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.
