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The Characteristics and the Power of an Integral Faith · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  With our standpoint based in the mental consciousness, we tend to
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  believe that if we think something, it is real.
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  This viewpoint fails to account for the different parts of the
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  being and their different modes of response.
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  For example, we may hold a mental conception to not fear
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  something, and yet when confronted with it, despite the
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  mind's best efforts, we find our vital being reacting with fear,
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  and we feel palpitations or weakness in the body itself,
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  symptoms of a visceral fear that we are experiencing despite the
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  mind's effort to overcome the fear.
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  When we come to the question of faith, we find a similar dynamic
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  at work. A mental faith is insufficient
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  to achieve anything. The mother refers to an integral
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  faith. This is a faith that encompasses
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  not just a mental idea or even an emotional energy of faith,
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  but involves the coming forward of the psychic being, which is
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  in its very nature imbued with faith, and includes a faith in
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  the vital being and even in the very cells of the body.
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  All parts of the being organized themselves around this faith.
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  The issue then turns on how to expand upon or transform the
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  mental conception of faith into something that even the body
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  accepts and realizes at the cellular level.
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  The Mother provides a clue when she indicates that work at the
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  subconscious level of the being is necessary to impact the
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  body's cells. A disciple asks, can mere faith
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  create all, conquer all? The Mother writes.
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  Quote. Yes, but it must be an integral
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  faith, and it must be absolute, and it must be of the right
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  kind. Not merely a force of mental
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  thought or will, but something more and deeper.
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  The will put forth by the mind sets up opposite reactions and
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  creates a resistance. You must have heard something of
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  the method of COI in healing diseases.
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  He knew some secret of this power and utilized it with
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  considerable effort, but he called it imagination, and his
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  method gave the faith. He called up too mental a form.
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  Mental faith is not sufficient. It must be completed and
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  enforced by a vital and even a physical faith, a faith of the
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  body. If you can create in yourself an
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  integral force of this kind in all your being, then nothing can
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  resist it. But you must reach down to the
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  most subconscious. You must fix the faith in the
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  very cells of the body. End Quote.
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  Reference Srioro Bindu and the Mother Powers within, Chapter 6,
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  Faith, pages 56 to 57.