Spirit tells me that knowing is not a matter of faith
and yet there can be no knowing without faith.
What has faith to do with knowing?
How do we learn?
Through experience.
Yes, but not through experience alone.
We reflect on past experience and use what we have
learned from it as a foundation for future …
Future what?
To guide us in our responses to future challenges.
And if what experience has taught you differs from
what others would claim to be the way to live?
This is developing beyond intellectual concepts.
Yes.
Then please explain.
Knowing is awareness
Awareness of what?
Awareness of what seems to be true, for us if for
no other.
Where does faith come in?
We each, in time, develop faith in our own
knowing, or awareness, of our own truth.
Simple Seeker Society 
A good article, for which many thanks. May I ask of your thoughts on distinguishing between our personally perceived ‘truths’ and what are merely the projections of conformity to our desires? For example, many spiritual seekers ‘become’ what they seek to become; though often this is delusional – ‘I know God’, ‘I am enlightened/spiritually advanced’, and so forth. The emotional investment made in desire, practice, faith and commitment demands a payoff – even if it is delusional. It’s a common thing from what I’ve observed over many years.
With gratitude and respect, Hariod Brawn.
Dear Hariod, You may be tired of my opinions after my seemingly over lengthy replies to your other comments. Why did I miss this one?
Anyway, for what it’s worth, our personally perceived truths can, at best, be what seems to be true, for us, as individuals, based on personal experience that, upon reflection and meditations seems consistent with similar personal experiences. Even then it is necessarily subject to change if subsequent experience seems to refute it. Truth, as an absolute is not possible. It needs to be able to grow into deeper insights, to “infinity and beyond” as a Toy Story character expresses it.
As to becoming what one seeks, I have no personal experience in that regard. I seem to seek an ever moving horizon. What chance have I got of ever making it? None. Of course, for those who seek a non-moving goal, many succeed. Oh, I did become, after mid-life, a university grad, but it was an anti-climax. I didn’t feel any more clever than when I began. I never found the answers I was looking for – such as a psychological explanation of Spirit. He exists in my personal life but, in psych terms I would be considered to be in serious need of therapy. I left Him at the classroom door.
As for “knowing God”, this might require a misunderstanding of what it is to know.
Being enlightened? is something we all are, more or less, and spiritually advanced is also relative to having been less spiritually advanced, which, of course, is a necessary prerequisite to now being more.
There is nothing wrong with expecting some payoff, as you refer to outcome. Why would anyone do anything for nothing. We breathe to live.
We study to learn. Whatever we do is for a purpose, whether we are aware of it, or in denial of it.
Anyway, that’s my take on your questions re my thoughts. And, I may be wrong.