I am sorry for my limited view and thought process, but as you said, Divine Grace is always there with us and faith is the key to realise that thing.
Sri Aurobindo has also said to protect the faith, but it sometimes feels like my faith is leaking from where I have stored it. The place where I belong is my family; my school gave me the faith that see, The Mother and Sri Aurobindo are the source of everything for us and I grew with that faith as my entire family accepted it from my heart without any questions.
Their questions ended here; now I started to find out the answers. Then one day, what I realised just gave me a big shock: in search of their answers, I had started thinking like them, the typical skeptical thinking that asks us to question everything. But my operating system was different; I couldn’t act for money, I couldn’t act for fame, I couldn’t act for better universities.
Here, I am writing couldn’t because I have tried to work for them, but I couldn’t get the motivation. I could act for the sake of my bhakti and the love I have for her. At that time, I felt like I was losing my very necessary thing, my oxygen. Bhai, when you say humans are experts in showing their ignorance, I feel like it fits me better, but I will never want anyone to question my Lord for my ignorant activities that people do in a very casual or funny way.
Faith is the starting point of any journey. When one says that one must question everything, doesn’t it imply faith in one’s ability to find the answer to everything? Doesn’t it also imply faith in the ability of the human mind to find the answer through the use of the sceptical intellect? Faith is the starting point of every journey. Its end is knowledge. But knowledge itself is of two main categories. An indirect knowledge based on sensory observation and mental/rational analysis of the data. Science stops here. But spirituality goes one step further. It says that since we all eventually have the same Source (call it whatever), it should be possible to know everything if we can find the secret of identifying ourselves with this common universal essence. That is what Yoga is all about. It is a knowledge that exceeds the sceptical analysis and the data of the senses because it has found ways and means of identifying the individual consciousness with this essence and Source of everything. And of all the means of identifying ourselves (with anything in fact), there is nothing more powerful, direct and swiftest as love. This is the intellectual basis for faith and love, not that these powers are born from the mind or the intellect, but it helps if the mind is on the same page as the heart.
It is perhaps this that your so-called friends pointed out, unwittingly though. Having said that, I don’t see why one should do something simply to prove a point to others or because of a prompting or challenge thrown by someone. This is a wrong starting point; hence the result is growing scepticism and doubt. The eyes do not see what the mind does not know. It is because the same data can be interpreted by the human mind and reason in different ways depending upon the premises and assumptions. The assumption may be that one can know only through statistical sensory evidence and rational analysis. There are plenty of things, including water, fire, air, earth, that do not follow a simple straight logic.
All this apart, basic decency and civility demands that each one has the right to lead one’s life the way one wants to so long as it doesn’t hurt or harm anyone. Here too, a belief in divinity and the possibility of yoga or union with the Divine is one of the best means of progress, a progress that brings wisdom, compassion, love in us. On the other hand, a sceptical mind only increases cynicism, a breakdown of the spirit of love and justice, leaving only one possibility before man, of a purely material universe in which there is no place even for ethics and goodness.
Search and inquiry are always good, but scepticism is not search but an a’priori doubt that leads us nowhere except an endless circle of cynicism.
Affectionately
Alok Da
