Faith

There are people who mock at faith. They say that those who have faith are those who have failed in life. They say that we have faith in God just because we have been frustrated or have failed in our career. But faith is the one eye, the one real eye, that is shared by both God and man. Man sees God with the eye of faith, and God sees man with the same eye of faith. Man is not aware of the fact that he sees God with the eye of faith, but God not only sees with the eye of faith but at the same time is conscious of what He is doing.

Our faith in God is very often conditional; but God's faith in us is always unconditional. We start our spiritual journey with fifty percent faith, saying, "God, I shall give You this; then You can give me that. I shall give You my aspiration; then You will give me Your blessings and so forth. " There is a fixed hour when God will kindle our consciousness whether we have faith in Him or not. He waits for the choice hour, and when the hour strikes, He comes and gives us what He wants to give. But that doesn't mean that we shall not aspire, that we shall live in the world of sleep and not make any personal effort. No! We shall go on like a true farmer and cultivate the soil with sincere dedication and regularity, and after we do our part, we will leave it up to God to decide when He wants to give us the bumper crop of realisation.

Faith is the eye that sees the future in the immediacy of the present. If we have faith in the spiritual life, we do not stumble, we do not walk, we do not march. No! We simply run the fastest. If we have implicit faith in God, if we have implicit faith in the Inner Pilot and in our own aspiration, then we constantly run the fastest towards our destined goal.

Once faith is lost, it is almost impossible to get it back. Once we lose faith in a spiritual teacher, in an ordinary human being or even in an idea, we will have to suffer for a long, long time before we get it back. If we lose faith in somebody else, we may get it back with great difficulty after a few months or a few years. But if we really lose faith in ourselves, then we have lost everything. We are worse than a street beggar. If we have faith in ourselves, then we can ultimately become divine. But if we don't have faith even in ourselves, our case is really helpless. It is useless to have faith in God, whom most of us think is in Heaven, if we don't have faith in ourselves on earth.

We have to have faith that we can realise God, either in this incarnation or in some future incarnation. We have to have faith that we can be the possessor of infinite Light, Peace and Bliss. We have to have faith in our aspiration, in our concentration, in our meditation and contemplation. Then only will our goal of God-realisation and the divinisation of human nature and earth-consciousness become ours.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Life-tree leaves, Agni Press, 1974
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/ltl