Faith is defined in various ways. The workable definition I use most often is that of applying yourself 100% to the task at hand even when you don’t “feel” it.

Now, don’t psyche yourself out and try to give more than 100%. This is technically impossible. However, even if you could “do” this, it would really only mean you were deceived or are currently deceiving yourself as to your true ability. Live consciously.

Live in the present and never in the future. Find out what task you should be or want to be engaged in now and give your whole attention to that. This may at times be planning for the future, but even this action is done consciously IN THE PRESENT.

Faith is usually displayed most prominently during the scientific times. This is when you have to believe in yourself and the rationality that went into making a paradigm for you to follow. However, faith is also employed during philosophical appointed times. It can be tempting during slow portions of these to switch back to an accomplishment mindset instead of really living in the moment.

Don’t operate on feelings. View them as the natural outworking of your thoughts, habits, and purposes. A tree does not strain to produce fruit; it “strains” to find sources of water and take in sunlight and the fruit comes automatically. The quality of the fruit it produces is determined by how much nutrients it gets from water, soil, and sunlight. The same is true with our feelings.

So, focus on living based upon your will and not your emotions. This will give you conscious fulfillment even if full emotional fulfillment lags behind. When in time your feelings tag along for the ride, this is just icing on the cake.

Remember that this is not just following a plan; it is giving yourself 100% to that plan. For example, suppose you want to do three things today: clean a room, research a topic, and write a paper. You don’t really feel like doing any of these, but know that you should, so you go ahead and do them anyway. However, the whole time you are engaged in these activities, you are thinking about how pleasurable it will be when you are done, how good dinner will taste, or just random thoughts. This is not faith. You are not believing these tasks can really bring you fulfillment in any sense, now or later.

Instead, admit to yourself that you don’t feel like doing these things. Tell your feelings to sit in the back seat. Put your consciousness at the steering wheel. Smile. Engage your mind on the activity at hand. As Colossians 3:23 states, “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.” Exercise faith!

I must have stumbled into some poison ivy while wearing my invisible shoes. All I know is that my feet have turned into two big itch zones. This is incredibly annoying, but is great practice for living consciously and not following every urge to itch.

I have not been doing very well on controlling impulse itching, so this blog will be my reminder and motivation. I am planning on not itching them any more for the rest of this scientific appointed time (see Living in Appointed Times by Faith).

Here are some lessons I’ve learned along the way:

1. Giving in to an itch feels so good the split-second that you start doing it, but then the itch just gets worse, pulling you to itch again, and the gruesome cycle continues.
2. The sensation to itch will pass if you just ignore it and think upon something else.
3. The feeling of accomplishment after you deny the sensation to itch and the urge goes away is empowering and worth the temporary struggle.

This principle of denying the itch parallels so many other areas in my life, such as the urge to check email, the urge to eat quickly, and the urge to be amused. If finding the power to deny itches in your life is important to you, consider reading this article by one of my blogger heroes, Leo Babauta.

Oftentimes, when I mess up or do something stupid, the hardest person to get forgiveness from is myself. If I have offended someone else, I usually can confess to them and receive release. If I offend the Almighty, I can trust in the promise of I John 1:7 that if I simply focus on living correctly in the present moment, the past is forgiven. However, in both of these circumstances and in those where the only person I let down is myself, there are times where I struggle and struggle to get over my failure. I tend to replay it over and over in my mind and allow my psyche to tell me that I am insignificant, stupid, or clumsy. I have learned to do three things in these situations:

1. Realize that my sense of worth and value comes from living according to my paradigm in this present moment, not one day ago, one hour ago, one minute ago, or even one second ago.
2. Realize that by succumbing to discouragement I am not helping my failure, but only enlarging and worsening it.
3. Choose to forget the past by actively thinking positive thoughts and doing immediately what I should be doing in this present moment (which is not moaning over failure).

As you move into action and leave the paralyzation of failure behind, remember to breathe, have faith in yourself, and enjoy life!

