Faith and Believing
by Rev. Marcy Ellen
Faith is something we all have. We always have faith in some things at all times. Having faith in something is the act of believing in something so strongly that we don’t even consider it could be any other way. For example we have faith every time we take a breath that there will be oxygen in the atmosphere to fill our lungs. We have faith that when we eat our food our body will properly deliver all of the nutrients needed for our survival. We have faith that when we take medication prescribed by our doctor that our illnesses will be cured. But what happens when we stop believing in certain things or when we start believing in negative and unfavorable realities?
The mind is very powerful and what we believe can have physical effects on the body. The fundamental cause for the nocebo phenomenon (the powerful negative effect of an adverse diagnosis or the opposite of the placebo effect) is belief. There are several well-documented cases from the patients of Clifton K. Meador, a doctor at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. One in particular was a patient named Sam Shoeman who underwent surgery for cancer of the esophagus. After the surgery Shoeman received unpromising news that his liver scan was abnormal, suggesting there were cancerous growths in the entire left lobe of his liver. His doctors at the time told him that he had only a few months left to live. A few months later he did in fact die but the peculiar thing about this case is that the patient didn’t really have terminal cancer. The liver scan was incorrect and an autopsy revealed only a single 2-centimeter nodule of cancer tissue that couldn’t have possibly killed him. He died because he believed he was supposed to die.
There is a universal power and an unlimited creative potential within all of us that we have just barely begun to explore. The key to accessing that power and potential is faith. When we settle into a lifestyle of faith what we expect to come to us naturally comes to us. We manifest the things we expect and believe are already in existence. Life proceeds as normal when we have absolutely zero doubt that it could be any other way. If we truly expect to be taken care of financially and have zero doubt that it could be any other way, then we will be taken care of financially. If we fear every day that we will not have enough money, then through the Law of Attraction we will attract more of that lack that we fear into our lives. In reality we already have everything that we need.
Spirit can never be lacking so when our minds create worrisome stories about lack we must remember that they are only fictional tales. Remember that what we see with our eyes is not a reality but a perceived reality. Unfortunately we don’t have an exact visual depiction of our reality because our eyes and our minds are narrating a different story. Our brains are always adding and subtracting things from our perception which create major limitations in how we view our world. It filters things out that we don’t need to see and it fills in imagery that is absent from our blind spots. There is a reality that exists that we cannot see with our eyes, and what we think is reality isn’t even the correct or whole reality. When we reconnect to the whole of the universe through meditation, we regain our understanding of what is real. What is real is that we are whole and lack nothing.
There is an old story about Christopher Columbus and his ships that said when they were coming ashore the Native Americans could not see the ships as they were approaching. They could not see the ships because their brains could not process the image of a ship as they had never contemplated a ship as a reality. While we don’t have documented evidence of this, there are plenty of experiments that show how our brains do not perceive things that are not brought to our attention beforehand.
The most famous of these experiments was one performed by Harvard professors Daniel Simmons and Christopher Chabris in the late 1990’s. In the experiment viewers were shown twelve basketball players. Six players were wearing white and six players were wearing black. During the experiment, they asked the viewers to count how many times the team in white passed the ball. In the middle of the video experiment a woman in a gorilla suit walked in, pounded her chest, and then walked off. After the experiment was over, they found that only half the viewers had actually seen the woman in the gorilla suit. When they showed the video again after telling the viewers to watch for the woman in the gorilla suit, of course then every viewer saw the gorilla. The viewers who didn’t see the gorilla the first time were stunned because it seemed so obvious the second time. That experiment was later updated and in fact it aired on various TV shows. The professors labeled that phenomenon “inattentional blindness”.
Whenever we have a belief in something and we make that belief a virtual truth in our minds, then that belief can in fact become a reality for us. Whatever we want our physical life to look like we must first contemplate it as a possible reality. Then through faith and believing we can attract this contemplated reality into our lives. Dr. Wayne Dyer says “You’ll see it when you believe it”, but our cultural conditioning has us saying just the opposite, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Therein lies the problem. We believe that our external environment is the cause and our internal environment is the effect when in fact the reverse is true. Our external world is a reflection of our internal world. Change the inside and the outside is sure to follow.
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About the Author
Rev. Marcy Ellen is the author of The Soul Truth; Reflections for the Waking Soul, a life coach for Sigma Your Life, and the Media Director for Simple Love Advice. She is a spiritual teacher, writer, speaker, and a radio host with a Master of Divinity Degree from The University of Metaphysical Sciences. www.sigmayourlife.com
