What is the value of faith?

[Tenet Nosce]

It is my great joy to share with you this quote from the Aaron/Q'uo Dialogues, which I just happened to be reading earlier today:

The Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, Session 17
23 Mar 93

For reasons I cannot easily explain, the primary lessons of third density are faith and love. What will teach you faith? If you incarnate with full awareness of who you are and what you are doing in this incarnation, with clear seeing of the divinity in yourself and in all beings and the clear experience of God, where is faith to be learned? But that faith is a foundation. Without that faith the later lessons of wisdom may so easily become distorted and move the being into negative polarity. So these muscles of faith must be built by practice.

You know that there are many planes of learning and that this earth experience is a somewhat new experiment insofar as the entire history of the universe. Perhaps the greatest success of this experiment has been the profundity of the way faith is learned, of the experience of faith on this plane. This is a gift, this veil of forgetting. Because of the veil you cannot take your divinity for granted, but must always move deeper into the experience of it, must always work to separate illusion from deeper reality. And yet, no matter how clearly you experience that deeper reality, as human, it still must be taken as a matter of faith. You are not given proof.

One thing that is occurring here is that you are strengthening the will to express your divinity and to be of service to all beings. If there were clear seeing with no veil, you might come into incarnation and say, “Yeah, I’d like to serve. Sure, why not?” But it would not be a strong decision from within the heart, not a deep answering to a call, just following the pattern: “This is what everybody’s doing; I’ll go along with it.” Can you see the difference? Intention is all-important.

We emphasize that you have free will. We emphasize responsibility. In essence, this veil and the matter of faith offer you the opportunity to exercise that free will and responsibility without clearly knowing what you are doing, just trusting that light within you and the way it connects you to all that is. Through each incarnation lived in faith you grow into deeper readiness for that responsibility. You are responsible for what you know. To know, to have deeper wisdom and understanding, carries deeper responsibility. Without the deep support of faith, that responsibility would seem too great a burden.

When you see clearly who and what you are on the astral plane between your human lifetimes and after graduation from this plane, then your decisions to serve, for example, grow out of a strong place only of will. Because you know who you are and are ready for that responsibility in the upper densities, there is no problem. On the earth plane it can easily become distorted so that will twists itself into judgment and self-judgment. Rather than expressing love, one would simply express self-discipline. One would move into a sense, “I came to do this and I’m going to do it, and nothing’s going to stop me!” But you are not here to learn that level of self-determination, not here to use force and judgment as guidance for your choices, but here to learn love as guidance for your choices. To express your energy with love, there must be that sense of connection that grows out of faith.