The Trinity of Hope, Faith, and Trust and the Shock of Existence

I hope that a lot of people will read this blog.

This hope is a desire for something specific to happen now and in the future. It can keep us going while waiting for the desired result. Hope can also provide comfort and get us through a very bad situation. It can be helpful in these ways.

Enter faith and trust, the other two elements of this trinity.

Faith and trust are essentially the same thing, although there is a small difference. Faith brings a religious and spiritual flavour while trust does not. Faith also has the meaning of a belief in something religious or spiritual and can encompass a deep relationship with God. In addition, faith and trust are nouns, with a noun being a thing, but trust is also a verb, expressing an action.

Faith and trust together with hope are considered to be very important elements of our relationship with the Divine. We have trust that everything is going to be alright and we have faith that God is looking after us and we hope that these things will come true.

But what if they don’t?

What if the unexpected lightning bolt of existence crashes into our lives? What if we get sick, have an accident, someone close or we die, financial and life circumstances deteriorate?

What then?

I know why I am writing this blog. I write it because it touches on the root of my separation from reality, my separation from God. I have memories of that, which I have described in chapter 11 of my book When We Wake Up, Anything Is Possible. It has resulted in trust issues, being able to trust the light of God. My memory is that I was living as one with God in a heaven world and then an unspeakable catastrophe struck and evil emerged. The apparent destruction of this world followed and the taking on of a physical body and the traumatic descending into matter. To me, this is the mother of all traumas, what I call cosmic trauma, and the root of separation after which followed the journey through a disconnected world on the stage of matter.

Hope can keep us going in dire situations. A lifeline to grab hold of for dear life. But we also have many hopes about the things we want. As said before, hope is a desire for certain things to happen. But if what I hope for doesn’t happen, there may be suffering. Because if not a lot of people read this blog, then I may feel disappointed, sad, or angry, and then I may be thinking negative thoughts, such as people don’t like my blog, I am not a good writer, nobody likes me, what am I even doing, I may as well pack it in.

This is the dark side and spiral of hope.

Hope relates to something that is not now manifesting, so it is a separation from reality. It can prevent us from coming to terms with what is now and keep us living in a virtual reality of wishes. We can also hope our lives away. The mind wants certain things and can live in hope to have what it wants, but that is not necessarily going to happen. There can be a conflict between the mind, the conscious, and the body, the subconscious and unconscious, with the conscious saying, I hope many people read my blogs, and the sub and unconscious saying, no, I don’t want people to read my blogs. Conflict between the conscious and sub and unconscious lives in most of us. This is evident when we say that we want something but our actions don’t support what we say we want. This is a clear indicator that something is standing in the way; there is a block.

When the bolt of existence smashes into our lives, what happens with faith and trust?

An important thing to ask ourselves about faith and trust is in what? There is always something that follows these words even when they are not spoken, the elephant in the room perhaps. We may say we trust in God. The question is trust in God that God will do what?

This is where we come to a crucial distinction about faith and trust. When they have desire attached to them, for example, I trust that God will keep me safe, healthy, abundant, happy, etc., then I open myself up to suffering if the desired outcome doesn’t happen. In this example, there is a condition attached to faith and trust, and if the condition is met, then we are fine and good with God.

But if it isn’t . . .

Faith and trust in God are more realistic if they include any possible outcome for us in our lives. If it doesn’t and includes only what I want and what I think is good for me, then that faith and trust are brittle, a feeble crutch of the ego mind. This type of faith and trust will be shattered on the hard edges of life: financial difficulties or ruin, broken marriages and relationships, accidents and natural catastrophes, horrendous diseases and physical problems, war, torture, and a host of psychological issues and suffering. This is the faith and trust that the ego has. It is conditional and therefore prone to suffering.

This is how many people lose their religious or spiritual faith, or trust in the goodness of life. This is where some of us throw the baby out with the bathwater instead of changing our beliefs and views of God to something that is more accurate.

