Faith can be interpreted in various ways. One may rely on fate to help them succeed in life and to help them find true love. Yet one may have faith in God and let that faith bring them success in life. THE word faith has acquired an almost exclusively theological or institutional connotation. It is, clearly, because of this fact, and in this sense, that H.P.B. in her Key to Theosophy insists that “faith is a word not to be found in theosophical dictionaries.” Faith, however, when used to represent a psychological force, or as a reference to powers focused during the di

A human being, that can only be fulfilled in knowing what is ultimately true can seek refuge in the teachings of theology. Within the realm of theology can an individual aim to understand the freedom that exists in their faith and the reasoning that they have. It is only after this level that the call to know, love, and understand God as the one and only is met. One can then come to realize a deeper, more spiritual part of who they are. They see in themselves the embodiment of what they understand and hold to be true in their faith.

The missing element in psychiatry, clearly, is not in the basic method nor in the attitude of the best practitioners in the field, but solely in a lack of sufficient knowledge regarding the “higher self.” If the day finally arrives when psychiatrists and psychoanalysts not only destroy “imaginations and fears,” but also are able to “give another bent to the imagination,” the staggering incidence of mental illness will certainly abate. For men need to know not only that their psychic disturbances may be alleviated; they also need to acquire a sense of direction which is positive, and which brings increasing glimpses of the destiny of soul in the long pilgrimage of evolution. In the meantime we can be thankful that the word faith, like the word soul, is used cautiously and sparingly by our new practitioners of the mental healing art. Better these words not be used at all except when they find sufficient philosophical focus.

Imagination is a potent help in every event of our lives. Imagination acts on Faith, and both are the draughtsman who prepare the sketches for Will to engrave, more or less deeply, on the rocks of obstacles and opposition with which the path of life is strewn. Says Paracelsus: "Faith must confirm the imagination, for faith establishes the will. ... Determined will is the beginning of all magical operations. ... It is because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result, that the arts (of magic) are uncertain, while they might be perfectly certain." This is all the secret. Half, if not two-thirds of our ailings and diseases are the fruit of our imagination and fears. Destroy the latter and give another bent to the former, and nature will do the rest. There is nothing sinful or injurious in the methods per se. They turn to harm only when belief in his power becomes too arrogant and marked in the faith-healer, and when he thinks he can will away such diseases as need, if they are not to be fatal, the immediate help of expert surgeons and physicians.

On the same page, H.P.B. refers to another of the “primary forces in nature,” designated Mantrika Sakti. This term, she states, refers to a definite force or power emanating from “letters, speech or music”; thus we find an occult basis for the hold of ritual and music upon religious followers. So a dogmatic faith may be supported by the entirely irrelevant intrusion of another “force of nature” - without the believer bringing his own volitional powers into play. This, we might imagine, incidentally, is the secret of the origin of the word “fanatic.” Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins remarks that “around a temple (fane) one is likely to find persons whose religious impulses make them seem over-wrought. (Attend any revival meeting.)” In other words, without the knowledge that full faith must be a self-directed psychological force, concentrated by one's own independent affirmation of truth and one's own efforts to test it in action, religions must appeal chiefly to the psychic aspect of man's nature. Again, the distinction between the theosophical tradition and that of Christianity is in the belief of the latter that men can be "faithful" in groups. The Theosophist, seeking for an inspiration of his own to solve universal problems, c

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