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Friday, September 12, 2014

Religion and Spirituality

1.     I would like to begin with two mantras:- one , we cannot defy or deny the existence of anything that impacts or influences our life even remotely. Two that there are no perennial taboos or trends to pin down life.


2.     I also would like proceed with a premise which Ram Dass very beautifully has said, “Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.


3.     We must admit we are all seekers of reality. We are not realized souls. Different approaches appeal to and/or suitable to different people as different dosages of the same medicine to different patients.


4.     We must be tolerant towards whatever approach that an individual seeks, if not we are self centered and fanatical individuals trying to foist our ideological, ritualistic, cultural, traditional belief systems etc on others.

5.     We all must in all humility accept that none of us have seen, unfortunately, Divinity face to face in any form tangibly to say I have met Divinity and I know his requirements or what he wants me to do etc which in itself is a paradoxical statement because  to say that a omnipotent and omnipresent divinity is constantly expecting us to perform something for him.

6.     We all can easily see through that most of the acts that we perform for the sake of divinity or in    the name of divinity are things marketed by religious people or we ourselves take pleasure in doing them or we are used to performing them because from childhood we have been habituated to and told to do them without questioning about doing them and this is one of the reasons that almost all religions and religious practices become a person’s second nature.


7.     If we bother to study ,most of the enlightened souls, then we would realize that none of them have despised rational approach and unending questioning of beliefs , tradition ,religious practices etc starting from Adi Shankara to Swami Vivekananda to Bhagwan Sri Ramanamaharishi to Sri Aurobindo to J.Krishnamurthy to Neale Donald Walsch to Echort Tolle.

8.     As long as human beings have those additional faculties of conscious awareness, thinking, reasoning etc they would use them to scan everything that comes into the radar of their conscious awareness or everything that is forced on them and arrive at a perception based on their limitations of knowledge and reasoning powers, their convenience, whatever is more suitable at that particular situation etc.

9.     Therefore, there is no fit all or suit all panacea for everything and everyone.

10.  Even highly religious people in the recent past like Swami Chinmayananda , seeing the rift that was being created between the generation/group  of people who insist too much on following traditions and rituals blindly and the unwillingness and disinterest of the generation/group which shows the least interest in these activities and in order to avoid them were tending to adopt indifference towards anything that comes in the name of religion, wrote an excellent small booklet titled ‘Logic of Spirituality’ intended more for the group which thinks following rituals is the only way to realize reality.

11.  Even if other religions prescribe unquestioned faith and belief as the sin quo non of relating with divinity , at least Hinduism gives a very wide spectrum of methods to grasp the reality or supreme power that propels life of all species ,including rational questioning atheism as a scripture itself in the form of two broad schools of philosophy in Hinduism namely Mimamsa and Samkhya.

12.  I have attempted to always question everything as that is the only way I am good at and comfortable with. I have made no secret of my approach through many of my interactions, interests ,intentions, involvement etc. However, I have supported and participated and continue to participate in if not all, at least many, of the rituals for social obligations, in order not to hurt the sentiments of others, as well as continue ,sincerely, to pursue whether at some moment of spark, imbued with  hope, that I will get the grace and blessing of the divine for which people perform these rituals and traditions with utmost sincerity and unfailing regularity, something which I do not do. Momentary hypocrisies are justifiable rather than hard- hearted haughty and hurting refusals to participate in the society where we live and in its activities. But when it comes to priorities of living I am very firm that humanitarianism, compassion and cohabitation etc take precedence and are more vital to social human life than anything and everything else.

