When I was growing up, a friend once counseled me, “Beware of words that end in ‘-tion.’” We were both studying Latin and loved English. She became a filmmaker, and I a writer and teacher of music and literature.
I have noticed in the word ‘verification’ a problem inherent in the endings that make nouns out of verbs. My mind likes to solidify verbs, to frame them into concepts which are easy to handle, organize, and shelve for future use. But verbs are not like that—they slip and slide. This may preserve their ability not to crack under new circumstances.
Yet I like to think of verifying rather than verification. We must continue to verify, to make our spiritual work fresh, our inner state fresh. We can have faith and trust only in that which we continue to verify.
By looking, listening, becoming aware of our lower self, remembering our eventual death and present luck, we learn to engage higher centers. We learn to participate in a higher cosmos devoid of ‘I’s, a cosmos of Higher School. With prolonged presence, we can deepen and lengthen our relation to that cosmos. And in special moments, the high energy of World 6, of cosmic understanding, can enter. And when this gift comes, we must try not to shrink from it.
Those moments do crystallize into nouns: verifications. Consciousness is not functions.
Faith is the fuel. Like all fuels, it doesn’t stay constant. And like petrol, it gets used up. Like a flame, it wavers as its source diminishes. Sometimes faith needs us to put “another log on the spiritual fire.”
The most voracious consumer of faith is the lower self. When we forget this fact, forget that we have verified the lower self, the many ‘I’s flood in. We stop verifying what we have and what we are, reverting to tangible evidence from lower worlds.
True Knowledge as Faith
Perhaps faith is a product of true knowledge, as Socrates and Plato define it: the recollection of truths the soul knew before birth but forgot upon entering the body. We have this knowledge, but it is still learning to walk, not yet ready to fly over the market-calls and siren voices of the world.
Trust, it turns out, has its origins in a word meaning “reliance on the veracity, integrity, or other virtues or sound principles.” The words ‘trust’ and ‘true’ are related through their common root, which originally meant ‘firm,’ ‘solid,’ or ‘steadfast.’
Verification needs our participation, our efforts to re-vive or re-verify what we know and what we are, within the context of any given moment and situation. Even as the dictionary has it:
Verify—prove to be true; confirm by Reality.
For more on Plato’s definition of true knowledge, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-theaetetus/.
Ruth Atkins is one of the editors of https://fourthwaytoday.org, and a former educator. For another recent article by this author, see https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/ruth-atkins/