As promised in the last post, I will give some of the background for developing the concept of living in appointed times by faith. For starters, when I was younger, although I did have my fair share of deep thoughts, I never really developed any of them, and so most went to waste. I wasn’t really living for anything, per se. I enjoyed games and reading novels, but of course this was not what I was living for (even if I was passionate about them frequently). I mostly just wanted to be normal, safe, and get as much entertainment as I could while being respectable.

In the Summer of 2008 I attended a Journey to the Heart, which is basically a Christian retreat sponsored by the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). The focus of this journey was on discovering your true self – your heart. While there, I discovered the extreme shallowness of what I called my heart beliefs and convictions; I confessed to a lot of failures in my own life and asked forgiveness of many people I had offended. I returned from this experience a changed person, incredibly more focused on what I wanted to achieve and maintain in my life. I had a new sense of freedom and drive and did not want to lose that to the daily grind of life again. I maintained this new level of consciousness I had achieved fairly consistently over the next few years. However, though I did develop greater awareness, I was still limited by the world in which I had grown up, and the presuppositions that I had never challenged.

Over Thanksgiving break of 2010, I started having symptoms of tendonitis and carpal tunnel. The following summer I underwent massive physical therapy to try and correct the postural compromises I had allowed over the years that had led to the condition in which I found myself. During this time, I was forced to lay off practicing violin and piano almost entirely, something I usually did 6-8 hours every day during summers. This gave me an enormous amount of time to think. I questioned whether I would ever be able to play music again, whether I would have to change my whole career focus, which had been pretty stable up to that point. I had goals of getting a Ph.D. in Violin Performance and teaching violin at the university level. I questioned my purpose in life and started making existential inquiries. I even doubted my assurance of what I viewed as my salvation in the Christ of the Bible. This is something I had done constantly when I was younger, but had not even thought about the last couple of years since attending the Journey to the Heart.

I came out of this experience with a new desire, not just for genuineness but for truth. Old ideas, beliefs, and traditions did not impress me any more. My philosophical roller-coaster ride only increased when I decided in January not to finish my degree that semester, as my condition, though improved in the fall, had gotten worse over the holidays. This decision was made just days prior to when I would have started classes. In April of that year (2012) I underwent carpal tunnel surgery after having a battery of tests. The entire first quarter of that year I again had massive time to think and rehash some of the questions that had plagued me the past summer. I decided to really find and commit myself to a definite purpose so I had something to live for, since the things I had given my heart and time to in the past (my music especially) seemed to be taken away from me. I started to intensely study Scripture, because though I had “believed” in my mind since I was a child that the Bible had all the answers for the problems humans face in life, I had never truly entertained this belief in my heart; it had only been an intellectual exercise.

This desire for meaning and value led me to literally apply every Scriptural commandment, instruction, and even proverb that I could. I had been exposed to the possibility that YHVH’s torah (the commandments found in the first five books of the Bible) was valid for today and dove into keeping that passionately. I stopped eating unclean meat, and then meat in general, started fervently observing weekly and annual sabbath days, starting wearing tzitzit (tassels), bought a shofar, and devoted more and more of my time to studying this portion of Scripture especially. In December of 2012 I graduated with my Bachelor’s of Music in Orchestral Instrument Performance. I employed myself in submitting an application for graduate school, but my heart was not in that at all. I had become infatuated with the Biblical thought that my body was the temple of the Holy Spirit. This lead me on a path to what I believed was total health. I almost overnight went from a semi-regular diet to eating all raw foods, fasting a couple days per week, making fruit and vegetable juices, and eschewing any “unnatural” hair or body products.

In February of 2013, I started what I believed to be the ultimate in physical cleansing – a 40-day water-only fast. One of my brothers and a friend of mine had recently completed such a fast just a month before. I hooked up with someone I knew only through my brother and traveled out to New Mexico for this exciting experiment in body purification. I kept a detailed blog during the entire nearly-six-week period. Some day I hope to summarize and post some of the amazing experiences and discoveries I had during this memorable time, but I will save that for a future post. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for me, I developed a bowel obstruction shortly after breaking the fast, and underwent emergency intestinal surgery to correct the problem. I stayed in the hospital for about a week and then was home for about 2 months recovering from my surgery and utilizing feeding tubes for all my nutrition since I was still unable to pass food through my stomach to my intestines. This was the worst time in my life, and probably will remain so for a long time. I am thankful to be alive and healthy now, except for the scars.

