Trusting the Moment

And I have been thinking lately about how one's trust can be built up.

It's like we have this reservoir of trust built up inside our minds. Each time we trust that there is some force in the universe which brings us exactly what we need to learn, and that trust is confirmed in our life experience, our reservoir of trust goes up slightly. And if we are disappointed or betrayed by our life's experience, and we lose trust in the future, then our reservoir goes down.

Emmanuel Swedenborg taught that every past experience is stored up inside us. His term for these stored states of mind was "remains." And he correctly pointed out that each of us has a tremendous stock of positive experiences stored up from when we were infants. He said that all the states of love and innocence and joy that an infant experiences are safely hidden inside the mind.

Think about this for a moment. If you have ever raised children, or been around infants, think about all the time they spend laughing and playing and loving life. Even in war zones, soldiers are often amazed to see that the children are still playing and laughing and having fun.

Now, granted that all experiences from infancy and childhood are not wonderful. There are also states of fear and mistrust and sorrow and pain. And these get stored up, too.

But just focus for a moment on how many hours a person spends in the joy of infancy and childhood while growing up. That's a lot of time! It is hours and hours and days and days and months and months of time. If you put it all together, it would be years of joy!

And according to Swedenborg, this is what enables each of us to have faith today, all those stored-up states of feeling good. Not just those states of joyousness from infancy, but also all those times in our adult life when we are deeply satisfied, or deeply intimate, or proud, or laughing 'til it hurts, or grateful, or caring about others, or giving of ourselves from pure love towards another. And if we take a moment to be grateful for these experiences, then we get the benefit of their positive power twice in our lives.

It's as if heaven gets stored up inside us, and then we can use that to believe in more heaven-to-come.

This is, I think, one universal fundamental of living a spiritual life: to trust in the moment. To have faith in each new thing.

When entering into any new activity, we can believe that it will contain a spiritual teaching that will be gratifying on some level.

When entering into a crisis of some kind, we can believe that it will transform us in a good way, into a more powerful and loving person.

When finding ourselves in pain or trouble, we can believe that there is some goodness somewhere that will bring us something that redeems the experience by providing learning or better boundaries or more clarity, to help us enjoy greater fulfillment in the future.

And if we believe, then the good thing is more likely to happen, I think.