In the previous two posts, I went over what it means to live in appointed times. I will briefly review. There are two primary aspects of existence in which human beings function: the scientific and the philosophical. The scientific is planned and purposeful. The philosophical is unplanned and purposeless. The way to experience the most conscious growth is to keep these two modes of existence separated but in a symbiotic relationship with each-other such that, though they never intersect, they are constantly providing revelation and direction to the other. In this post, I want to talk about what faith is and how it plays a role in all of this. However, before I do that, let me clear up one detail. What should be the ratio of scientific time to philosophical time? There is no right answer and I encourage the reader to experiment on their own to see what works best for them. I believe keeping it in the context of a 7-day week works well. I also believe there should be more scientific time than philosophical time, since in order to test the philosophical conclusions, there has to be adequate time to experience them in the scientific appointed times. This leaves three options for the ratio of scientific time to philosophical time in days per week: 6-1, 5-2, and 4-3. Of these, I choose 6-1, meaning six days of the week are put into the scientific appointed time and one day of the week is put into the philosophical appointed time.

Moving on, I want to comment on the last aspect of this paradigm: faith. Faith is defined and expressed in a variety of ways. Some view faith as a blind leap in the dark. Some look at faith as a firm conviction that something is true based on logic and evidence. For my purposes, I will define faith as ‘belief that one’s conscious paradigm will in time produce personal fulfillment, even if at the present moment they are not experiencing it.’ During the scientific modes of time especially, there will be a tendency to get disheartened or weary with activities that seem hard and unrewarding. One must believe that these activities which were decided upon beforehand will bring the highest level of fulfillment if followed and accomplished. This includes things such as healthy eating, exercising, avoiding movies and novels, and studying. Thus, faith is used to guard against two pitfalls. The first pitfall is emotionalism: wanting pleasure and wanting it now. Faith helps as get to the point where we can have conscious pleasure in following our paradigm, even if we don’t have emotional fulfillment yet. The second pitfall is doing things by rote, without even thinking it possible to attain emotional fulfillment. This pitfall is just as bad, because it robs us of experiencing a real measure of joy in the present via faith, and it also is usually detrimental to really 100% applying oneself to something, thus lessening the chances of future satisfaction.

You may need to reread the last few posts a couple times to really start understanding the whole concept of this empowering paradigm about living in appointed times by faith. For me, this has probably been the most important concept that I have ever discovered. One reason of this is because it is solely my paradigm; I did not copy it from anyone else, though certainly various ideas and people played a large role in my formulation of it. In the next post, I will give credence to some of the sources that influenced the construction of this paradigm and also give some background on the circumstances that led me to thinking about this concept.