Does Faith Help Us To Raise Our Consciousness?

Sri Chinmoy: Every day we are assailed by doubt, and every day we are inspired and energised by faith. When we are assailed by doubt, what we notice is our conscious fall. We cannot expand; we doubt our own capacity, even our very existence. When doubt enters into our mind early in the morning, it is impossible for us to come out of our tiny mental room. But when we are inspired and energised by faith, we feel that the whole world belongs to us.

Each human being has both doubt and faith. The moment he uses his doubt-instrument, he feels that everything in his life is circumscribed. His progress comes to a standstill. But when he uses the other instrument, faith, he feels that he is flying up to the highest plane of consciousness and singing the song of the ever-transcending Beyond.

Every day we can bind ourselves or we can free ourselves. We sing the song of bondage consciously or unconsciously by feeding the teeming doubt within us. We fall from the reality-tree again and again when we play with our doubt-friend. But when we dive deep within and bring our heart-illumining and soul-manifesting faith to the fore, we climb up the reality-tree high, higher, highest.

We have to be faithful both in the inner world and in the outer world. When we are faithful to our inner and outer life, we feel that our divinity is blossoming petal by petal. When we go deep within, we see that there is only one person who is constantly and eternally faithful to us, and that is God. From time immemorial He has been faithful to us, faithful to His creation.

If we follow the spiritual life, naturally we will want to go to the Source, which is God. We will want to be as divine and great as the Source. If our ultimate aim is to become divine or to become God Himself, then we have to be faithful to the world that we are living in. We have to attend at every moment to what we say and what we think. When a thought comes to us, if it is a divine thought, then we have to feel that it is a blessing that has entered into us.

This blessing we have to offer to the world around us. If we can faithfully and silently offer this divine thought to the outer world, then we are fulfilling the God inside us.
If we are following the path of spirituality, we have to be one hundred percent faithful to our path. If we have a spiritual Master, we have to be one hundred percent faithful to him. We have to be faithful to our inner life, to the path and to the Master we follow. But a day will come when we will realise that we can be faithful to the inner discipline, the path and the Master only when we are faithful to ourselves.

When we perform any action, we have to feel in this action the life of God. When we are eating, we have to feel that the food is God. If we can see and feel God in everything and feel our constant oneness with God, then automatically we will be faithful to ourselves, and when we are faithful to ourselves, we are bound to get what we are aspiring for.