NVC Evolves

I’m reading Alan Watts’s book “The Wisdom of Insecurity” (1951). The following passage touches the heart of what I wanted to get at in my post “Trust that …”

We must here make a clear distinction belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.

What Watts calls “faith”, one might also call “Trust”, and what he calls “belief”, one might call “trust that …”. In this sense, “Trust” does not depend on someone acting a certain way and so is re-aligned with what we call “needs” in NVC.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 2:03 pm. Tags: Alan Watts, belief, faith, language, needs, NVC consciousness, trust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.