Real faith is when you can live in the darkness and know that there “will” be light

Faith requires no special sacrifices. Just complete mindfulness.

In the darkest of hours, when the chips are down, and you are up against a big, huge wall, it is normal for you to get tense, for your mind to get distracted with worries and imagine scary, ‘what if’ scenarios. You are feeling that way because you are no longer mindful. Your sense of grief is arising from the fact that what you wanted to happen is not happening. Instead, you begin to fear, that something unplanned, unexpected may take over your Life. Mindfulness helps you stay in the present. The present moment may be indeed stark, but when you are mindful you realize that your future state has not yet arrived. So, you begin to see the futility in being worried and fearful – why fear something which is not there?

Let us say that you are expecting a raise. Just then there’s news that recession has hit your industry and that your company is likely to announce layoffs and freeze pay hikes. Now, your vacation plans, your idea of applying for a mortgage loan on your house and some investment options you have been considering are possibly likely to go on the back burner. You begin to worry. While the reality looks grim there need not be any truth in your fear that your raise will not come through. It is your fear of what you think is a likely consequence that makes you worry. Mindfulness helps you here. When you are mindful, you learn to stay with the reality, accepting it as it is. While at the same time it also teaches you to greet any fresh reality__like your imagined future or otherwise__only when it arrives, not before that.

This attitude, really, is what faith is all about. Many people will tell you that faith is about fasting, about going to temples, to places of worship, about abstinence and about talismans. But real faith is when you can continue to live in the darkness, appreciate the darkness and yet never imagine that darkness can ever submerge light. In fact, just the opposite is true. Only light can remove darkness. So, if you want to get out of any hopeless situation, imagining that the situation will finish you is indeed poor thinking and you are causing yourself to be fearful and stressful. Faith demands that you think intelligently. With faith, anything is possible!