When so many people expend so much energy propagating that you've got to believe-in... something; then you eventually realize that nobody really believes in anything.
For a long time, people could be induced to believe in things by social structuring; then for a while-more belief was created and sustained by inducing people to participate in rituals, study, self-disciplines; and then that phase passed.
For a short period more; it was widely asserted that this inability to believe meant that anyone could believe anything - simply by choosing.
Someone could - by wanting - learn to "believe-in yourself", or believe-in any kind of religion, spirituality, or political ideology...
Someone could (it was said) induce belief by replacing external social structures with a personally-chosen framework....
The implicit theory was something-like this:
First; you chose what to believe...
Then you build your own belief-sustaining system...
Finally you stepped inside and...
Believed - from then-onwards.
Yet that interchangeability of belief also implied that if you could believe any-thing, then you ought to be believe... whatever was currently-approved/imposed by the rulers.
Because if not, if there was no consensus of belief; then "chaos would ensue"; than which anything is better (so most people felt).
Meanwhile - nobody really believed anything: because belief was (for pretty obvious reasons!) self-subverted by its own arbitrary-ness.
If we can "believe anything" then, actually, we cannot believe anything.
And that is where things now stand.
Believe-in doesn't work.
Now, what we need is to-know.
And that means we need to know without having first to believe-in.
And that means we need to know directly, by a single inner act of knowing that does not depend on any intermediaries that must be believed-in...
That is we need to know without believing that words/ concepts/ symbols capture -real-reality, we need to know without having first to believe-in some particular person or institution (or church).
Direct-knowing in this way can be called intuition - and it not only can but must become the ultimate basis for life, because it is the only potentially solid basis: the only basis that is not merely a floating island adrift in the sea of culture.
Direct-knowing is when the island of our expressed belief is merely the tip of a root that extends to the bedrock of reality.
And on that rock...