Once a revelation has been encoded as a symbol in a fixed format, belief in its content can become an expectation (or complex of expectations) which we take as a reliable guide into the indefinite future. This is what it means, pragmatically, to be a believer. But if any kind of guidance worked perfectly, the future would turn out exactly as expected, and then there would be no surprises, nothing to learn, and no sense of a reality beyond your imagination. That would be the end of experiencing, which is the crossing or collision between expectation and reality. If experience in that sense did not happen to you, then you would not be conscious of yourself as a believer – or even as a self.