Photo Credit: The Power Path
Faith and trust have similar meanings, and often people will use the
words interchangeably. Faith involves trusting in something you
cannot explicitly prove. Faith is inseparable from trust; it’s the confidence
that God can and will do what He says in His Word. Faith includes both
intellectual assent to something and trust in it. So, we believe something to
be true, and we also place our trust in it—we rely on it. Faith recognises that
a chair is designed to support the person who sits on it, and trust
demonstrates the faith by actually sitting in the chair.
Ordinarily people think
that trust means faith, which is wrong. Trust does not mean faith. Faith is
emotional, sentimental. Faith creates fanatics – Hindus, Muslims, Christians,
Jews. Faith is actually borrowed – borrowed from parents, from the society in
which we are born. We live in faith out of fear or greed, but not out of love.
Trust is always out of love.
Faith is a
conditioning, it is imposed; it is a bondage. The man of faith is a prisoner –
he may or may not know it. He may have been living in a beautiful palace, but
he is imprisoned in it. The prison will be beautifully decorated with religious
books – the Gita, the Bible, the Koran – it may be made out of beautiful doctrines,
philosophies, ideologies, but it is a prison because one has entered into it
not out of choice, but has been forced to enter it.
Since childhood I have
always trusted people, never believing that they would lie to me and innumerable
times I have felt disappointed, but the trust in people never left me. Even
today I continue to trust people with whom I interact – the feeling being that
if I am open with them then there is no reason that they would let me down.
That trust and the faith that whatever is happening is out of a divine will ensured
that my spiritual journey would be completely based on trust and faith.
After meeting Swamiji,
trust and faith have become the rock-solid foundation for spiritual progress. The
spiritual experiences are a testimony to the fact that faith and trust, both in
the divine and in the medium of the divine of the present time are necessary
for inner development.
Faith is not belief; it
is not about believing in a certain theory – faith is believing in life itself.
Faith is not about believing in the Bible, Koran or Gita. Faith is not belief –
faith is a trust, a non-doubting trust. And only those who are faithful, those
who are capable of trust, will be able to know what life is and what death is.
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