Awakening Faith

Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Faith is man's greatest property and it is his special wealth. Faith is the main factor behind man's existence. You do not live by bread or money alone. If you live at all, be sure that you live by faith. At times your faith may be hidden or concealed. Sometimes you kill it, sometimes you protect and nurture it, and at other times you rear it up.

Now, do not confuse faith and belief, they are two different things. Belief is a mental substance. Those people who are innocent have faith. Perhaps you have come across some examples of faith in the Bible. Peter could walk on the sea when Jesus told him to, but the moment he doubted, he began to sink. It was all a matter of faith. When his faith is high, he could walk on the water and when his faith began to dwindle he lost that ability. Similarly, many other incidents can be cited from the lives of the great saints. If we could maintain innocent faith without any intellectual pollution, there would be nothing in life that we couldn't do.

If you read the stories of the Christian, Hindu and Muslim saints, you will find that all these great and powerful people were from the humblest strata of society and most were hardly literate. Christ was the son of a carpenter, Parahamsa Ramkrishna was employed in a temple as a pujari drawing fifty rupees a month. Swami Vivekananda lived in poverty and often had to beg for food. What was the special wealth of all these great people? No. It was pure faith. If I have faith, I can move a mountain; I can part of the ocean or make the sea dry. This faith is a spark of divinity which can be found in everybody.

I believe God and faith are two sides of the same coin. The moment you have realization of faith, you have realization of God; the moment you have realization of God, you have realization of faith. This can also be put in a different way. God is formless; God is an experience. God is transcendental existence. You can’t see him with this naked eye or by means of this mind, you can’t even realize him by any mundane sensual tools, but when faith becomes effulgent, God is there.

Just as there is a spark of divinity in everybody, in the same way, there is faith in everyone. But this faith is in an embryonic form; it is in a seed state. It needs to be exploded and developed. If you are thirsty and you stand on the bank of a river and just say. ‘Water, water, water’, you’re not going to quench your thirst. You have to go down to the river and drink the water. Just because we have understood the greatness of faith does not mean we have got it. It has to be exploded, and that is a gradual process which begins with guru and ends with God. Guru is a man, he has a human frame; a saint or sage may have a great soul, but still he has a physical material body. When you want to heighten you faith, you have to develop it around a visible form first. That is why you start with a guru, saint or sage. You cannot suddenly develop your faith at the highest point.

If you want your child to be well educated, what do you do? Do you put him in the university? No, you send him to kindergarten. Then what happens? He automatically progress to the first standard, then the second and third. Then he goes to high school, college and university. In the same way, faith has to be developed in gradual stages starting with the guru and progressing to God. In this way, you finally realize the faith.

Intellect is the greatest enemy of faith. I tell you, it is poison! That is why it is said ”Be childlike”. It is not said, ‘Be childish’. Intellectuals are childish; innocent people are childlike. To be childlike is to have the purity of a baby, the knowledge of a realized man or the vastness of a kind person.

Often people ask me how I work, and although I may not always give them a direct reply, I know that I go by faith. I have faith in myself; I have faith in everybody and I also have faith in the future of humanity. I don’t care if it turns out to be untrue; I don’t want to work out everything intellectually. I have found in the last forty five years or so of my life, that it is futile to try and solve the problems of life and humanity intellectually.

Now, the last word that can be said about faith is this- in the dictionary of faith, there is no such word as impossible. This word ‘impossible’ is not the word of an arrogant person. With full faith and conviction, I say, ‘Nothing is impossible’. You can eliminate your disease, no matter what it is; you can change your nature overnight, no matter how bad it is; and what’s more, you can be anything in life regardless of what you are today. Even if you are a very humble person with limited resources in life, once you realize faith, you realize God. So tell me, what is impossible?