What is the value of faith?

[Steppingfeet]

Could it be a poise of consciousness which encompasses (rather than transcends) a variety of levels of consciousness?

My understanding of transcendence is that it necessarily includes that which has been transcended.

For my money (or, "For my energy expenditure"), this gets to the heart of the value of faith. It's that inner knowing that trumps apparent reality and it's the courage to stand up in that knowing that conduces to increase of polarity.

But what distinguishes this inner knowing from psychosis or a simpler form of self-delusion?

Don't have enough personal knowledge of the various forms of psychoses to comment. I do however have an other's thought to offer.

In rereading some of my highlights in Ken Wilber's "Grace and Grit", I came across this conversation between him and his then wife, Treya.

TKW: ...I've often heard it said that the mystical vision could in fact be schizophrenic. How do you respond to that common charge?

KW: I don't think anybody doubts that a few mystics might also manifest some schizophrenic elements, and that some schizophrenics might also evidence mystical insights. But I don't know any authority in the field who believes mystical experiences are basically and primarily schizophrenic hallucinations. I know a fair number of nonauthorities who think so, and it's hard to convince them otherwise in a short space. So let me just say that the spiritual and contemplative practices used by mystics -- such as contemplative prayer or meditation -- can be fairly strong, but they simply are not strong enough to take wholesale numbers of normal, healthy, adult men and women and turn them, in the space of a few years, into floridly hallucinating schizophrenics. Zen Master Hakuin left behind him eighty-three fully transmitted students, who together revitalized and organized Japanese Zen. Eighty-three hallucinating schizophrenics couldn't organize a trip to the toilet, let alone Japanese Zen."