13.  I am able to feel the pulse of divine wisdom exuding in the philosophies of Bhagawat Geetha, in the speeches of Swami Vivekananda ,  J. Krishnamurthy , Ramana Maharishi, Rajneesh, writings  of Saint Francis of Assisi,  Neale Donald Walsch,  Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Meera’s Bhajans, Saint Tyagaraja’s music, Kabir’s sayings,Tirukural , Guy Murchie’s writings etc

14.  Shri S.Gurumurthy Talk on Peace Through Religious Harmony at SASTRA University

15. Culture, Philosophy, Literature and Religion Revisited.* By Prof     S.A.R.P.V Chaturvedi


16. Here are some of my write ups on these pet topics relevant to this posting. I would like you to go through all these patiently with all the links embedded in them at your own leisure and may get back to me if you feel like, with unbiased interactions.
A ] New Year with a New Realization of Reality
B ] SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY
Sanathana dharma is perhaps the best known way which gives sketchy guideline for this process of soul’s slow but sure search for spiritual enlightenment /evolution/improvement. The crux of the matter is to grasp the essence of spiritual vibrations in every aspect of life in our own way and leave out the extraneous factors, however greatly revered by tradition or promoted by religious institutions or eulogized by the elite. Everything in any process of growth is just a step, important and inevitable, but not a stop. It is so with mother’s milk [our biological aspect of life]; it is so with learning of alphabets, words and numbers [our intellectual aspect of life]; it is so with hugging, kissing and cajoling as babies [our emotional aspect of life]; it is so with our learning and understanding of different concepts [ our philosophical aspect of life]; it is so with all forms of worship, devotion and all its concomitant rituals and religious practices [ our spiritual life] and so on. This is the inherent wisdom. A normal human being has to go through a process to grow in everything or into something but ultimately grow out of it . There may be exceptions like a Adi shankara, or a Bhagawan Ramanamaharishi.

We can neither avoid the steps nor get struck to them. That’s why I cannot accept the snobbism of so called intellectuals parroting pet slogans like religion without rituals, god without religion or religion without gods, spiritualism without god or religion etc. In fact I have books titled in each part of the slogan.”



E] SWAMI VIVEKANANDA MY OBSERVATIONS


17] http://www.deeshaa.org/is-sri-sri-ravi-shankar-a-con-man/ where in the author writes very clearly
“Depends on your definition of ‘great’ I suppose. My informal ranking is thus:
I.          Enlightened (and Great, Good, Useful)
II.         Great (and Good, Useful)
III.       Good (and Useful)
IV.       Useful
In “Enlightened” I would put the historical Buddha, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Mahavira, and a few others.
Great would include Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare, Tagore, Krishnamurty, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Darwin, and many more.
Good would include many people who have invented stuff that have benefited mankind – from the inventors of dynamite to penicillin.
The useful category is for the rest of us – you and me and a few billion others. We don’t do anything really harmful such as killing others. Some of us are known – as Sri Sri Ravi Shankars and Deepak Chopras. Some make big bucks – such as Gates. But most are merely useful and mostly harmless.
(I am not including the negative side of the scale here: that would include Stalin, Bush, Bin Laden, Hitler, the founders of the monotheistic faiths, and so on.)
I believe that Ravi Shankar falls in the “Useful” category.”


18] I would like to end with a quote which reflects different perception of   spirituality.
“In societies where coolness and being cool is a top priority, the religious replace the word 'religious' with 'spiritual' to make their faiths seem less extreme.” –Criss  Jami.


19] I always fancy quoting this particular verse of Tirumoolar the great Saint
This verse is titled as ‘Kelvi kettamaidal’ which could be translated roughly in this context as ‘ask all questions and  remain silent.”
VERSE NO.126. முப்பதும் ஆறும் படிமுத்தி ஏணியாய்
ஒப்பிலா ஆனந்தத் துள்ளொளி புக்குச்
செப்ப அரிய சிவங்கண்டு தான்தெளிந்து
அப்பரி சாக அமர்ந்திருந் தாரே.
126: They Walk Into Light of Siva
Ascending thus the steps,
Thirty and six of Freedom's ladder high,
Into the peerless Light of Bliss they walked;
And Siva, the inexplicable, they saw--
Having seen, realized and so stayed.

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