What takes priority?

Treat the other man's faith gently; it is all he has to believe with. His mind was created for his own thoughts, not yours or mine. – HENRY S HASKINS

I had a dream. You have a dream and everyone has one. Is it that dream can take you to what you want to achieve? Most say YES!! Some say affirmative NO!! I’m one of the “some”. The very simple reason to the defense is that supportive action must be there to achieve dream. To do that supportive action, one must have the eagerness to do. Above this, one must have the knowledge on thing to act upon. Mere knowledge would not suffice to do action. Necessary skill is required to acquire the knowledge. Knowledge is bottomless. To reach the desired milestone, with skill and knowledge, attitude is foremost importance. If you think that I’m going to stress on Attitude, then you are terribly wrong.

Let me walk through a couple of examples on what this article is going to talk about.

Charles Blondin, his real name was Jean-Francois Gravelet was sent to Lyon when he was just 5 years old. After 6 months training as an acrobat, he made his first public appearance as “the Little wonder”. His superior skill and grace as well as the originality of the settings of his acts, made him a popular favorite. Blondin especially owed his celebrity and fortune to his idea of crossing the gorge below Niagara Falls on a tightrope, 1100 feet (335 m) long, and 160 feet (50 m) above the water. This he accomplished, first on June 30, 1859, a number of times, always with different theatric variations: blindfold, in a sack, trundling a wheelbarrow, on stilts, carrying a man (his manager, Harry Colcord) on his back, sitting down midway while he cooked and ate an omelette. There was something Blondin’s Manager exhibited on Blondin. Let’s keep the subject matter in disguise for a meanwhile.

Let me give another example from a famous animation movie “THE PRINCE OF EGYPT” which I like the most and revolves on the subject matter.

The important person in the Bible was Moses who exhibited the subject matter as well as others who reposed the same. Moses was born in Egypt which was ruled by the Pharaohs. During that period Hebrew were slaves under Egyptians. The tradition was that Hebrew might grow in population and rise against them. Hence they slaughtered new born male children. But Moses was a pharaoh and came to understand later that he was Hebrew. At later stage he was chosen by god to deliver them. Moses did not believe in himself that he can do the job as he was a pharaoh. Neither people did. But God chose him and was with him to deliver Hebrews.

As one can see there was something more fundamental bonding on the action of Colcord on Charles Blondin and by God on Moses. Many people saw Blondin walk across the gorge below Niagara Falls on a tightrope, and believed that he was capable of carrying a man on his back safely across. But only his manager Harry Colcord had enough faith to allow himself to be carried.

By now you must have got to know what I was trying to emphasize. Yes. That’s Faith!! The word seems short but the meaning is magnanimous.

What is faith? Is it praying to god on a night before the exam to clear it? Or seek god’s help in winning the lottery? Or seek help to clear the interview? What are we doing here in real life situation? We seek somebody’s help in our favor for an event to happen to our benefit. If the event is unsuccessful, we desecrate the other entity. Is it correct? Many will say NO. Successful events and unsuccessful events happens everyday and night. Some may succeed and some may fail. It is illiteracy on our part to blame when we do not succeed. Life is full of uncertainty. If success becomes 100% then there would be no winner at any contest as all participants in a running race will win. The reason being that all the people had faith they would win. Imagine a world with 100% success. There is no essence. The point that I am trying to emphasize is that faith does not necessarily lead to positive results. Positive people have faith irrespective of the event outcome.

Going back to the Moses example, Hebrews did not believe that they would be freed. But their faith still remained. That proved the essence of faith. The fruit of happiness would be tremendous when success comes after many failures with faith intact. Faith is to commit one to act based on sufficient evidence to warrant belief, but without absolute proof. Mere belief on the basis of evidence is not faith. To have faith involves an act of will.

Faith may be to trust on an action. It may be also to believe without reason or believing based upon social traditions. Faith is the development of pathways through doubt. With certain resistances to life, wishing to obtain more life force causes us to develop means and methods to overcome the resistance. When something is wanted and there stands doubt between your current condition of need and the thing desired, systems of faith are employed. A person will first work existing pathways already established by faith. If they fail, they will seek to develop other pathways by faith, not knowing for sure if the path they pursue will provide the object they seek.

The desire for things dominates the application of faith. Many of those actively applying faith to specific pathways seek less tangible things, such as love, peace, harmony, or even eternal life. Faith is an individual path. Just because it worked for one person, doesn't mean it will work for another. Faith has to be realistic. One cannot have hard faith to fly in air one day by himself. Faith sometimes make ingenuity seems illiteracy. Numerous news has been heard of scientists having faced many failures before reaping the fruit of success. The success recipe is pure faith and confidence in them.

Faith is based upon the interpretation of the intangible (feelings, emotions, etc.) instead of the physically tangible.

According to the Bible, "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see".

As we knew in real life positives always have negatives as appreciations have criticisms. One may also see blind faith. This is too dangerous. I would not like to go on this part as the subtle scene as of now goes misty. A certain number of religious rationalists, as well as non-religious people, criticize implicit faith as being irrational, and see faith as ignorance of reality: a strong belief in something with no evidence. The issue is more than theoretical. Defenders of faith say that belief in scientific evidence is itself based on faith — in positivism; yet they do not themselves defy reason by walking off cliffs out of faith in divine intervention. When one has constructive belief and faith and does his act to the full, no result would be undone.

Unless we have faith, we may become isolated in mind and world. In all walks of life, one may experience it. When we travel in an airplane or in a public transport bus, we have faith at the pilot or driver to drive us safe to our destination. Some may exhibit the character explicitly by praying god before travel. Mostly it is implicit. We do not question the pilot on their success in driving but we do travel. Imagine. Leverage your thinking.

Another interesting term in sync with faith is trust. It’s up to you and everyone to experiment on situations where they apply and derive benefits. One can be said for sure is that success comes at any stage. If one has commitment, confidence and faith to do, success is rest assured. Ask anyone. They will heed to it. Before sign-off, have faith in life!!