our existence and we become moved and can move more closely in a way related to the being of our personality. We must say "more closely" or "tending to" because
there are no absolutes other than infinite interrelationship. Even there the absolute is broken by the ability of growth. To achieve perfection, at this point of our existence, necessitates that we tend towards or seek to approximate, because that is all the mind is capable of. If it were not so, there would be no need for effort and evolution would be an accomplished fact. Because there is still work to be done both at the personal level as well as at the universal level, we must always in our thinking understand that there is no dogma at
work here other than the right to seek freedom, for all else is relative to the way it is described at infinity. Thus, how we broadcast our existence allows our identity to "know" us in its universal way and, in return, we can then seek to "know" us in terms of how is manifest our being in this greater identity. Our belief is the energy that broadcasts from within our center of existence in our identity; the energy that is released by this belief is what tends to broadcast from our greater identity to our individual existence. The effect is that our being is directed within its existence by the pressure of events and circumstances as we find them in our immediate environment. The pressure
of direction is a physical manifestation of our belief at work in our universal reality. It is the energy that is radiated by our greater being, our greater personality. In effect, it makes us what we are.

This would appear to be a rather roundabout way of saying that we are as we believe, that as our minds believe so are we the persons we are. But such direct simplicity would be deceiving. There is purpose to this exercise: We are what we are only in the relationship that exists between our mind and the physical reality within which it exists. We can say that our mind is actually impotent without its greater reality, for it is against this greater reality that it gains in expression. We cannot exist in a vacuum, we do not have the power to change reality as we wish, and change is always conditional upon whether or not reality accepts any desired action. Whether or not an action is possible is a condition of reality and not of will. Together, therefore, for the possibility of desired change to be realized, as the terms imply, must be accepted by both the mind and by reality.

The same is true for our search of a spiritual reality. We may wish to transcend the physical and experience being that is somehow purer
and more sublime. To withdraw from the world and its corporeal cares and seek spirituality through meditation is an example of being forced to recognize that there exists a separate reality that needs to be negated in order to achieve the desired state of meditation. By negating the physical, only the spiritual becomes of consequence and a greater perfection may be attained. However, that may be an illusion and no more desirable than saying that a person's being is as he or she believes without considering why this is true. The monk in his cell, or the hermit in his cave, may have mastered the ability of negating influences of reality to an acceptable level for the attainment of spirituality, but by doing so he is also negating that which had brought him to the point of desiring to achieve spirituality, the greater
physical-spiritual reality. Thus, to withdraw from physical influences is a negative behavior, since it does not recognize that it was this reality which made the withdrawal desirable, even if not totally possible. It is as if there were a trap along the road of our development; withdrawal from a total reality, both physical and spiritual, may serve to divert us from that which we are trying to achieve; a greater being. To be as we wish to be, we must allow for being as we are. This being is our greater reality which is both physical as well as spiritual. One cannot be without the other, for they are inseparable. To seek a "short cut" from the physical to the spiritual reality is of no avail for then it is as if saying that a person is as he or she believes irrespective of that person's greater reality. To be without the influences of one's greater reality is a totally egotistical being, since the mind is believed to hold in its inner sanctum the key to all existence. If this is true, then therev would be no longer a need for physical reality and existence would be free to negate itself into an ultimate Being. It may be perhaps that because the mind human has not yet achieved that lauded level of attainment that this total negation of being has not yet occurred. On the other hand, it may be that a belief in the ability of the mind to hold such power is in itself egotistical and that the shedding of the ego against such a framework becomes impossible. We cannot negate reality because reality is the definition of what exists. To seek a total ability to negate reality can result only in a negation of our greater reality, which is not the desired state of being. Thus for a belief to believe that it can achieve the object of its belief without the benefit of its physical being may be no more than a spiritual trap, an ego diversion. However, such an exercise can have no harm in it, for the mind that enters it only succeeds to negate itself. Its real benefits must lie in a different area, where meditation can serve as a temporary holding area where the mind can then re-sort itself in terms of its greater reality, as that reality has the time to realign itself with the meditative mind; the two become as one.

Thus: We are in terms of our greater being; our personality is a description of this being in terms of our greater reality; our belief is a description of this personality in terms of our mind. This is the trilogy that makes it possible to be as we consciously wish to be, as we believe. It is from this trilogy that flows the energy of our existence to make us more closely resemble in our personality that which describes for us in universal terms what is our individual, human identity. If our belief is love, then that is what we project. If we believe in compassion and forgiveness, then that is our broadcast into reality. If we believe in helpfulness and charity, in fineness and sincerity, in
truthfulness and rightness, in beauty and music, or in humor and joyfulness; then these are all elements of the mind that swell our lives with their special characteristics of personality. And if it is in their negation that we believe, as we will see later in the text, it is to these negations that we will also succumb. We are as we are because of what we believe in terms of reality. If our belief is life giving, full of joy, then our existence is healthful and joyful. And if it is sacred, seeking to merge the heart and mind with the Soul of the Creator, with
the ultimate greater reality, then such belief is also a power on which hinges our future development and which brings the reality of Creation into our existence. We are how we believe because by believing we are in how is the energy of our greater being. It is that energy that fills the body with life and personality and the mind with love. It is an energy that can experience life after death, or the magic of Earth forces, or the thrill of minds joined as one. In belief is the energy that to a conscious mind may be called the Soul.

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