The world I had imagined and built up for myself completely crumbled to the ground during this humiliating time. I tried to find something to hold on to but everything seemed like an illusion. I went through a period of deep depression for several months, but finally emerged with a new, powerful, albeit simple paradigm for my existence. This was developed through 3 key passages of Scripture as well as tidbits of self-help blogs I had begun to read. The first Bible passage was Ecclesiastes 3:1 in The Scriptures which states, “For every matter there is an appointed time, even a time for every pursuit under the heavens.” The next two passages are from the Restored Name King James Version. Exodus 20:8-11 states, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.  (9)  Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:  (10)  But the seventh day is the sabbath of YHVH thy Elohim: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:  (11)  For in six days YHVH made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore YHVH blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Galatians 6:9 states, “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” These passages, some insight from the blog zenhabits.net, and much thought later, I developed my paradigm of ‘Living in Appointed Times by Faith.’

Ever since I began using this paradigm toward the end of Summer 2013, I cannot imagine living without it! It has changed my world significantly for the better and is inherently sustainable.

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.

In the last post I explained the basic concept of living in appointed times. I mentioned that there are two primary modes of existence in which human beings need to function in order to obtain the highest level of consciousness, health, and truth, all of which relate directly to my other paradigm of living for total health and consciousness forever. I explained that while I seek to make the scientific part of my existence as purposeful, focused, and disciplined as possible, I seek to do just the opposite with the philosophical part of my existence. One neat effect I have noticed since adopting this paradigm is that it nearly eliminates the feeling of sorrow at having to leave a pleasurable mode of existence for one that is less so. Near the end of my scientific existence I am eager to dive into the philosophical, and by the end of my philosophical existence, I am eager to get back into the ordered routine of the scientific. Very seldom am I ever enjoying an evening wishing it could just go on forever, but knowing that was impossible. I am always excited about the next appointed time. This paradigm feeds excitement and growth all the time.

When I talk about having a paradigm for everything in the scientific appointed times, I mean just that. Ideally, I would like every action, word, thought, desire, attitude, and decision to be the direct outworking of a preplanned paradigm. Now, is this likely to happen? Probably never 100%, but I want to get as close to that as possible. Some might immediately react and say that that would be incredibly burdensome, binding, slavish, or otherwise robotic. From personal experience, I don’t find it burdensome, binding, or slavish at all; in fact, I find it incredibly liberating and empowering. However, I will agree it is somewhat robotic during the scientific appointed times. I don’t find this in the least objectionable. One of my main reasons for adopting this paradigm is to reap the rewards of functioning in two worlds of existence: the scientific and the philosophical. Actually, these are one in the same. Unfortunately, until I know all truth, living in both simultaneously is not really an option. So the best I can do is to split them into completely different segments of time. However, these different segments feed each-other and allow for never-ending growth. Thus, I would like to make the scientific as predetermined as possible. This is, in a way, robotic. But, who is controlling the robot? My own consciousness. During the next philosophical appointed time, I can tweak the robot’s actions and responses, or completely reprogram him. I am in complete control of this whole process. This is why I say it is extremely liberating and empowering. It is similar to the process of controlling your avatar in a video game. I am trying to get to that point in the scientific appointed times, where I am more or less outside of my body just telling it when to act, how to respond, what to think, and who to engage. This could be viewed as a third-person experience. When I reach the philosophical appointed time, I transition to first person.

I must slightly quantify the philosophical existence. This is not a period of absolutely no restraints. That to me would be a bit dangerous. While I want to stay within the outer limits of my parallel paradigm of living for total health and consciousness forever, I don’t force myself to pursue this actively, and also allow myself to question this paradigm, and change or discard it if I rationally decide that is best. However, I am fairly confident that I will not be overturning my paradigm of living for health and consciousness anytime soon. After all, who in their right mind isn’t living for total health and consciousness forever? Also, during this existence, there sometimes is some scheduled actions. These are kept as few as possible, with as much preparation done before entering the philosophical realm. Let me say that I am not limiting myself from doing anything I desire to do during the philosophical appointed times (except for not negating my parallel purpose statement mentioned above). However, there should be no sense of urgency, accomplishment, or schedule. It should be as spontaneous as possible and inspired only by my true inner self and the eternal yearnings of my soul.

