What Is Faith

What is faith? Thank you.

So what is faith? Is it that there are two compartments in our head—one loves God, you see, and the other hates God? So to go towards the compartment in our head which loves God, is that to live in faith? Is it? Yeah, that's not it. To live in the true mode of knowledge, to live in Atma, to live in God's presence, to operate from there, to let go of the false notions of who we are and to rely only on what our heart tells us to be true—that is faith.

You see, so that is why all the spiritual practice questions, whether you take 'Who am I?' or you take a Zen koan, are meant to take us from head to heart. So what happens in 'Who am I?' You can't solve it here. You can be the highest intellectual, but you can't solve it in your head. And yet people have used that question right from Yajnavalkya's days, you see, in the Upanishads; at that point, they have used the question to find out who they are. You see, so how is it possible? If you cannot solve it in your head or intellect, then how can that question be resolved?

You see, now our idea is that I should just ask 'Who am I?' and then I should naturally go to the right way of knowing and the truth should be revealed to me. Doesn't happen that way because we are used to living in a different planet. All our conditioning, Avidya, is what? All our conditioning has the propensity to pull us into our heads instead of letting us drop into our intuitive place, which is the heart.

Now, among our seven billion brothers and sisters, the heart is an emotional heart or a biological heart. They don't take the heart to be the spiritual center where Atma comes from, where true knowledge comes from, and where true guidance of what is God's will—and how to live in God's will—comes from. So when we say 'heart' in Satsang, we're not talking about the biological heart or the emotional center, you see. We're talking about the heart that Bhagavan told us about; it is at the very core of our spiritual existence.