MenoSundays; Life Lived Lovingly...FAITH

A miniseries of articles which are partly personal history, partly ramble, but wholly geared to prompt more thought...

Last week I jotted down a list of thoughts. It's not that they had just occurred. This is pretty much how I spend my days and have done so virtually since I was aware of being able to formulate thought at all. It was always, though, what might be termed a sideline or hobby. A deep personal interest which was kept pretty much to myself. How might this pondering be termed in a single phrase? Well, it turned out the phrase used frequently was "who are we?"

It was only when finding myself on the path of Advaita Vedanta that I came to understand this phrase needed tweaking.

As soon as that caught my attention, the path was sealed and my 'hobby' became the purpose for what will be the remainder of my life. I am now a philosopher and also, technically, a theologian.

I do lean heavily to the philosophical label, though. Mainly because I have a strong scientific bent and because my mind demands logic.

Not necessarily evidence, you will note. This comes down to experiences in life for which no current science has any answers. Experiences which defy logic. Experiences which, if put into text, read like fantasy (not even the fiction of science). The sorts of experiences which required of me that I look into matters of faith and trust and devotion and philosophy and belief.

Every one requires faith in their lives. Almost without fail these days, though, mention of faith immediately engenders reactions based on an assumption of a religious context, and a lot of folks' toes curl at the thought.

Faith, however, is a necessary part of our functioning. It is, scientifically speaking, 'an assumption of fact before the arrival of the function'. In other words, based on pre-existing proof of a given phenomenon, for example, the sun appearing before us each day and the moon each night, we can safely and reasonably assume that the same thing will continue to happen. This assumption is nothing but faith, prediction based upon an existing pattern and expectation of that pattern being consistent. We place similar faith in our parents or our employer. Without disrupting events, we respond to that faith by, getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, by attending to the needs of our parents and our duty to our employer.

What happens when something comes along to disrupt the pattern upon which that assumption has been made, however? Before eclipses could be explained in a logical and practical manner, they caused lots of hysteria and wild behaviour; if our childhoods have been less than idyllic, our faith in the concept of family becomes damaged; no matter how secure we may feel in our employment, economics can override and result in loss of our income and position. Our faith in the pattern of things becomes scarred with worry, regret, anger and so on.

Having faith gives purpose and meaning to our every activity and when the faith rug gets tugged, if we have not got a full grasp of who we are and our place in the greater picture, that can be very distressing.

Faith is what has kept me here as long as I have been. It could have been a shorter visit. The faith I had, though, was in that underlying, background 'radiation', Universal Love. Somehow, somewhere, it made itself known to me long before my finally arriving at a place where it was fully described and analysed in a scientific and logical manner. My faith in life containing something more than could be seen was rewarded with Vedanta. This meant, in fact, that faith did, in the end, have to have a complexion of religion about it - but that is for me and does not have to be the case for all.

What is important, I feel, is that none should deny 'having faith'. In doing so they are denying having any purpose in life. Without the anchor of purpose, of having a value to trade and input to life, the essence-of-being in the personality (aka the soul) is left adrift. We see this a lot in our society. Lost souls. If those souls are to be brought into safe harbour and re-energised with purpose they need to first - even before faith - find trust.

***🔶🔶🔶***