What is Faith?
“Faith
is like a bird which feels the light and sings while the dawn is yet dark.”
(Rabindranath Tagore)
Faith
has been defined as: “A belief in something which one does not know so that one
may come to know what one believes in.” Faith
is often misunderstood to be a blind belief which kills one’s initiative, progress,
and growth. True faith is not so; it is a positive quality that revives and
vitalizes one’s endeavors in life. It is a vital factor in all great
undertakings.
Why
is faith necessary for one’s spiritual quest of Truth?
Because
we are on the journey of ‘unknown’. The supreme Reality, ‘known’ to the Person
of Realization, is ‘unknown’ to us. An ‘unknown’ factor can be communicated to
another only in terms of what is ‘known’. In other words, a thing ‘unknown’
cannot be understood if it is described in terms of other unknown factors.
Knowledge has to proceed from the known to the unknown. But the difficulty
experienced by the Masters in communicating the nature of the Reality is that
all the factors known to human beings—whom relate to the terrestrial world—are
not directly helpful to describe or explain this unknown Reality.
Consequently,
their descriptions and explanations, being circumscribed by the student’s own
limited knowledge, cannot define the ultimate Reality for the student. Hence,
they had to make use of the students’ faith to complete the spiritual pursuit
so that they could realize the Truth.
There
is a philosophical saying: “One can walk consciously only a part of the way
towards the goal and then must leap in the dark to one’s success.” Perhaps this
is the origin of the phrase ‘leap of faith’. Faith, therefore, becomes an
inevitable and integral part of one’s spiritual quest for the Truth.
The
strength of faith of a seeker rests on his or her confidence in the Truth of
the repeated unanimous declarations of all realized sages and saints that there
exists for every person’s personal experience a transcendental Reality beyond
the scope and purview of the material equipments. The seeker has also to
believe the Masters’ assurance that every one possesses the capacity to strive
for and reach this Truth. Faith, therefore, may be considered to be a blend of
trust, confidence, and conviction born out of an intellectual quest rather than
an emotional acceptance.
Meditation
must proceed with true faith in the existence of an ultimate Reality. In the
absence of such faith that is reinforced with understanding, there can be
neither sincere application nor an honest seeking of the Truth. However, if the
foundation of faith is strong and firm, meditation takes deeper roots and the
meditator reaps the golden harvest of Self-Realization—which is the culmination
of human evolution and all human endeavors.
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