Bhaktipedia today

Came across this very interesting resource and found this entry (coinciding with a fairly vivid dream myself, earlier) by Swami B.A. Paramadvait, particularly poignant:

Blind faith is confusion. Manipulated faith means that you have lost track by
being misguided by those who are not truthful. You have to give them up in order
to make some real progress. Distorted faith is what you have produced yourself
by your own cheating mentality, by being too attached to matter and sense
gratification. Very often the loss of superior faith takes place by being
involved with activities in distorted faith, such as intoxication.

When you take intoxicants, like tobacco, marihuana, different drugs or alcohol,
even your positive, constructive, reasonable faith may become shaken. But that
is your mistake.

Disheartened faith is something else, which is more or less produced by having
encounters with people who disheartened you. You may have trusted them, but then
you got abandoned. That is of course a very painful experience. You have to go
through this to realize that only the truth, and the souls who are purely
dedicated to the truth, or at least those who are pure in purpose, can provide
healing faith. They have real faith, positive healing transcendental faith. You
will become disheartened when you put too much faith in somebody who does not
have these qualifications. Having been disheartened should encourage you to find
somebody appropriate to put your faith in.

We cannot walk without faith. We cannot even eat without faith. If you ate
something, which gave you a lot of pain in your stomach, then next time you
would not eat it. You would no longer have faith in that food. If something like
this happened, you would not stop eating altogether. You would try to go
somewhere else and get something else. If this something else gave you good
nutrition, then you would put your faith in that type of food. Disheartened
faith in that sense is an aid to finding real faith.

More readings in "perennial psychology" may be found here.


*****

Amidst certain gloom and doom, today I dreamt of a simple, joyful couple, living
in faith and truly sharing that, as reality.

May such dreams, however rare, never fade away . . .