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Faith in everything

Faith can not only move mountains, it can transform lives, even the lives of the agnostic and the atheist.

Many have lost faith in religion, given up on the mystery and rituals because we think, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we have seen the man behind the myth.

We think we have lost our faith in faith, but we’re wrong.

Our whole life is governed by faith. Without it, we would be frozen in fear, afraid to peek out from under the covers. From the moment our eyes open until they close at night, faith guides us.

We have faith that the sun will rise, that when we drift off to sleep, we will awaken, that the alarm clock, the shower, the toaster and the coffee maker will work.

We have faith that the electricity flowing behind our walls will fry the bacon, but not us. We have faith that:

  • our car will start – and stop – and when we get out our feet won’t go through the pavement
  • gravity will work
  • the laws of electromagnetism won’t be repealed
  • the millions of neutrinos flowing though us won’t suddenly gain mass and rip as apart
  • the atoms coming into us will know the jobs of the ones they’re replacing.

“The atoms that come into my brain, dance a dance, then go out again, always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday,” said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

We have faith our bodies will remember to renew themselves without us being aware we’re being replaced and unlike the snake shedding its skin or the tarantula molting, we are not left vulnerable. It just happens, like the owner’s manual proclaims.

We have faith that the TV will turn on, the balcony won’t collapse and that our kids will ask for money and the car on Friday night.

We have such faith in everything except ourselves.

 “Faith is a faculty of the mind that finds its highest expression in the religious attitude,” Ernest Holmes wrote in The Science of Mind.

“But always the man who has faith in his own ability accomplishes far more than one who has no confidence in himself. Those who have great faith, have great power.”

People with great faith change the world. Buddha, Jesus and Mohammad are the obvious religious examples, but the men and women who had faith in what they were doing also made our world better:

  • Sir Isaac Newton
  • Michael Faraday
  • Charles Darwin
  • the Wright brothers
  • Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, the first to find microbes, a seminal discovery that has saved millions of lives.

Even misplaced faith can still change the world. Christopher Columbus believed fervently that he could find a shortcut to India and travelled to the great capitals of Europe trying to convince anyone who would listen to back his plan.

Finally, Queen Isabella pawned her jewels, Columbus ran into North America, and Spain became a world power.

We don’t have to make great inventions, or discover new laws, all we need is a little faith in ourselves and we can change the world as we are transformed. And we don’t have to make great sacrifices or spend out life cloistered away in a lab to do it.

The world exists only in our thoughts and when we change those, we fix the world. There is no objective reality. We see the world as we are; it’s a mirror of our intention and our attitude. We can argue for our limitations and get them or have the faith that we can do anything.

And it doesn’t have to be difficult. “Always think of what you have to do as easy and it will be,” said Emile Coue, the French psychologist called the father of applied conditioning. His self-hypnotizing slogan – every day, in every way, I feel better and better — has become a mantra of Silva Method.

Our thoughts create our physical reality, our biography becomes our biology; we can make ourselves healthy or sick.

“The greatest single discovery of my generation is that we can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude,” said William James, the father of American psychology.

We take so much for granted that we’ve become blind to the crucial fact that we are an integral and essential part of the world. It has been said that the universe is so finely balanced that if one atom were removed, it would collapse.

The big bang would become the big whimper.

Some believe the universe is god, that the big bang was his/her/its birth. Cosmic inflation was its initial growth spurt and the rapid expansion a few billion years ago was another spurt; it’s growing at the speed of light.

That makes us part of god, a sub-atomic particle in its little toe maybe – or the cosmic equivalent – but still god in the way that a wave is the ocean.

All we need is to have the faith in ourselves that we have in our microwave; when we press the start button we know, we believe, we accept that it will cook the food.

Would we transform our lives if we proclaimed 100 times a day that we have faith?

Though we seem to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
— Rumi

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.



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About the Author

Ross Freake, a former managing editor of The Daily Courier, has worked at 11 newspapers from St. John's to Kamloops. He is the author of three books and the editor and ghost writer of many others.

He can be reached at [email protected].



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The views expressed are strictly those of the author and not necessarily those of Castanet. Castanet does not warrant the contents.

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