To Make Oneself Safe and Secure

Now, looking at the word īmān, which is faith — it is translated generally as faith — its root is three letters: alif, mīm, nūn. Amina means to be safe or secure. To be safe or secure. Īmān is a verbal noun that comes from one of the fifteen forms of every verb; each verb literally creates a whole semantic field, by which one gets nuances of the meanings of the word. Īmān is from the fourth form out of the fifteen forms, which literally means to make oneself safe and secure. So the idea here is that faith is an anchoring element in the human experience, and lack of faith is something that creates a type of trouble, of turbulence, within the psyche itself.

This can be seen when someone is going into surgery. One hears people say that they have faith in their doctor — because nobody wants to go into surgery not having faith in the doctor. One would be a wreck. Really, one would be a wreck. There would be a lot of trauma related to that experience. So there is the idea of faith as a securing factor in the human condition.

Now, there is a wonderful thing in the Greek tradition. Prometheus gives man fire, which is knowledge, and then Prometheus is cursed by the gods, because the gods do not want man to have knowledge — man is going to compete with the gods. Once Prometheus is on the rock, in Aeschylus's play, and Prometheus is bound, they are asking him what he gave to man. He said: I gave him fire, and I taught him the crafts. And then they said: what else? And he said: I gave him faith. In other words, without faith the human being is in a hopeless state. So there is the idea that we need faith. If we have all the knowledge in the world, if we know how to do all these things, but we do not have faith in the future, in tomorrow, we go into a state of despair. And human beings cannot function in a state of despair.

There was a study done with rats — these are horrible things that scientists do, but sometimes they come up with interesting results. They put some rats in water, and then they would let the rats swim until they drowned. What they started to do was time it, and they would say the rats would survive a few minutes. Then, right before the time at which they would normally drown, they would pull them out and save them. And they would do this over and over again. Then they would leave those same rats that had been pulled out and saved, and the rats would go on sometimes twice as long, or more, than they would normally have done had they not been pulled out of the cauldron. So the idea is that even the rat has a concept of hope. Even the rat, as insignificant as its brain is, has a concept of hope: that it might be saved, and so it will hang on a little longer.

There is a story of a man who asked another man once whether he believed in God. He said no. The first man said he had a question for him: if you fall off a ship in the middle of the ocean, do you just give up? And he said: no, I continue to swim. And he said: why? And he said: out of the hope of being saved. And he said: that is God. There is within us this odd mechanism in our own psyches that refuses to give up. And this is rooted in this idea of wanting to make oneself secure, of wanting to be in a state of security.