I mentioned in the page about me that I hoped to experience ultimate fulfillment by adopting two parallel purpose statements for my life, namely, living for total health and consciousness forever, and living in appointed times by faith. Although the first of these could use some explaining, especially the word ‘consciousness,’ I will leave that for a future post as I feel it is mostly self-explanatory. In this post, I will unwrap a little bit of the second statement.

What do I mean when I say I want to live in appointed times by faith? First, the word ‘live’ denotes that this is a time paradigm, meaning that this regulates how I manage and view my time. I don’t think many people would disagree that every person, organization, denomination, and religion in existence today has some truth and some error. It might be as much as 99.9% truth and as little as 0.1% error. Or, it might be as little as 0.1% truth and as much as 99.9% error. Once we establish this, it puts everyone on the same plane. Instead of one entity having ‘the truth’ and others not, we all believe some things that are true and some things that are false. And, at least in this life, I believe we always will. Also, we need to be really careful about judging where we think others fall on this continuum between truth and error, because in doing so we are forced to use our vantage point, which is also on the continuum, and thus we might be as wrong or worse as the one we are judging because we lack information and thus truth. It may seem to some by writing this that I am denying absolute truth, but I am doing no such thing. However, though I believe that there are absolute truths as well as ideals, I don’t know fully what they are. And, I might add, neither do you. Now, feel free to argue with me about this, but I would like you to just stop and think for a moment. Do you have all truth? Will you ever have all truth in this life? If you answer these two questions with ‘no,’ then you are agreeing with me that though you may have some educated guesses, you really cannot say for sure what the absolute truths and ideals are, though you believe that there are such things.

What does any of this have to do with living in appointed times by faith? Well, I figure that since I don’t currently have all truth and never will in this life, I want to create a time paradigm that allows for and even expects regular change. I do not want to deceive myself into believing eternal principles that I can not 100% verify are eternal (even if I have some good hunches). So, instead of just living in a relatively changeless state, always following the same principles, focusing on the same things, believing the same statements, I want to live in APPOINTED TIMES. What this means practically is that I want to divide my life up into primarily two distinct modes of existence. One is scientific. The other is philosophical. By scientific, I mean it is regulated, scheduled, goal-oriented, purpose-laden, well-disciplined, focused, established, and definite. During this appointed time, I am following a preset paradigm of how to act, think, respond to others, schedule my day, respond to failure, and achieve results. There is very little wondering if what I am doing is the best thing, what the point of my life is, or whether I should believe something different. I have made a conscious choice to completely follow the paradigm that I set beforehand. However, what do I mean by beforehand? This is where the philosophical part of my existence comes into play. By philosophical, I mean it is unregulated, unscheduled, not concerned with accomplishment, purposeless, unfocused, undisciplined, unestablished, and indefinite. During this appointed time, I am not, by and large, following any preset paradigm, I have no goals I am pursuing, and thus failure doesn’t exist. The one thing you could say I am focused on at least somewhat during this time is rehashing my past scientific paradigm and tweaking or overhauling it for my next appointed time in the scientific existence. Other than that, I simply am.

These two modes of existence happen back-to-back in a never-ending succession, creating constant growth without succumbing to the philosophical condition known as paralysis of analysis, which according to Wikipedia is the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome. Boiling it down, what this means is that I have two modes of existence, or appointed times. In one, I am trying as much as possible to have a complete paradigm in place and simply to follow it in my actions, words, thoughts, and attitudes. In the other, I am not trying to do anything. I am free to explore various subjects or not. I am free to engage in various activities or not. The only thing that you might say I am trying to do, and this definitely would not involve the whole period of time, is that I want to reset the paradigm for my other mode of existence, tweak it if needed, or abandon it altogether if warranted.

