Working Faith
All spiritual traditions recognize the central importance and power of Faith. But to the modern mind, faith appears as the opposite of rationality and an abandonment of the vast knowledge which humanity has acquired through centuries of intellectual inquisitiveness and scientific discovery.
The true role of faith is not to supplant or replace what we know to be true through personal experience and the evidence of our physical senses, but to bring us into contact with that which we have not yet experienced and lies beyond the perception of our physical sense organs. To many people faith appears as a mysterious and suspect thing, based on imagination, superstition or wishful thinking. Actually, faith is an essential faculty by which we all live, regardless of our basic convictions. Without faith, we could not function for a moment. Modern humanity--even the devout atheist--lives primarily by faith in a great many unseen and unproven “truths”. We place varying degrees of faith in computers, doctors and their medicines, government, teachers, the books and newspapers we read, the opinions of experts--environmentalists, engineers, astronomers, meteorologists (not always!), lawyers, nutritionists, etc. And if we examine carefully and objectively the physical evidence of personal experience or direct sense data on which these various faiths are based, we discover that there is very little. We trust the doctor, because we have faith in doctors. We trust the medicine the doctor gives, because the doctor says it will work. Occasionally or frequently we find that our faith in these things was misplaced. The faith required for spiritual experience is a faith in the reality of a higher Consciousness which we have not yet directly experienced, though we may have “sensed” them intuitively. This faith is not blind and empty wishful thinking. It is a premonition of a knowledge and experience awaiting our discovery. How then is faith created? In fact, we do not need to create faith. We only have to shift our faith from where it presently is to a higher level. The criminal has faith in his capacity to prosper by stealing rather than hard work, and he lacks faith in the power of law to stop him. If he exchanges his faith in stealing for faith in his ability to earn an honest living, he rises in consciousness and becomes a new person. Similarly, each of us has faith in a variety of things which we feel are essential to our existence--our capacity to understand, communicate, persuade, please, convince; our skill, efficiency, cleverness, attractiveness, fairness; our education, social position, career achievements, friends, family, contacts, etc. All these endowments may be very real, but they are all necessarily limited. When we shift our faith from our own limited endowments to the infinite creative powers of the Divine Consciousness, we rise in consciousness toward that which we rely on. For instance, we trust in our ability to understand and reason, yet how often life proves that we really did not understand a person or an event and that our faith was misplaced. Recognizing the limitations in human understanding and rationality, we can shift our faith to a higher power of consciousness. This does not mean abandoning rationality--which would be to return to a pre-rational existence--but to no longer insist on it, to remain open to a higher source of truth than that which our minds can provide. Faith is a movement of the soul deep within us, a power of Truth, a direct and spontaneous knowing which is truer than mental knowledge. We should not confuse this true faith with our preferences, wishes and desires. Faith is most effective when it is integral--not only the mind, but the heart and the body should share it--and when we do not expect or insist on a particular result, but rather give up our claims and expectations and maintain our confidence regardless of the apparent outcome. |