Today, I had a discussion with Aanal about Faith. Faith in my opinion and also according to the scriptures and very succinctly written by Sri Aurobindo is something that is within and which is part of the soul.
This is an inner conviction. Unfortunately, this faith is very poorly understood. What most people have is a firm belief in certain things, a belief that is based on reading or experience or even worse a belief entirely based on a mental projection or fantasy. This belief is something that is a product of the mind and NOT an inner conviction or faith which is something that is inherantlly present in the soul. At other times there is a similar doubt present in the mind which again is another way Maya uses to prevent spiritual progress. In both cases, the belief retards the progress by creating an illusion and masking the inner faith or doubt which also masks the reality of faith and prevents progress.
True faith can be shown in many examples. I will limit myself at present to 2 examples
1) At one time Shankaracharya was at the other side of the river, the side away from all of his disciples. Suddenly he cried out and said something has happened to me, come here quickly. All of the disciples panicked, some looking for boats, others started to swim. However, one disciple just started walking on the water. Subsequently he came to be known has Padmapadacharya because whereever he walked on the water, a lotus (Padma) appeared and prevented him from drowning. This is an example of faith. There was no interjection from his mind of either that this will happen because Gurudev said so, nor was there any doubt. It was just an inner faith! Any activity of the mind either positive or negative mars and covers up true faith.
2) An example of Jesus Christ and Peter is well known where he was walking on water and suddenly his mind began to doubt and he started drowning. That is when Jesus said, “Ye men of little faith”.
3) There are thousands of examples where people have had a strong belief in a certain set of scriptures, books such as the bible, Gita, Koran and in other misguided zealots, but when they have followed it, the results are not there and then they say the scriptures are wrong. Here the problem was they read certain things and based on their reading, they created a strong belief in it or a mental projection of the interpretation, and trusted the mental projection! Anytime there is activity of the mind and one believes ones mental projection, one will not get the same results as true faith.
I end here with a quote from the Bible. Please do not think you have faith perfected till you can move mountains! Here Lord Jesus goes to the extent of saying, even if you have faith as little as a mustard seed, you can move mountains!
So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you,
if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain,
“Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.
Matthew 17:20
Bhavin