Trust and Faith
See these statements now: I have faith in the fan in my room that it will give us cool breeze. I have faith in my pen that it will write letters on a paper. Are these statements true? Some say they are. Others say they are not because however strong your faith may be in your fan and your pen and whatever prayers you offer them, the pen won't work when the ink in it is finished and the fan will stop if the power supply is disrupted. This cause and effect relationship is already established. Therefore, it is a matter of trust and not faith. Similarly the assertions such as - two multiplied by two is four; polio can be prevented by proper vaccination; zero was invented in India; Shivaji was a great king are all a matter of trust. If you observe the biographies of other contemporary kings, we notice that no other king can match the virtues and abilities of Shivaji. That is why I trust he is great.
I now give you a contrary example of distrust. It is a true story. A woman with three children lived in a village, while her husband worked in Mumbai. Someone prejudiced him about his wife's character. He was furious. He returned to the village and confronted his wife. "If you have a spotless character", he insisted, "then prove it by putting your hand in the pot of boiling oil in the temple and taking out the coin at the bottom of it. If your hands remain unscathed and your fidelity is proved I will accept you as my wife”. The poor woman was aghast and did not know what to do. Her brother, who knew that ANS workers know and perform this trick, approached us. We taught him the trick and the sister performed the miracle in front of the whole village and saved her marriage.
The point here is not that of the fidelity or infidelity of the woman and whether boiling oil will burn her hands or not when put in it. The point is whether there is any relationship between these tow occurrences. Of course there is no relation whatsoever. So a notion as silly as this without any basis of cause and effect relation is superstition. However one must keep in mind that every time it is not possible to arrive at such an indubitable conclusion as above. Yet we cannot afford to wait every time, till it strikes us and have to carry on our work, despite the uncertainty. When faced with uncertainty, most people turn to faith for support. So when one believes in the existence of a thing in spite of no evidence to prove it, and continues to perform activities pertaining to it, it is a matter of faith for him.
Faith in one's Physician
Throughout their daily affairs, people are aware of what they do. They even examine their faiths. We often say that we have faith in our physician. It means that whenever anybody falls sick in the house, you take him to your family physician. The medicine he gives cures the patient. As this happens frequently, we develop faith in the physician. However, some time later, he fails to cure a sick child and the child had to be taken to a child specialist; a couple of months later, another patient of your family, after a week's treatment by the same physician had to be removed to hospital as the illness aggravated; now if any of your family member's illness aggravates under this doctor's treatment will you still continue with this family doctor? No, you will not. Now whatever has happened to your faith in this physician of yours? You bank on your experience of the last several months and conclude that your physician is not effective now as he used to be earlier and you approach another doctor. However the important things that have happened during this period are: You examined your faith in your physician's proficiency and concluded that it would not be proper to take any more patients to him. If despite your experience of repeated failures on his part, you keep approaching him, what would it mean? Faith? Superstition? The important conclusion, one can draw from this situation is: any existing situation that prevails even after being questioned on the basis of knowledge and/or experience, can be called trust or faith. If it ceases to be, after being questioned by knowledge and experience, it is superstition. The situation here is that your child is sick. Your experience is that earlier your physician was able to cure the child. The knowledge is that the doctor recently had stopped to be effective. Now you come to the conclusion that it is high time that you change your physician. Here we have obtained a method. We face situations, we get experience from life, i.e., from facing situations, we obtain knowledge, we then examine the situation with the knowledge and experiences obtained and then take a decision regarding our faith. Of course all this sounds very simple but is extremely difficult to follow. Taking decisions regarding one's faith i.e., deciding whether it is a faith or a superstition is extremely difficult as it hurts one's ego. So one tends to avoid it. That is why it is all the more necessary for ANS to pursue this movement vigorously.
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