Faith and trust in God that include any horrendous outcome is worth having. And that type of faith and trust harbours an inherent hope. A hope and belief that things will be okay, no matter what. This can be helpful in life and keep us positive as we forge ahead through this challenging realm.

But hope and even faith and trust when they do include all outcomes for us are a separation from the reality of life. These qualities are helpful to have when we live in a separated consciousness, the ego mind, where we suffer and perceive lack. It is actually this separated consciousness that gives rise to the need of hope, faith, and trust. When we live in our pure consciousness - infinite awareness, God, Buddha nature, Christ or unity consciousness, whatever you want to call it - we don’t need this. Hope, faith, and trust are moot points because we are it, we live it, and the separation experienced through the mind doesn’t exist. Questions arise from the ego living in separation. How to be one with God, how to heal, how to stop asking questions. These questions simply don’t make sense from our pure consciousness. Also, the bolt of existence showing up in our lives in whatever way is not so bad because even our death is not relevant.

The distinctions I have made are important because the big obstacle to uniting with God is the mind and all the stories, beliefs, and desires that live there. The contracted ego consciousness likes to stick its head in the sand and deny reality. It likes to build sand castles, but of course those will be destroyed by the ocean washing ashore, just like the ocean of being erases our denials or hiding from reality. Many of us don’t want to entertain these thoughts; they are frightening. And we would have to give up the made-up safety that we are clinging to.

We all have certain beliefs about our world created through our experiences in this and other lives in the cosmos. Our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations are conceived by the mind about the world based on our subjective experiences. Our belief system is not reality but rather a virtual reality based on observation of and reaction to the things that happen to us and the conclusions we draw. It encompasses the interpretations of the meaning of events in our lives and our lives as a whole.

But beliefs can be inaccurate, and they form part of the story we tell about ourselves and our lives.

The beliefs and stories we create extend to our existence and the many questions that come with it. Religions and spiritual paths go hand in hand with stories, but are they accurate? We project our unconsciousness onto life around us and onto faith and spirituality. We project our ideas about God onto God also and engage with a God veiled and infected by our many beliefs. But is what we think of as God accurate?

This is why we may no longer believe in God when catastrophe strikes and what happens doesn’t align with our view of God. To then stop believing is actually an irrational thing to do, instead of adjusting our beliefs to reality. This shows us that the God we believed in indeed doesn’t exist. But it doesn’t mean there is no God. It is just different from our beliefs. It shows how powerful the mind and its thoughts and beliefs are; after all, it is what creates.

I will give an example of this. The ego may create beliefs that life is good, most people are good, and that good will triumph over evil. These are comforting things to believe. But do they reflect reality?

The ego consciousness is a veil that lies over reality and has interpreted the dual work of creation and movement as having the opposite poles of good and evil. This is a false duality that has been imposed on the underlying reality of giving and receiving, of action and rest, the plus and minus poles. So in the world of duality as perceived by the ego, we have good and bad people and people who do good and bad things. In this world, good doesn’t triumph over evil, they just change places. Think of it. Good will at some point triumph over evil, such as peace after WWII, but it can equally be said that evil triumphs over good because harmony and peace are shattered by war. In other words, in our world of duality, good and evil are a dance, with sometimes one leading and then the other.

If we don’t understand this, then an inaccurate perception of our lives and the cosmos will continue to drive wishful thinking and hopes that will only be destroyed by the bolt of existence at some point. And it will keep us running on this hamster wheel going nowhere.

The good and love that will triumph over evil and the bad and the good (of duality) is the divine love of the heart, the pure consciousness that we are at heart. This is the underlying reality that forms the backdrop to or are the arms holding the dualistic play of maya on the stage of matter. It holds the duality of manifest life, the two dancing poles, in its arms of unity. That is what triumphs and also brings us a very different story to tell about our lives.

