Our use or not of the word ‘believe’ reveals much about our deepest opinions and concepts of meaning.
I can say that I believe that the awful weather we’re having will shortly change to something more appropriate to the month of May. I can’t say I ‘know’ this to be true, but I’d be willing to defend my opinion.
I can say I know how to ride a bicycle. Doing so has been one of the joys of my life. I couldn’t explain to another what that moment of letting go of the fear that I will crash to the ground, offset by my calmness and forward speed, feels like.
I can simply do it, and know with the fullness of involvement, that I can and will do it. In simple terms, riding a bike has become part of my known truth; it’s gone beyond hope, and even faith, to knowing. I know the experience of it, I no longer need the theory, I can just be it. And yet, to someone looking at a bicycle for the first time, the idea of balancing, let alone travelling, on it would seem impossible.
The Ancient Greek philosophers had a name for this kind of experience, related to the knowing of what started at spiritual knowledge and became something less theoretical: gnosis. Gnosis resulted from a depth of contemplation so purposeful that it propelled the participant beyond the emotion of having faith in something – a belief – and into the actuality of living it and therefore knowing it. Once achieved, the knowledge and presence of the known and lived experience rendered the other levels redundant.
The true state of what is known in this way is holy. That’s the effect it has on us…
The process of initiation was considered central to helping aspirants achieve gnosis. Initiation was designed to involve as many of the senses as possible in order to bring lived reality to the experience in a way that thought, alone, could never do.
Anyone can have the ‘knowing of gnosis’. It involves the living presence of the truth – the actuality – about a situation or state. That presence replaces the ‘idea’ – a thing or thought with which we’ve struggled towards a longed-for goal. Some situations lend themselves to a knowing of actuality, others not so readily.
Death is an interesting example. It would seem we cannot know death until we live it, and then no-one returns to talk about it… We live in an age where me must ‘conquer’ such nightmares, to make us sleep safely. Christ’s comments on this were interesting, He said that to ‘conquer death we had only to die…’
I suspect he was talking about a state where we enter death in a fully-conscious way, seeing it as the culmination of life, rather than its opposite.
When we get to our innermost thoughts and feelings – and opinions on such considerations as life and death, it becomes delicate…
No writer or philosopher wants to trample on the cherished beliefs of friends and companions on life’s shared journey; be they physically known or via the blogsphere. But there are certain approaches we can take to ‘test and mature’ our beliefs.
When we believe something, we are using it to cover up a ‘hole’ in ourselves. That hole is a non-belief, a fear. In the case of death, the fear is that our existence is going to end, that our molecules will dissipate back to nature and be recycled and that ‘we’ – really ‘me’ will cease to have a holistic continuity known to ‘me’.
Since we cannot know that this life subsists after death, we hold a small doubt in our minds about its existence. At the same time, we may fill our lives with small rituals of various kinds that act as an inner call to everything we hold dear, as we beseech this ‘inner state’ of life after death to reveal itself in some tangible way, so that we may age peacefully towards it.
In other words, we acknowledge doubt. And there is nothing healthier than doubt.
As children, we are full of doubt, but we know it as curiosity. Tommy Jones says the moon is made of shining cheese, but I think there’s more to it than that. In fact, I know that there’s more to it than that because I feel the two certainties: the doubt and the opening of alternatives.
Doubt has the magical property of bringing our personal truth into consideration. I might doubt that reincarnation exists as it is popularly described. I can’t prove it either way, but the doubt focusses me, intelligently, on the possible purposes of life and the natural methods of its continuation.
Eventually doubt will lead to the most meaningful questions and these will lead to trust … and a never-ending confidence in your own powers to decide what matters and what is right for you to enter the known.
Equipped with the truly known in ourselves, we will be ready to enter any gate that life – or death – offers. The only valid experience will be ours, and how we ‘see’ it.
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©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a monthly Zoom-based gathering of companions, each one on their own, unique journey to the deeper states of them-selves.
There is no charge to attend these meetings.
Guidance will be provided to each person joining the group in the form of conversation, questions and answers. In this way, understanding and companionship are deepened in a caring and sharing environment.
There is an optional extension of this work in the form of monthly studies into the nature and facets of our personalities, how to examine them and the finding of the keys of spiritual return in each of the jewel’s facets.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry, humour and travel)
Contact: STEVETEMEQ@gmail.com.
Sun in Gemini 
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