This may be a difficult concept to think of philosophically, but most people actually tend to fall into this naturally at least to some degree in their lives. Most people work for five or six days a week and then have a weekend. During the work week, these people have goals to accomplish, a schedule to follow, and people to please. On the weekend, they can kick up their feet and do as they please. However, this usually is not done consciously and so doesn’t really help them too much in the area of consciousness, which I will delve into in a later post. This is because they aren’t really following an all-encompassing paradigm during the week. They are following bits and pieces of different paradigms that many times are incongruent with each-other. Also, on the weekend, they are usually not truly free but often allow themselves to adopt an accomplishment-mindset at least in certain ways that makes it look like they are still following a paradigm during this time; it is simply a different one from the one they were following during the week. In future posts, I will go into more detail on how I flesh this out in my own experience. I also will explain what faith is and why it is important.

Selfishness is viewed in a negative light by most people. Selfishness is usually equated with stinginess, unconcern for others, ruthlessness, and egotism. However, in order to know whether selfishness is really bad we need to define it. According to the World English Dictionary, selfishness is the state of being chiefly concerned with one’s own interest or advantage. Can you honestly say that you are not chiefly concerned with your own interest or advantage? Well, if you say you are then that means you are selfish. Doesn’t sound so bad and evil anymore, does it?

Really, every single person is inherently selfish. This is part of what it means to be human. We are conscious beings and therefore have the ability to make our lives better by innovation and skill. We aren’t just hardwired to live and behave in a certain way (at least I hope you aren’t). This is in large part what distinguishes us from animals.

Why do we associate all these bad qualities then with being selfish? It is because we are only looking at the bad kind of selfishness to draw our perceptions of it. The question is not should we be selfish or not, but rather how should we be selfish? Should we selfishly gorge on junk food because it fulfills a momentary urge or selfishly go for healthy snacks instead that will guarantee us better health and more longevity? Should we selfishly bully other people to make us feel superior, or selfishly give respect to others to forge quality relationships and connections that will bring great opportunities for financial success and emotional well-being? Should we selfishly spend our time watching movies and reading novels, or selfishly spend our time improving our skills and exercising our body so we feel good about ourselves and have more opportunities of advancement in the world?

I am selfish. You are selfish. However, you do have a choice to make. What kind of selfishness will you practice? The kind that will bring you ongoing joy, health, and security, or the kind that will bring you disease, no friendships, and self-loathing? Choose wisely.

I want to make what may seem an audacious claim. Every person that is living today, has lived in the past, or will live in the future is living for the same purpose. Whoa…wait a minute! You mean to tell me that Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Deists, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, and who knows what else are ALL living for the same basic reason? Yep. Actually, this is fairly easy to prove if you just think about it for a minute. What is the Atheist living for? Personal fulfillment. Since they believe there is no afterlife, they do all they can to experience and achieve what they think will bring them the most personal fulfillment in this life. They may do things that seem to be selfless or humanitarian at times, but even these actions if taken to the root motivation will seen to be done out of a desire to experience personal fulfillment. Take giving money to someone in need. That is looking for the fulfillment of others and not yourself, right? Wrong! The reason anyone would give to someone is because that fulfills them, either by making them feel good about performing a perceived or manufactured duty, or avoiding the societal guilt that they might feel if they didn’t help someone in need. The same is true for Christians. Why do Christians believe in a higher power, and why do they believe in the resurrection of Yeshua the Christ, and why do they (or at least some) seek to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling”? Is it just because they happen to for no reason love the Almighty? No, it is because they want a personally fulfilling eternity. They too are living for personal fulfillment, though in their case it extends beyond this life.

Really, everything everyone does is at its root done for personal fulfillment. One may have to dig through a pile of secondary and tertiary reasons, but that is always the root. And we would think very strangely of a person that was not living for their own personal fulfillment. We would probably think they were mentally retarded. After all, who is going to do things they feel will never (either in this life or after this life) give them personal fulfillment in any way? I don’t even know if that is possible. So, the next time you are talking to someone with a different worldview or outlook than your own, realize that both of you are actually seeking and living for the same thing; you are just using different routes to get there.