Faith

So this sort of aversion to God and Satsang becoming God-centric was very common. I don't know if you saw some of that when you were here last time, but a lot of Satsang members, brothers and sisters, went through this. They would ask, 'Can we just keep God out of it? Can we just say maybe make it Consciousness, or make it more scientific rather than a living being called God?' because that seems a bit scary to the mind or unrelatable to the mind. But if you really look at it, Satsang is spirituality, isn't it? And spirit is what? What is spirit? What would you say?

My dear, faith is that only. You can't say, 'I put my faith on that which I already know,' isn't it? Because then it's not faith; it's just rationality. It's just making sense of what our senses have shown us. Faith is that leap. A leap of faith means that I don't know it, but something feels drawn to this strange man. He talks about God, but I have no experience of God from what I can tell. So that process of following someone, trusting someone in spite of the mind resisting and in spite of all that we've experienced being contrary maybe to what is being shared—that is faith. Once we've seen it, once we've experienced it and we have made sense of it, then faith is not needed; then it is just rational.

So the spiritual journey is a journey of faith, and every time we speak of God or we hear of God, it is an exercise in faith. You see, because never will we be completely free of the doubting mind, which will say, 'What are you talking about? Is He like that?' So how to recognize the difference between a blind belief and faith? That is the crux of it, isn't it? The answer also is not easy because the answer is that what your heart is clearly telling you—to follow that in spite of everything the world may be showing you or the mind may be saying—that is faith.

But I know what the problem is. The problem is that it's like a chicken and egg. I don't know what the heart is telling me, you see, because to go to the heart needs faith. So it's a bit chicken and egg, isn't it? So it's a great gift if you can find someone in the world who, for some strange reason, your heart trusts. It doesn't have to be Ananta; it doesn't have to be... I don't know which teachers you're in touch with. But to find that someone who our mind may not agree with—or in fact will not agree with—but something feels drawn in the heart to visit them or go to them, that is a great gift. There, that trust will deepen faith within yourself because you're kind of stuck, isn't it? Your mind hates it or resists it, but something keeps getting drawn to it; something keeps pulling you back to it.

The way out of the stuckness is to either just leap or to surrender and say, 'Okay, now what is he talking about? Could it be true? Could it be real?' So that at the expense of my rationality, at the expense of my perceptual sense-making, can I follow? That willingness to follow will lead to a beginning of spiritual experience, and that beginning of spiritual experience will lead to the development of faith—the development of the deeper thing. Because what is being said in Satsang is completely contrary to the way of the world. I'm saying that God is a living being, the light of this universe, and to meet Him by His grace has been made possible in the form of the Atma within ourselves. You see? So that spirit is the Atma within ourselves, that Holy Spirit. That is what spirituality is actually about. It is not about, 'Oh, do this and become happy, do this and become more productive,' or how the Bhagavad Gita can make you a better manager at work and all this absurd rubbish which is there in the world. It is about coming to the holy presence of God Himself.