Prolifically Raw: Faith

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Faith

What is faith?

Faith is not measurable. Faith is surrender of mind but not necessarily of will.

There is a deep driving will in all forms that contain life. A form has the will to expand, to survive, to grow and to express fully. Life is an unbound force of will: slow, steady, omnipresent, relentless and oh so patient.

The will of life is evident everywhere you place your eyes--tree, moss, ivy, bugs, snails, dogs, humans. The will to be is the art you create, the songs you sing, the awakening each morning to a new dawn. The life will is clear. Life is alive and flowing.

Faith is the surrender of the mind and its questions of how life will turn out. Will life, as it is known now, flourish or fail? Faith is the surrender of this question and an abiding in the will of life, within the human form and everywhere on the planet. Faith is a quiet confidence. Faith is trust and more, faith is intelligence. It allows the form to relax.

Re lax. Re lax. Re lax.

When the form that life uses to express itself can relax the tension of anxiety and mental struggle, life can more fully flow.

Humans, encumbered (and blessed) with cognition, mammalian nurturing and primal survival functions have a miserable time with relaxation.

Relaxation is being explored at this time, to a great degree. There are pharmaceuticals, spa treatments, therapies, centers for meditation, breathing, stress relief and the entire spiritual movement. There are whole schools of thought around what is "relaxing." Travel? Food? Sleep? Drinking? drugs? Sex? Shopping? On and on.

Relaxation is not escape. Relaxation is the release of the mental tension, learning how to unburden the form from the tension created by the mind--brain--primal and mammal brain which tells a flood of stories about "survival challenges."

A human being, well fed, warm, comfortable and secure in a house can tell himself countless stories of doom that produce so much anxiety and stress for the system that there is no relaxation at all. Rather there is a massive depletion of energy through the mental processes and the system is taxed. All systems connected to that system are taxed as well, and since all life systems are interconnected, the result of one systems tension impacts all systems. It is quite stunning to see how one human being's mental anxiety can trip up the entire system of life.

Have we lost track of faith? No. Faith is the major component of re-laxation. The faith in life, the surrender to the will of life, as an entirety, is a deep and basic function of being. Faith is available, in abundance when one observes a planet or an animal. Stand and observe a dog, a flower, a tree, a turtle. Borrow a bit of faith from these forms to calm the mind and to relax. All beings on the planet, from plant to man, have the capacity to relax in the faith of being--to rest in the will of life and to trust life--as a force and as a presence.

Some say faith is a childlike quality. Simple. And this is true. But faith is also more than simple. Faith is innocence infused with great wisdom. Innocence is faith and trust and knowing of the goodness of life. And life is truly good.