Trust

Trust is one of the more important themes in a spiritual life. If we can truly trust, really trust in this moment, our tensions melt away and we naturally relax very profoundly. Just meditate on this for a few minutes. Just try this. Trust in this moment and in how time is unfolding right now. Trust that everything is just fine in this moment. God is here in this moment and in each moment. And you are loved. God loves you right now. Trust in this. For this is a beautiful and deeply profound meditation, a deeply profound experience. Just breathe in the inner quietude of the moment and trust. And you will feel a dropping away of heaviness and a melting of tension. You will then notice the heaviness, the walls, and the tensions you normally have, even when they are not noticed. We don’t usually notice these tensions, but they are nonetheless present. Yet when we trust, we can notice them as they melt away. So trust has a very profound effect. But it’s not just affecting the body and energy field; it’s also affecting other levels of our being.

Trust also affects how the world responds to us. Remember that the world responds to our attitudes and actions, just as we have responses to what happens in our world. And if the world responds to us, then we have some power in how that might happen according to how we are in the world. There is much that could be suggested in regards to this law of life, but for now let us just consider the effects of trust.

Also, trust is profoundly important in our relation with the Divine Love and Intelligence. Trust opens up the channel for Divine Love and Intelligence to enter us, to guide us, to transform us, and also to transform how the world unfolds around us. So trust is a significant quality of being, which opens up greater possibilities for the Divine to enter into us and also affects how the world relates to us.

Thus, trust in God, in Allah, or whatever name is given to the greatest and highest Divinity of Love and Wisdom and Merciful Power. The mystical Sufis make this into an actual practice by repeatedly and rhythmically chanting Allah, with a deeply sincere feeling of trust and a complete surrender of oneself into that trust, which is deeply transforming and also opens up the spiritual channel for God to emerge into conscious realization.

Yet trust cannot be the only practice. If one’s whole spiritual path were only about trust, then one might become simply complacent and passive in life and in relation to the world. This is a very subtle and difficult topic to explain, because a complete trust is suggested by the great mystics, saints, and masters, and yet they exhibit other qualities as well, which complement and balance this complete trust. For one, they take responsibility for themselves, their thoughts, emotions and actions. And thus, they are not simply passive in relation to their own energies. They don’t simply say that everything anyone ever thinks or does is divinely inspired. They hold a complete trust in God, yet they have already mastered the often chaotic and compulsive forces of personal mind, emotion and body.

In addition, they are not merely passive in relation to the world. Many people confuse what trust means, so they think it means to be just passive, or to think that everything which happens in the world must be accepted trustingly as good. Trust in the world has to be understood in conjunction with trust in God. Now if we realize that God’s Intelligence and Goodness is unfolding in the world, but this unfoldment is not yet complete; then we can understand that what happens in the world and by other people is seldom completely intelligent, loving and good. Hopefully the world is on a good course towards greater intelligence and goodness, but we cannot merely assume that everything is going in the right direction, since occasional wrong directions are part of its learning process.

Thus, trust does not simply mean to accept that everything happening is perfectly good and right. Rather, we are trusting in the overall process and also trusting that the Divine Wisdom is always present to help us and the world. Also, we are realizing that an attitude of trust opens up the spiritual channel for the Divine Intelligence and Love to enter into our world. Trust opens that channel and possibility, while pessimism and doubt closes it down. Nonetheless though, trust needs to be balanced by discernment (between what is better or worse) and an understanding of the better direction to take.

Trusting people and things of the world is a good attitude in some ways, but it could also be a naïve attitude. Positively, we can practice a more loving and trusting attitude towards others, and because of this attitude the people we meet will respond more positively to us and more likely they will reflect back to us the love and trust we first gave them. This can be called a movement towards trust with others. Yet without some discernment concerning their actions, we could become naïve in our trust. We can practice a movement towards trust with others, but we need to acknowledge that some people might not be ready for our complete trust. For to think that everyone can be completely trusted is rather naïve. In a world full of perfectly loving and spiritual people, this trust would be warranted, but we live in a world with many imperfectly loving people.

There are many sales-people in this world – many more than actually call themselves sales-people. Many are trying to sell us stuff, some of which is good, but some is not. So there are all these sales-people trying to sell us their stuff, their products and their beliefs. And yet so many of these folks are trying to manipulate us. They are trying to make us trust them. Getting people to trust is what makes a good sales-person. But should we trust all sales-people, all advertising, all politicians, all propaganda, or all authorities? The answer is obvious. Nonetheless, we can practice moving towards a greater trust in regards to others, as long as discernment is also present, and as long as we are searching for real truth, rather than just accept whatever we hear as being truth.

Besides understanding what trust means in relation to ourselves and the world, there is also a needed understanding about trust in direct relation with God, or Divinity. The great mystics and masters have explained that trust in the Divine is absolutely essential. And yet, as has already been said, the great teachers have not just been passive. Rather, they have been responsibly active and in service in the world. They take responsibility for themselves, for mastering their bodies and minds, and they use discernment (or good judgment) when making decisions about right action. They don’t merely trust that everything will automatically happen just perfectly, while they remain passive. And they don’t simply avoid making decisions about what to do.

Now in relation with God, trust is complemented and balanced by asking. This asking is partly to make a spiritual connection with the Divine, and partly it is to make more clear what our needs are. We are asking God to help us and guide us. We don’t have to tell God how to help us or how to guide us. This would be like a student telling the teacher what they should teach or how they should teach. It would be like a patient telling the doctor or healer what should be done. So we are not asking or telling Love/Wisdom what to best to do. Yet we are asking for the help, the healing and the guidance. This opens up our connection with the Divine Love/Wisdom, with our compassionate God. So, asking goes along with trusting. And the trusting is not really enough, without also the asking.

IF it was only about trust, then one might make the mistake of trusting that everything happens just perfectly, without any need for people’s spiritual connection and self responsibility. Just trusting, without any asking or without any self responsibility, would probably lead to mere passivity. Or it might lead to a conclusion that every response one makes to anything must be the right response – [in this mode of just trusting]. In other words, we might then fall into an attitude of passivity -- in just trusting that everything is always happening rightly, no matter what anyway. Or, we might fall into an attitude of trusting that everything we do and everything anyone else does, as a response or action, must therefore be just right and good, no matter what that response was.

This reductionist kind of trusting might also lead to a lack of discernment between what is better or worse; since one might be holding a trusting belief that everything is already really good – and therefore any distinction between better or worse is dismissed as mere ‘apparency’. In other words, discernment (or good judgment) is either devalued or dismissed in this misleading meaning of trust – in this false belief that the enlightened spiritual perspective is that whatever happens or has happened must have been good (since it happened). What value does discernment have, if there is no reality of better or worse? And how could there be a ‘better or worse’, if everything is presupposed (or trusted) as perfectly good? This is just as naïve as trusting that all sale-people are selling perfectly good stuff.

Yet if we balance trust with discernment, the view looks different from the ‘its all good’ attitude. For we can trust in a larger process of divine unfoldment, which includes ups and downs, and includes temporary mistakes or wrong turns, and also trust that God can help us in this very moment if we open up the spiritual connection by being receptive to the divine and asking for God’s help. All of this is possible while maintaining discernment between better or worse, right and wrong, justice and injustice. So, trust needs to be balanced with discernment and a mode of asking or prayer – which opens the spiritual connection. Thus, ask and trust.

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