Faith and Invention Part 2

In part one I discuss the personal benefits of faith in overcoming challenges life throws at you.

Now in this second and final part, let’s extend that perspective to encompass the world.

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Faith is Risky Business

Persons with high levels of personal mastery… cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head or heart, any more than they would choose to work on one leg or see with one eye.

Leaders and inventors don’t only focus on what is commonly accepted. Allergic to conformity, visionaries are strange with their habit of constantly challenging our assumptions. Their resulting insights, though beneficial to society, can be detrimental to those whose empires depend on upholding the status quo.

The very act of innovating means to make what existed before obsolete.

Innovation is only good for business if you’re the one innovating.

History has not been kind to most visionaries. The more resistant to change we are as a culture, the more they suffer at our hand. They lie in silent anguish, their works a well-kept secret. They are burned at the stake, exiled, or condemned to drink poision―a justly punishment for “poisioning the minds of youth.”

People with faith change things, and change is uncomfortable.

Those with faith are regarded as foolish or are met with concern, and why wouldn’t we be? We are standing on ground that doesn’t exist―yet.

Dreamers vs Leaders

Faith is beyond fantasy.

Faith is what allows you to persevere through failure. Without faith, Thomas Edison would have been a person who dreamed and talked about the concept of a lightbulb, maybe even gotten people excited about it, but he never would’ve gone through the trials to make electric light a reality, and we wouldn’t know his name today.

Can you imagine going through a thousand failed experiments without faith?

When a person’s inner faith surpasses their fear of being ridiculed enough to inspire them to take action, they become a leader.

Trying to lead from a place devoid of faith, but full of wishful thinking and blind optimism, is exhausting.

Leadership requries a lot of energy, but it’s not accurate to say that this energy is generated purely from within the leader. This energy is given to the leader from those he is in resonance with.

The True Nature of Inspiration

We are all frequency. You resonate strongly with an action only because there are other people who are matching your giving frequency on the receiving side.

Inspiration is a telepathic call-to-action.

Have you ever followed a content creator, and then saw that they posted something that was so immediately relevant to you at the time, that was the exact guidance you needed for a specific problem? This happens to me and my friends all of the time.

When I follow my inspiration, I resonate more with people. It’s almost like people, consciously are not, are asking for specific things, specific answers or experiences, and that energetic call-to-action then finds the person best able to respond through their work.

Inspiration is an indication of cosmically-supported energy transference.

Faith. Inspiration. Intuition. These are all the same words for the same thing.

vocare (v.) Latin - to answer a call; usually describes life in a religious order but also means to recognize "a voice." This voice is distinct and like no other. It invites you to follow it.

The word vocation literally translates to a calling―something you have been called to do.

You can call this voice a number of things. Your higher self, Spirit, Source, Collective Consciousness, God, the Universe…

Education for Inventors

Unfortunately, it’s rare for people to enter adulthood with their connection to their inner voice intact.

The circumstances that brought me to calling the suicide hotline was a life lived ignoring that voice in my head. To understand how that happened, we need to go back to the invention of the light bulb.

The story of Edison’s brilliant invention is incomplete without talking about what technology his lightbulb made obsolete: the kerosene lamp.

Thanks to this new invention, industrial giant John D. Rockefeller was almost put out of business. With time, his ruthlessness brought him back, stronger than ever, but he never forgot the lesson.

Rockefeller was a strong supporter and philanthropist for public education―but only for his kind of education.

I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.

The purpose of the school system Rockefeller helped build and what we still have today, isn’t to educate, but to homogenize. It isn’t to develop uniqueness, but to get everyone to think the same. What better way to accomplish this than to condition children to conform each other?

School typically is a pleasant experience for children until third grade. Around that time, school stops being fun, and kids start learning to ruthlessly attack any idea―or other kid―that stands out as different.

Classrooms are battlegrounds for young inventors who are condemned to outcasting and remedial classes―too bored to engage, feeling too stupid to do anything meaningful, and labeled a freak.

Growing up at this age was a painful experience for me. I believed I was an introvert, but my social isolation was actually a way for me to protect myself against the ridicule and outcasting that would happen whenever I would express my “strange” ideas.

I find it hard to imagine bullying remaining such a systemic problem without the conforming and comparison machine we call school nurturing such harmful behavior. Bullying is not natural, but it’s just one of many pain inducing things we do when we learn to ignore our inner voice―our collective voice―which are both one in the same.

Is it any wonder why most of the world’s innovators are school dropouts?

Time to Leap

There are things in the world that upset me… Our lack of understanding in mental illness and the negative impact we are having on the planet, for starters.

And I am supposed to accept these powerless narratives, roll over and wait for the end?

I don’t think so.

I have faith in the voice in my head leading me to research into alternative perspectives on “mental illness.” Many people believe that they are victims of genetics and circumstance, that diagnoses are life sentences, and that there is no hope outside of a pill bottle. I reject this.

I also have faith in a future where we live sustainably with our environment. Many wish to ignore the detrimental impact that carrying on with “business as usual” is having on our blue planet, and to pretend that that the problem doesn’t exist. My faith gives me the courage to look, but instead of accepting what I see, I’m free to imagine and invent new futures.

I have made peace with my faith and the risk that expressing it requires. The ground I stand on may not exist yet, but I invite you to join me in building it.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition… What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

No path is better than the one taken on unwavering faith. The gift is not the destination, but the journey. It’s not what comes to be, but what you are becoming.