There are two tiers to these stories. The second tier encompasses all stories that we tell ourselves based on the experience of separation. This gives rise to fascinating tales as well as many tales of woe. First-tier stories live at a very different level, the level of divine creation with which we can cocreate. Here we can cocreate things for the world that transcend any human/ego ideas of what would be a good world or thing or circumstance. Here cosmic stories and new cycles are birthed that are beyond the mind, beyond any human ideas. So the two different types of stories we tell, the tier one and two stories, are stories birthed by our pure consciousness and stories birthed by our consciousness living in separation.

In my journey of cocreation, described in my book, I encounter the tree of life when I am travelling in the Pacific Ocean. She needs to be woken up as she has an important part to play in the creation of new cycles. The tree of life is the ocean of being, the mother of life who births all life, and she creates vast, new cycles. She is beyond the mind and realm where humanity lives and is not affected by what happens with us as we are engulfed by these cycles. This is where the tier-one, new story is created, birthed by the Divine in the cosmic womb. Here, the great cosmic story emerges. This is a vastly different story from the stories we tell about our individual lives.

Change and transformation are very painful and traumatic. To give you an example a little closer to home, think of a baby being born. From the safe, warm womb, squeezed through a narrow, restricting channel to emerge in a large, open, very bright world full of stimulation. No wonder we cry when we are born. Yet, the painful and traumatic transformation wrought upon the divine love spiraling into manifestation is also breathtakingly beautiful and simply awesome when experienced and contemplated from our pure consciousness.

This is our path of initiation and maturing. This feels like ecstatic joy, but I simply have no words to describe the feeling associated with the change and transformation wrought by the Divine upon our world and us. This is how traumas are tools of our growing up and evolving as they force us to revisit our beliefs and come to a greater and more accurate understanding of life, but, more so, come to experiencing reality. This is the way in which we can mature from being a child of God to being a co-creator with God. We can mature to the realization that we are God, but with the understanding that the physical human and its personality are an impermanent and limited manifestation of God in matter. But at the heart of us, literally, we are God; this is the ground of our being that has sent the emanation of us into matter.

We are like the little chick in the safe egg, or baby in the safe womb. In terms of my personal experience, which was the experience of all of us, the innocent in the heaven world. These wombs are shattered because we need to continue on our journey of evolution. The egg must break as does the seed to produce life which begins its great journey through the cosmos. There is always a breaking, as the egg, seed, womb, heaven world must give way for something new to be born and created.

The Greek Myth of Pandora’s box reflects our journey through matter and the discussion of hope. Pandora, meaning the all-giving or all-gifted, was the first human woman created by the gods. She was given a jar in safekeeping and she was not to open it because it contained all the evils of the world. She was given this to compensate for the boon of the fire Prometheus stole from the gods and gave to humanity. She opened the jar anyway, releasing the evils before quickly closing it again. Hope remained in the jar.

I interpret hope in the jar as the possibility of transcending the suffering of the physical realm. The intention of the gods is behind everything that happens in this myth, such as Pandora’s curiosity, which was a gift from one of the gods, the releasing of the evils, and, even though not part of the myth, the possibility of transcending it in the end by opening the jar again to release hope. We fell from our heaven world to this world of matter and suffering for a purpose. There is a way back. I mean, actually, a way forward to something new. Each of us can open the jar again and have access to hope. But not a blind hope without action; that wouldn’t work. But a hope that is action, the action of turning back to the light of our pure consciousness and making the quantum leap into our hearts, instead of continuing to focus on our separation. If we do that, we will discover that we never really left, that the Divine has always been with us, waiting for us to turn our attention to it again.

Where does this leave us at the end of this blog?

With hope, strangely!

But a different kind of hope, a hope that is an action that shows us the way back.

Having said that, hope, faith, and trust with ego conditions attached will be shattered by the lightning bolt of existence, just so we can mature and come to a more accurate understanding of life, and we come to realize who we really are. If they encompass any outcome for our lives, then they are helpful and beautiful to have. But they still come from a separated consciousness, from a disconnected place where there is suffering, which gives rise to the need of hope, faith, and trust. In our pure consciousness, we don’t need this. We are it and live it.

An important distinction if we are working towards embracing our reality and being hope, faith, and trust.