The question of trust and verification is a fundamental, even critical, question in a person’s inner work.

Since spiritual work aspires to reach a world beyond—beyond the senses, beyond the intellect, and beyond emotion—the question naturally arises: How can we verify and trust in a world that our senses, emotions, and intellect can never meet?

The short answer is: we cannot verify or trust the world beyond ourselves—the world of the third state, higher centers, presence.

As a matter of fact, what we can do in the ‘second state’—the unconscious state—is try to verify that we are a ‘machine’ operating automatically, and to not trust any ‘I (thoughts, sensations, or feelings) that do not lead to presence.

If that is so, must a person who works for spiritual development do so without verification and without trust?

The answer is: yes—but.

Beyond Ourselves, Another World

Verification (which may also be called realization) and trust (which, to a great extent, may be called love) belong to the world beyond ourselves.

Both trust and verifications exist within the third state, within the higher centers, and in real time—that is, when we are present. They grow and develop the more we are present, yet they exist only when we ourselves exist—when we are present.

So, what happens when we are not present?

Once again, when we are not present, we have no trust and no verification. But we do have knowledge, ability, and help to return repeatedly to the third state. We can meet higher centers with ever-deepening trust and verifications. This growing trust ensures an increasing availability and presence of higher centers. Eventually, this gives us the capacity to live from them: to live from higher centers a life of continual presence.

Experience shows that there are quite a few people who have worked on their evolution for many years—even decades, then one day they stop working on it. This does not happen because they have lost verification and trust, but because they have lost their work itself. They have surrendered to the lower self, which can never experience verification or trust.

As Gurdjieff said, “Reverse what life thinks.”

It is not the loss of verification and trust that stops one’s spiritual work — it is the loss of the work itself that ends verification and trust.

In conclusion, trust and verification are essential qualities of higher centers. They advance the work on our evolution, yet they do not belong to our ordinary, unconscious world. We must work on ourselves without trust and without verification, in order to attain them—in a higher world.

Nimrod Boros has been a student of the Fourth Way for more than three decades.