Raphael Warjri

Faith is a matter of personal conviction that people believe about things that they trust about its actual existence and effect on their life and assist them in their quest for Truth. Therefore, it takes a lot of courage and dedication to experience the true spiritual ambience. It is sacrilege to believe in any religion as a matter of convention or inherited tradition. Every person must accept and believe with authentic evidence that they are convinced with clarity on their individual freewill and prudence. Every human being was borne out of a mother with essential sensory organs and the mind to think that it needs a proper sensibility to understand about life. The infants will not understand about death as much as their elders and adults, who had encountered and experience the mystery. When they grow up, they will realised the fact about the supernatural forces that control life on earth. The immensity of the universe is immeasurable as compared to the extent of human intelligence, and a divine entity in the form of god is created. This is how faith has been handed over by the ancestors, but humans prefer to believe in the tradition without proper understanding about the customs and practices being performed. In the community, the consensus of the majority is always accepted and the wisdom of the few is ignored, unless it can be articulated in a universally intelligible manner. It is better to rely on the assumed fact of the distant past than to accept the recent reality that could be true or false because people might be doubtful about certain things and speculate with their limited intelligence. The forebears handed over their subjective opinion through generations in the form of faith, a blind faith that people failed to comprehend. The knowledge of the distant past could be in the form of myths, legends, parable and folk tales, which may not be taken as true but to ponder upon the vision, mystery and the interpretation of the stories about life that is relevant to the present and has aclarity of foresight for the future.

Taking a reference from the myth about the dance festival of all creatures, the entire divine congregation was not aware about the endeavour of the rooster to convince the sun to rise again after he crows three times, which is the coincidental testimony that prevailed till today. The arrogant elephant and the conceited hornbill could not accept the success of the rooster; but all the creatures had acknowledged it with humility, the simple fact that the sun has risen again. Thereafter elephant carries the trunk through generations and became gentle, and the hornbill carries the protruded bill through generations and realised his mistake, another coincidental indication that prevailed till today. There is no modern knowledge system that can deny this fact,that when the rooster crows  the sun rises and dawn breaks through. This is the inception and foundation of the Khasi faith. However, the religious performances that the subsequent generations indulged is the gesture of appeasement and the onset of the quest for the divine that have been lost after the fallen of the Diengïei representing the demolition of the tree of life, and the detachment of the Jingkiengksiar Sohpetbneng representing the lost of connection between human and the divine. This is the prophety,perhaps, about the destruction of the environment and the lack of proper communication with Nature. The irony is humans(it is humans not human.Human is an adjective) and all other creatures have certain tenure of physical existence on earth and will ultimately perish and turn back to the earth, while they exploited, mutilated and devastated mother earth for the sustenance and survival of their temporal life. It is plain truth that all beings including human are borne, grown up, matured, gradually bacame infirm, senile and ultimately expired, but mother earth remained intact since the beginning of time.

The sophisticated advanced technology emerged out of human intelligence has surpassed the ancient simple knowledge about life and the surrounding environment. The consensus of the masses dominated the genuine faculty of few traditional expert in the relationship with nature and the popular public opinion influenced the supervision of certain affairs in the society. The mockery of democracy over the merit of folk wisdom is reigning, prevailing and became more accepted to the extent that the majority of mediocre became the participant and champion of the application skill, while the few geniuses are marginalised and demoralised to propound their inherent expertise. The ordinary quacks will endeavour to learn a bit about the plant and its application on the ailment and some of them with versatile oral articulation will get better attention and benefit than a genuine person who is proficient in herbal cure in consonance with the spiritual intervention and the profound knowledge of a particular plant from its origin to the function and effect, and the outcome of medication. It is human nature to desire or want anything faster than its normal course and this is happening every now and then with the attitude of the general public to appreciate the temporary and incomplete consequence rather than a permanent and absolute corollary. Significantly, the quick fix method works in every aspect of human endeavour, because in the race for accumulation of unlimited resources, time is more important than the wellbeing of the body and the mind. The popular trend of attaining excellence through the idea of survival of the fittest, unmindful people is prone to resort to discreet fraud and trickery, instead of genuine expression of actual aptitude and competency. At the same time it is difficult to differentiate between an individual with the quality of knowledge and quantity of information, because  the ability of each person is at par with the other in terms of their capacity to articulate their discourse on the topic of their expertise. In the same manner, religion will provide information about the divine, about god, about the traditional practice and custom within the congregation, and faith will be experienced through the inherent spiritual process in person or within a group of sincere community, which could be a family or a clan. Religion will demand participation in the divine performances and faith requires involvement in the divine intervention. The patriarchal system is like the religion professed by the male occult and the matrilineal system is the faith inherited from the mother of all beings. Religion is a political structure of similar or unilateral composition of followers that professed and navigate its faithful to the singular purpose of assumption of certain supernatural power that control human destiny, while faith is a clarity of the trust that facilitated universal commitment and devotion to the cause of spiritual wellbeing of every individual human. In every religion it is being taught to dedicate to the exclusive divine entity and refused or denied others, while faith is a personal experience of spiritualism that embraces universal righteousness and truth. In every religion it is being preached to assume confidence on the divine without apprehension, while faith is a matter of clarity to the truth of actual knowledge, ignorance and uncertainty. A person believing in god assumed and accepted the religious teaching and prophecy, while a person of absolute faith accepted things that he or she definitely knows, deny things that they absolutely do not know and have reservation over things that they are not sure. The irony is that most religions are being taken for granted as faith or fairly a false faith.