Faith vs Belief

[Whateverist]

GC - your last post put me in mind of a bit of writing by e.e. cummings about a man who sits on a chair on a tightrope and sways.  In the process of looking for that quote I found this other I like even better. I'm pretty certain it comes from his "Six Non-lectures", one of my three favorite books.

http://www.mrbauld.com/ee.html

Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying-

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

I think the "most-people" he finds fault with include true-believers.  Their "birth proof safety-suit" consists of the beliefs they cling to which guarantee they will never be renewed by a new and larger vision.  For them the thought of such a re-birth can only be felt as a loss.  Since they so identify with their beliefs, anything which threatens them entails what they feel to be their death.


But people who embrace the mystery are not snobbish about their existing beliefs.  "We" leave our beliefs at risk and do not identify with them in such a way.  We welcome the rebirth of a better world view or paradigm change.  More light, more inclusion, more understanding .. we just say let it be.  Let what is limiting and mistaken fall away and let my new self move forward.  In death is life, not catastrophe.