“Dogmas — religious, political, scientific — arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‘I know.” [1]

                                               — Eckhart Tolle

Let’s talk about the nature of “belief.”

A belief, at its core is a thought.

A belief is an idea, a concept, or a mental image we hold in our mind.

((and let’s remember that our mind has a lot of irrational thoughts!))

A belief is like a photograph of reality.

Just as you can imagine an apple in your mind, you know the apple in your mind is not an actual apple.

It’s like a photo of an apple: it’s not the real thing, but it’s like the real thing.

If God is like a mighty flowing river; our belief is a photograph of the river.

The photo is never the real thing.

But it can point us to the real thing.

In order to let God be God in God’s Selfhood – we must hold our ideas of God lightly.

Then what is faith?

Faith is having trust in God — The Divine Flow — that in spite of our erroneous beliefs in God, we’ll still be ok in the end.

Faith is knowing that we don’t know, and trusting that the Great Mystery has got are back regardless.

Faith is practicing nonattachment: loosening our grip on our sacred beliefs and embracing the idea that God is larger than any of our ideas of Him, freeing God to carry us beyond whatever limits we place on Her.