FINDING GOD: WHAT IS FAITH?

Summary:
A universal question of people of different ethnic backgrounds, languages and beliefs is, “How Does One Find God?” In my case God found me with Divine Miracles and Divine Providence, but in most instances it requires faith. If one’s heritage and upbringing is such that faith in God is strong, then believing and trusting in God is a given. However if one holds on to one’s rational logical mind or sours on God because of evil world events like the Holocaust, faith may never materialize or be lost.

What is Faith?
One of the best descriptions of faith was told to me ten years ago by a friend on Long Island. “Faith is the bird that feels the Light but chirps when the dawn is till dark.” Faith in God is believing before it actually happens. What happens? That God provides us with evidence of His existence. We believe without proof. Faith is not waiting to see if God makes His entrance on the world stage. Faith is believing that He will once more make Himself known to us as He did back in biblical times with the ancient Israelites.

Being an agnostic means you don’t have faith. The same is true if you are a humanist. Your issue in either case is that you don’t see evidence in the world for God or your brain won’t allow you to temporarily give up your rational logical mind. However once you cross over and believe, you pick up your human intelligence on the other side so that your faith stands alongside your reason. The physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both had faith in very different personal ways. Nevertheless they both knew there was a more powerful Supreme force at work than the brilliance of their physics theories of the universe. As one physicist puts it, “If we have to explain physics only by physics, we won’t be able to explain physics.”

The Battle for Faith:
The struggle for faith is therefore really a battle between our Divine Soul and our Human Brain. Faith is outside the realm of our body as it originates inside our soul. Very near our heart we have an innermost point of God’s electromagnetic energy called in Orthodox Judaism the pintele yid. This kinetic energy needs to be activated in order to initiate the sparks of faith within ourselves. In Buddhism this central point is referred to as kernal. If our left brain closes off this central point of energy which was placed in all human beings by God, we will choose not to believe in God although we can still lead a meaningful life without turning on our pintele yid. Humanists are perfect examples of beings who lead philanthropic and righteous lives without believing in God. Spirituality however by my definition requires belief in God.

The more we activate our Divine sparks, the closer we come to God as we climb God’s spiritual ladder. Almost three thousand years ago, King David would wake up each night at midnight and strum his harp. The more intense the sounds of his harp, the more he was activating the sparks of his pintele yid. King David so valued God’s presence after committing an almost unpardonable sin. What David understood was that we human beings are imperfect but what God values most is that we have truth, honesty, goodness and fairness in our heart and that we repent for our sins. This sincerity of the heart is the core of spirituality and also of true love.

When we trust in God and especially allow ourselves to be guided by God, we find life itself. As David’ son King Solomon said in his Book of Proverbs, “When you find God, you find life.” That doesn’t mean that you live a strictly spiritual life without enjoying our physical world. As my wife Marcia told me repeatedly while she was alive, “Life is a gift.” A quote that I heard that makes so much sense to me is, “Hang onto Heaven but keep both feet on the ground.”

Finding GOD:
Once we activate our Divine Sparks and begin our spiritual journey, we will no longer have to find God because He will find us. Because He gave us a Divine Soul, God is Omniscient and knows exactly what’s going on in each person, even in the nooks and crannies of the crevices of our thoughts. Our thoughts arise instantaneously in our souls but we can change a not so great thought with a new thought that will become our new Now in the present.

The idea is not only to align our actions with our spirituality but also to move our thoughts into God’s realm where we synchronize how we think and how we behave with having truth, honesty, goodness and fairness in our heart, our spiritual core. We should not worry about the thoughts that come into our soul. We ought to just change them and get back on the spiritual path. We can’t help our thoughts. As King David wrote long ago in His Book of Psalms, “And He realized that we are but flesh.” God made human beings imperfect and we have to just accept ourselves. We can however improve our character. God gave us the Free Will to do so in our lifetime.

In our book, Putting God Into Einstein’s Equations: Energy of the Soul, my wife Marcia and I have a chapter on acquiring Spirituality.

Personal Story:
In a couple of recent articles that I have written for the Self Growth website, I have given you a personal glimpse into myself and my imperfections. My time hasn’t been easy but God did choose to intervene in my life in 1982, at the end of 1998, and even to the present day. For ten years plus, I have wanted to put a video together of my Divine Miracles that propelled me on my spiritual journey in the beginning of 1999. This is when I activated my Divine Sparks at the age of fifty-eight. Here is the link on the Self Growth website, http://www.selfgrowth.com/videos/jerry-pollock-miracles-from-god Thanks to Kristina Kanaley of Self Growth for all her help and support with our spiritual endeavors.