Skydiver Survives Fall With Dying Teacher the headline reads.  A few thousand feet from the ground, Daniel Pharr, making his first skydive Saturday, was strapped to his instructor when the other man suffered an apparent heart attack.  “At that point, “Pharr said, “I realized I was just going to have to do what I had to do to get down to the ground and try to help him.”  He made it safely to the ground.

Does that ever happen to you?  You’re going along just fine thinking someone more knowledgeable than you is at the helm, just to find out you’ve got to take the wheel after all, at a crucial point.  And often that’s when we find out just how capable we really are, and what we really know. All Pharr knew was that he had to get to the ground.  He knew he’d been told how to do it.  Although he had never before actually done it, he knew he had all the info he needed to make it happen.

So often, that’s all we have to go on.  We know that we “know” something.  We’ve just not yet had the opportunity to put what we know into practice.  We’ve not gotten to demonstrate that we know it.  This is where faith comes in handy.

Faith Gets A Bad Rap
Faith is a handy trait to develop.  So many people think religion when the word faith is mentioned, and the thought of developing faith sounds too churchy for them.  But I’m not talking about that kind of faith.  I’m talking about having faith in your own curiosity to learn about life, faith in your own intelligence to gather information.  Faith in your own mindfulness to retain facts, and faith in your own ability to bring what you’ve learned to the forefront of your consciousness when you need it.

That’s what Pharr did and that’s what we all do when we’re in emergency situations.  All of a sudden, despite chaos around us and our own mind scrambling, suddenly we get flooded with ideas and information to help us do what needs to be done.  That’s where having developed faith comes in handy.

In Chapter 3 of  Think and Grow Rich, Napolean Hill says “Faith is a state of mind which may be induced, or created, by affirmation or repeated instructions to the subconscious mind, through the principle of auto-suggestion.”  Chapter 3 goes on to give the process to do it.

To me, faith is a scientific thing.  I see the cause and effect and have come to trust it.  I have learned that I can’t always see the cause or the effect in physical form, so I have learned to become attuned to the nonphysical world around me.  I have absolute faith that when I need to know something, I will know it.  I have absolute faith that in any emergency situation, I will be shown a way out of it.  I just need to stay attuned what is going on around me and know where I want to be instead.

You can test yourself also, to show you that it works.  Begin to take note of every new situation you encounter, and notice what information starts to come to mind, things you never thought of before.  Notice that when you ask for help – or information – in any new situation, it comes to you.  We’re such a curious group, we’ve even invented the internet so that any info on the planet is easily at our fingertips.  But the same thing would happen to you if you were stranded in a new place, with no cell phone or internet access, just your own six senses.

You don’t need to get yourself dropped Survivorman style in the middle of nowhere to test this out.  Just do something different in town.  Go visit one of those indoor rock walls and climb it.  You have to practice on something that stretches you.  That stretches your idea of who you are and what you are capable of.  When you do it, you will start getting info and ideas that are not just related to wall climbing.  You will begin to have faith that your hands and feet and body knows how to move into position to accomodate your new surroundings and will help you learn to move around in it.  Take a diving class.  You will begin to get info and ideas that are not just underwater and diving related.

These exercises will give you faith that when you are placed in a new surrounding, the Universe will immediately begin to bring you info on how to adapt to it and how to be mobile in it. Best of all, if you are not where you want to be, the Universe will show you how to use where you are as a stepping stone to where you want to go.  All you need to know is where you want to be instead.

Like Daniel Pharr in the skydiving story.  He was thrown into an emergency, life or death situation.  Suddenly he was no longer a co-pilot, he had to step up and be the pilot.  He knew he wanted to be on the ground and he knew he was the only one who was going to get him there.  He knew he wanted to be safe.  And he let the Universe help him put all the pieces together to make that happen for him.

And the instructor? George “Chip” Steele, 49, told Pharr he loved skydiving, having jumped more than 8,000 times.  Pharr said he “made the comment to him (during the fall), ‘It’s surprising how quiet it is.‘ And he’s like: ‘Welcome to my world.'”   How awesome to be able to go in the midst of doing just what you love to do.  Steele did just that.

I know I will be just as lucky as well.  I might like to die at age 120, hiking in the Rockies with my 90 year old lover.  Just lie down next to the campfire, looking up at the stars, and suddenly be among them and onto my next journey.