Moving from Trust to Faith

Faith is the reflection of the soul's knowledge by experiences expressing in the mind or heart as faith. The mind relies on its understanding. That is mental trust. Moving from trust to faith is moving beyond mind to the spirit -- it comes when we abandon reliance on the safety and security of our understanding and act on a higher knowledge and will of the spirit in us. Similarly, the body has trust in medicine. The vital in money or people or social tradition and custom or religion. Trust has power, limited to the truth that is behind it. The power of faith is only limited by the purity and intensity with which we embrace it. Different cultures develop different truths of spirit in different measure and they thrive in the measure they rely on and remain true to that truth. The Truth embraced in the West is the truth of the individual which is a profound spiritual truth, but it readily descends into selfish individualism. Faith is a great spiritual endowment of Indian tradition which has descended into blind superstitious allegiance to cultural tradition, social values and religious practices. Each culture rises by bringing out the full spiritual truth of the values on which it is founded. India's greatest discover was of the transcendent oneness -- the unmanifest brahman and the aspiration to realize it in life. Overtime it descended into ascetism rejecting life as falsehood or illusion. Sri Aurobindo came to reunite truths of life and truths of spirit for perfect spiritual manifestation in India and the world.