Faith

“[Faith is] an awareness of levels that leads to an understanding of the principle of scale and the recognition of a pattern in existence formed by a creative act, which implies a Creator. The Greek word translated in the Gospels as faith (pistis) means ‘another kind of thinking’ and is related to obedience. …

“[F]aith interpreted as an awareness of levels is closely linked with this Work understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven. [Mrs. Pogson said]: ‘There are interesting clues Dr. Nicoll gives in The New Man when he speaks about faith in relation to unity. …

… it is clearly also connected with the power that a man may gain over himself … The Greek word for faith – pistis – is from the verb peitbo, which means to persuade, or make obey. What in a man will make all sides of himself obey him? What persuasion in his mind will bring him into a position where everything in him will yield its power to him? If a man could find this secret, he would be master of himself, not directly, through his own power, but through the power given him by faith.

“Every obstacle, every natural difficulty, is rendered powerless and must obey the will of the man who possesses faith – not his ordinary will but the will arising from another level and source in him opened by faith. He is saying that faith opens the way so that higher influences can come in and make these things possible. We have to have faith which opens the doors for these higher influences to come in.”

– Beryl Pogson, Brighton Work Talks

“Faith is connected with the idea of transformation and so is not mere belief, on the ordinary plane, as when a person might believe in this man or not believe in him, as the case may be. As we shall see later, in another narrative bearing on the real meaning of faith – when the conversation of the centurion with Christ is mentioned – faith, in its essential meaning, denotes a conviction, a certainty, that a higher interpretation of life exists, and as a consequence, that the transformation of Man is a possibility. The peculiar quality of faith lies in this idea, that life can only be understood and solved by the sense of something higher than Man as he is, and that Man has this possibility of being transformed and passing into entirely new meanings in regard to his life on earth. It is this peculiar quality that is the essence of faith and renders it utterly different from what we usually call belief. Faith, in fact, undermines all our ordinary and natural beliefs because it leads away from worldly belief and in a direction that can no longer be confirmed by … the evidence of sense.”

– Maurice Nicoll, The New Man