The Characteristics and the Power of an Integral Faith

With our standpoint based in the mental consciousness we tend to believe that if we think something, it is ‘real’. This viewpoint fails to account for the different parts of the being, and their different modes of response. For example, we may hold a mental conception to not fear something, and yet, when confronted with it, despite the mind’s best efforts, we find our vital being reacting with fear and we feel palpitations or weakness in the body itself, symptoms of a visceral fear that we are experiencing despite the mind’s effort to overcome the fear.

When we come to the question of faith, we find a similar dynamic at work. A mental faith is insufficient to achieve anything. The Mother refers to an ‘integral faith’. This is a faith that encompasses not just the mental idea, or even an emotional energy of faith, but involves the coming forward of the psychic being, which is in its very nature imbued with faith, and includes a faith in the vital being and even in the very cells of the body. All parts of the being organize themselves around this faith. The issue then turns on how to expand upon, or transform, the mental conception of faith into something that even the body accepts and realizes at the cellular level. The Mother provides a clue when she indicates that work at the subconscious level of the being is necessary to impact the body’s cells.

A disciple asks: “Can mere faith create all, conquer all?”

The Mother writes: “Yes, but it must be an integral faith and it must be absolute. And it must be of the right kind, not merely a force of mental thought or will, but something more and deeper. The will put forth by the mind sets up opposite reactions and creates a resistance. You must have heard something of the method of Coue in healing diseases. He knew some secret of this power and utilised it with considerable effect; but he called it imagination and his method gave the faith he called up too mental a form. Mental faith is not sufficient; it must be completed and enforced by a vital and even a physical faith, a faith of the body. If you can create in yourself an integral force of this kind in all your being, then nothing can resist it; but you must reach down to the most subconscious, you must fix the faith in the very cells of the body.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter VI Faith, pp. 56-57