Musings Episode 53: Faith – It’s Not Religious.

This weekend’s been a blur…but it was still awesome, filled with a lot of, well, fulfilling conversation. Mostly concerning politics, religion, finance, and more. Boring stuff to some – but important and integral to understanding life.

So as you know last week you all found out I was re-reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Well my friends and I on Friday night just so happened to get into a heavy conversation on religion, atheism and spirituality.

I’ll be honest – I’ve never been the religious type. The church going type. I’ve never been an atheist, either. Agnostic? For a stint. Spiritual? Probably been spiritual out of all of those three.

There was a time in Asia when I learned many things, it was a time that gave me literally months to meditate. Call it a sabbatical if you will…but probably the biggest thing about it was coming to understand myself, more than anything else.

See once you understand yourself, everything else kind of falls into place. Fear fades, because you know how to test your limits. You learn patterns. Habits. Thoughts. It all starts internally. Begin to know yourself internally and you’ll understand why you do things externally.

Anyway, back to Friday – a few friends and I got into this BIG discussion on the differences in atheism, religion, and spirituality. It’s pretty awesome when you have a group of friends where some are atheist, some are spiritual, and some are religious. I’ve had friends that are stout Muslim to total atheist – yet we still can comfortably get along and agree to disagree about our beliefs.

An interesting conclusion and mutual agreement within all the conversation that was exchanged though was one specific topic: Faith. Somehow, through some way shape or form, everyone could understand the topic of faith, even if they didn’t understand it completely.

Which really goes to show that faith isn’t religious – but a state of mind.

It’s not rooted strictly in religion – as religion has its downfalls, as does atheism.

…but what does faith have?

Power.

Insurmountable power.

Once a person comes to know it and harness it that is.

According to Napoleon Hill, faith is simply a state of mind which may be induced or created, by affirmation or repeated instructions to the subconscious mind, through the principle of “auto-suggestion.”

Faith is a state of mind – yet also an emotion.

A lot of religions say “have faith,” yet rarely explain what faith is, let alone how to obtain it.

A lot of atheist say “have courage,” yet rarely state that courage is tied in with faith.

A lot of spiritual people say “believe before you see,” without really realizing they’re just saying “be courageous and have faith.”

Faith really isn’t something that can be taught from a book. It’s something you have to develop within yourself. The only way so far to train yourself to have faith is through tapping into your subconscious.

How do you tap into your subconscious? Through repetition of affirmations or “stories/orders” you tell yourself.

The easiest way to describe this is to think on the man who commits a crime for the first time. When a man first comes into contact with crime, at first, he’s nervous, shaky, and abhors it. If he remains in contact with crime, he slowly becomes accustomed to it and endures. If he remains in contact with it long enough, he slowly embraces it and becomes influenced by it.

Another good example would be someone who goes to war. The act of being in active war is at first frightening, no matter how glorified they think it may be. The adrenaline kicks in, a person can get nervous, resistant of killing their fellow-man. Eventually, the longer they do it, they overcome fear and gain more courage – they gain more confidence. Then eventually, they can think clearly even in the heat of battle…eventually that courage, converts to confidence, converts to faith – that with the right planning, they can win the battle – win the war.

It can also be easier to have faith when you have a plan.

Faith is something that has to be developed at its own speed – and you don’t need a church or religion to do that.

Faith is something that’s a personal thing, an emotion you yourself have to become comfortable with – faith is something your conscious mind has to work with your subconscious mind on becoming comfortable with.

All thoughts that have been emotionalized (given feeling) and mixed with faith, begin immediately to translate themselves into their physical equivalent/counterpart.

So really, if you think about it, a man could tell himself a lie day in day out, and eventually believe it. Once he has belief in the lie, he has confidence – once he has confidence, he has faith – and once he has faith, that lie suddenly becomes FACT in his mind, regardless of “truth.”

Faith is a state of mind. An emotion. An emotion, that must have self-confidence to truly flourish.