=kit040.txt

KIT 40 - Faith and Belief

In the last Keeping in Touch, you explored being tested in your
life in your faith. Do not confuse faith with belief. Belief rests
upon some kind of proof: I believe in this or that. But faith is
like doing away with crutches. It is intuition, that inborn,
inherent mode of cognizance prior to experience, which
philosophers call "proto-critic." What I want you to do is try to
remember whether your faith flounders facing trauma. I must have
triggered off a lot of thoughts in your mind. Try to remember
these because I'm giving the guidelines of what you can do with
those thoughts. Open your heart to another person and tell each
other some of those things that you hardly ever talk about to
other people. Somehow there is a moment when one feels like
opening one's heart.

You might try to recall the following elements: first of all, the
event must have had some relevance to your sense of values. For
example, I remember when my sister Noor and I had to decide
whether we were going to be non-resistant or whether we were going
to participate in the war. It was a question of values. We had
been brought up in the Ghandian idea of non-violence. I suggested
that if the Nazis had a lot of people at gunpoint. and you
couldn't save those people without killing the Nazis, if you don't
kill the Nazis, you are responsible for the death of those people.
I don't know what the validity of that argument is. You could
discuss that but this is a clear case where a situation is
challenging your sense of values.

The second element is your motivations. You started off with a
kind of plan of what you would do in your life. A child says,
"When I'm grown up, I'll do this and that." You might have had to
revise your plans, not because you were forced to, but because
something clicked in you, all of a sudden you discovered the
purpose which you hadn't seen before. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
says, "The purpose of life is like the horizon; the further we
advance; the further it recedes." I thought this was my purpose
and now that event has totally shattered the idea I had about my
purpose.

Illustrative is the story of a man known as the Lion of India, who
was fighting the British to free India. He was walking the streets
and there was a leper who asked him to take him to the water. He
didn't have the courage to do that because he was afraid of
catching leprosy. Then, as he was walking along the way, he felt
terrible about it and though, "I, the Lion of India, don't have
the courage to hold my fellow man in my arms and take him to the
rescue of the water." He walked right back and did it. Then he
decided overnight that he was going to leave everything and build
a leper colony. What he did was marvelous for those thousands of
lepers. Now that's an example of a situation that might affect
your programming. So try to remember those circumstances that
changed your motivation.

The third element is - how do your feel? Did the situation trigger
off anger? did it trigger off hatred? did it trigger off
resentment? did it even trigger off guilt? because one can feel
guilty for having allowed themselves to be victimized by someone.
Guilt is not a very rational thing. So how do you feel? Do your
remember how you felt prior to the event?  And how did you feel
when the event took place? If you're very perceptive, you'll find
that there are certain emotions that draw one's soul downwards and
have a kind of delaying effect. Somehow, one gets tarnished by the
emotion. There are other emotions that make one rise; for example,
an act of heroism will make one high. So, how do you meet that
problem? Did it trigger off a sense of wanting to battle this
knight against injustice?

That brings us to the fourth element: the dichotomy between the
fight and flight reflex. We find that animals measure whether they
can cope with an attack or whether digression is the best part of
valor. That would be flight. If you decide on confrontation, it
makes you strong; if you decide on not dealing with the subject,
it makes you weak. So remember the event and remember how you
reacted. Perhaps your instinct told you not to attempt anything
beyond what you thought was your power and then, later on you
regretted it and decided that if this should ever happen again,
you would confront the problem instead of running away. The
question is, did you at sometime in your life make a vow, a pledge
of I will? It involves you in your honor. That gives you power;
try to remember that. When you had that moment of euphoria, you
suddenly realized that you were tested to the ultimate springheads
of your being. The whole unfoldment of your being depends upon how
you are going to deal with this challenge. If you goofed, well,
okay, you are given another chance.

In the meantime, one does tend to deteriorate if one doesn't deal
with the chances very positively. One sees people start life so
beautifully and then gradually, they deteriorate in time. Then
there are those who become more beautiful as life goes on. There
are those who have lost the battle of life because they've been
discouraged and disenchanted and haven't known how to hold the
"rope of hope", which Murshid calls it, that nothing can take away
one's sense of meaningfulness and the splendor behind everything.
The photons in a beer can are as beautiful as the photons that are
reflected in a snowflake. When we can see beauty in people whom we
dislike or who make it difficult to love them, it's a triumph of
faith over judgement.

Looking at how you were transformed or let's say, affected by the
trauma of the environment is only half of the task. The other half
consists in seeing how a change in you changes the environment or
circumstances. If we only work with the first half, then we look
upon ourselves as the victims of fate. If you look upon the task
from the second point of view, then you become competent in your
ability to transform your fate. At first, it's not very clear
because if we use our reason, it's difficult to see that we
transform the circumstances. Do you mean to say that I called this
accident upon myself? No, this accident was purely fortuitous.
That's the way we think.

Remember the words of Jung, the Psychoanalyst, who said, "If you
don't confront your shadow, it will come to you in the form of
your fate." Those are very important words because you can't see
the causal connection. Jung was talking abut a totally different
connection, synchronicity, rather than the very commonplace causal
relationship that represents the lower functions of our thinking.
From the moment that you can recall a situation in which your
being had an impact on the circumstances, instead of you being
victimized by the circumstances, from that time on, you will gain
confidence in your ability to govern your fate. That's why for the
moment, we're looking back and trying to recall a situation in
which it is very clear to see how your decision affected the
circumstances.

If you try to figure it out with your mind, you're lost; there's
no point; you're wasting your time. You have to keep your
consciousness very high, being always conscious of your eternal
being. Then see how your eternal being has had to deal with all
that you had inherited through your ancestors, and the
circumstances of your draw of life and how gradually, you lost
contact with your real being and things went wrong. Now you have
reintegrated your real being again; you're looking at things and
beginning to see things clearly. One has to keep on working at it.
Consider yourself as an instrument that you have to keep tuning
all the time. It gets out of tune very easily.
    
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