Types of belief or rather stages in believing

This is very sufi stuff , this is by Hazrat Inayat Khan My comments will be the ones in colored text

The first belief is the mass-belief. If someone says, ‘There is a God,’ then everyone repeats after him, 'Yes, there is a God.'
One might think that today, at this stage of civilization, people are too advanced to have mass-beliefs, but that would be a great mistake. People are the same today as they were a thousand years ago, perhaps worse if it comes to spiritual questions. Someone who is called 'the man of the day' in a nation, is for the time being supported by the whole nation.
Thousands and millions lift him up, hold him high. But for how long? Until some still more powerful person says, 'No, it is not so.' Then the whole country lets him down.

I find that this mass belief is reinforced by the media. When I was in the US a few years ago , my sufi friends were discussing about how sad they were that Israel was again under attack by the wicked Palestinian terrorists. I could only open my mouth wide in amazement that they thought that was how things were!!!..now that is mass belief..we believe what we see and hear but it may not be the truth.
Just before the war I was visiting Russia. In every shop one saw a picture of the Czar and Czarina, held in high esteem. It was a sacred thing for people. There was a religious ideal attached to the emperor, as he was the Head of the Church. And they used to be filled with joy when they saw the Czar and Czarina passing in the street. It was a religious upliftment for
them. But not long afterwards they themselves had processions in the streets when at each step they broke the czarist emblems. It did not take them one moment to change their belief. Why? Because it was a mass-belief.

Yep ,. it takes but a very short while to make people change their minds when it is a mass belief.

It is a very powerful belief. It changes nations. It throws them down and raises them up. It brings war. But what is it after all? A mad belief. And yet no one will admit it. If you ask an individual, he says, ‘I am not one of them.’ Yet at the same time all move together when an impulse comes for good or bad.

Scot Peck talks about this in his book The people of the Lie.Whole villages can move to kill and hate when there is a mass sense of something or the other. Everybody is swept by the energy of the emotion that engulfs everyone. Takes a lot of spiritual strength to move against this energy.

Then there is a second step towards belief and that is belief in an authority, as with people at the time of a dictatorship.They believe in a leader. They say, ‘I will not believe in the ordinary man, in my neighbor, in my colleague. I believe in that man whom I trust.’ This belief is one step higher, because it is a belief in somebody in whom one has trust. When a person says, ‘I am a Christian,’ it means a belief in Jesus Christ and his teaching. It is a belief in someone, not in an abstraction.
Yes people have to believe in something, when they do not believe in something they get sick emotionally
One might think that people do not believe in authority today, but this is not so. For instance everyone accepts a discovery made by a scientist before having made investigations about it. Investigations come afterwards. When somebody comes forward and says he has discovered something, everyone accepts it. Perhaps another scientist will produce something else
one may believe, but the one who says a thing with authority is believed by the multitude.
Oh yes yes yes! Even when the belief is not true, like believing the world is flat. Who was it who got jailed for saying the earth is round?
Then there is a third stage of belief a further stage, and this belief makes man still greater. It is the belief of reason, and it means that one does not believe in any authority, nor in what everybody else believes, but that one has reasoned it out.
That one sees reason in it. This belief is stronger still; for of the beliefs I have explained before one cannot give proof, but in this case one can stand up and say, ‘Yes, I have reasoned it out.’
This, however, also has its limitation. Since reason is the slave of the mind, reason is as changeable as the weather. Reason obeys our impressions. If we have an impulse to insult a person, or to fight with him, we can produce many reasons for it. It may be that afterwards there will be contrary reasons. But at the time, while we have this impulse, right or wrong, there is always a reason which supports it. Have the criminals put in jail committed crimes without a reason? No, they have a reason too. It does not fit in with the law perhaps, it does not satisfy society, but if we ask them, they have a reason. The reason we have today we may perhaps change next week, but nevertheless this third belief makes us stand on our own
feet, for that moment if not always. And it gives us a greater power to defend our belief
I have nothing to add to this I should think. The mind has its limitations .Muslims are taught to believe in the unseen.Iman bil ghaib, things that the mind cannot understand or reason out. A lot of the spiritual stuff falls under this category. It was a huge test of faith when the prophet told of his night journey Israq Mi'raj.Ok so I know Muslims take it for granted now like they do what is in the Quran, it is a matter of faith but supposing , just supposing you lived in the times of the Prophet Muhammad and he had just told about the night journey , how many would accept it because reason says it cannot have happened?

And then again there is a fourth belief. That belief is a belief of conviction, which stands above reason. There is a sense of conviction in man, which is not discovered for some time in life. But there comes a time when it is discovered. And that is a blessed day. Then there arises an idea, an idea which no reason can break, a feeling which is not a passing feeling but is a
conviction. However high the idea may be, one seems to be an eyewitness of that idea. One is as strong, as confident, as a person who has seen with his own eyes. One can be convinced of ideas so subtle that they cannot even be expressed in words, and one is more convinced of them than if one had seen them with one's own eyes. It is this belief which is called by the Sufis and Persian mystics Iman, which means conviction.

There is the eye of conviction that just knows...Aynul yaqin....I think this one comes only by prayers meditation and our spiritual practices or simply by God's grace.