VEDANTA, THE NEW RELIGION

It is time indeed to enunciate the principles of a new religion. In these turbulent times of intolerance and hatred when sectarianism causes untold damage to human civilisation, it is indeed meet that the essentials of religion be spelled out in the clearest terms, free of dogma or doctrinaire nonsense and full of the humanistic impulses that characterise what is best in the religious traditions of the world down the ages. It will be the New Religion of the Age that men may safely follow if they choose to, for freedom is the fundamental clause of this religion and realisation of the Self its very end. It is a religion ‘as ancient as the hills’ and has its genesis in the supreme truth of the Self of man and the Self of all that is. It is impersonal but contains within itself the multitude of personal religions as facets of itself, various phases of an undivided whole that penetrates all that is and transcends yet space, time and causality. It is therefore a timeless, infinite, transcendental Truth that is all-inclusive and universally comprehensive, yet it goes beyond the domain of the material universe to find fulfilment in its own infinitude. It is the religion of the Vedas, the Vedanta to be precise, the real religion of man, for it is the most glorious treatise on the infinitude and the freedom of the human soul, its essential divinity despite the myriad trappings that cosmic nescience subjects it to, tainting it with material contamination ever so seemingly that man forgets his divine inheritance for the while, merged in the mire of cosmic delusion. But the long night of the soul passes and the dawn of awakening heralds a new day with the light of an other world whose breath is sunshine and feel freedom. Glory unto those scientists of the Spirit who had discovered the supreme truths of the soul of man and the essence of being, the Rishis of India!

Such a religion is the call of the hour when the very word ‘religion’ has come to be associated in the minds of millions as a pernicious influence that is the root of much of the evil that obtains in the world today such as terrorist violence, to name the vilest of such influences. The Semitic religions are not as broad-based as the Vedanta and rely on principles of exclusiveness which in turn causes much mischief that is unacceptable in the 21st century. The global agenda of certain world religions to force conversion on the whole of humanity is reprehensible in much the same way as the erstwhile attempt to convert all the nations of the world to a single political system such as Socialism or Communism. This attempt to radicalise spiritual programmes by extreme elements of a spiritual fraternity under the sanction of scriptural authority interpreted in hideous terms is a major threat to world peace today as it has been for centuries ever since its inception and needs to be countered effectively by rational spiritual thinking as the Vedanta enjoins us to do. Hence, the need of a new religion, that is, a religion shorn of the defects of irrational beliefs as prevalent in existing major world religions and possessed of the finest elements of human thinking, rational and scientific, yet poetic and philosophic, that will allow room for amendment wherever necessary to suit the requirements of the times, a religion that will be non-discriminatory and will allow all to freely develop along the diverse channels of spontaneous evolution unhindered by doctrinaire teachings from childhood stifling the very soul of natural growth. It may seem a contradiction in terms that a religion may be transcendental and yet scientific for the two, transcendentalism and science, are intrinsically opposed to each other and see no common ground for rapprochement. Yet, the Vedanta is just that meeting point of all the apparent divergences of faith and belief and reason for it provides the unifying basis for all, the oneness of everything being its fundamental philosophy. The propagation of this religion or philosophy seems to be the way out for the future of humankind if it is to survive the holocaust of mutual antipathy based on dogmatic assertions of religion or science or whatever creed the ingenuity of the malevolent mind designs. Vedanta is the harmonic basis of all that is, the symphony of the universe, the music of the soul, nay the Self of man. Let its mantras sound and resound through the vales and hills of the wide world and bring forth a renaissance of human civilisation amidst the terrible din of the day when reason and inspiration have been sadly supplanted by destructive dogma masquerading as the revealed Word of God.

Let me end for the while on a note of hope then. Man is divine, so say the Upanishads and so have the Rishis of India down the ages corroborated through their life’s realisations. Therefore, civilisation is not doomed as some doomsday prophet may vouch. On the contrary, we are entering into the golden age of human civilisation when the discovery of the principles of mind and matter will work hand in hand to lead us onto the paradise of the Self seated within, unborn, undying, in perennial grandeur. Let us welcome this New Age Religion, the Vedanta which in trumpet voice announces the glory of all, embraces all despite diversity and divergence within its loving arms and blows away the accretions of age-old superstitions by the powerful current of discrimination even as a dark cloud is dispelled by the southern wind revealing the resplendence of the sun behind. So, it is with man. He, the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent infinite Reality has come to associate himself with a minuscule piece of matter called this psycho-physical system and suffers the rigours of finitude thereof. But bygones are bygones. Let us start afresh from where the Rishis left off and read carefully the pages of their realisations, the blueprint for the evolution of future humanity. Far, far ahead of the times they were, these Rishis of yore as they peered into Reality ages ago on mountain tops and river banks and left behind these precious gems, the Mantras (mystic formulas) of the Vedas for posterity to cherish and live on. This then is our heritage and promises to be the religion of the Age when science and doctrinaire religions are on a collision course and the only chance of a reconciliation lies in religion being founded not only on the realisation of thousands of mystics down the ages but also such realisations having been scrutinised scientifically and then expounded in the form of a rational philosophical system, ever open to fresh investigation in the light of modern science and ever subject to amendment if the availability of fresh data makes such an event imperative.

Humanity is at the crossroads today when evolutionary biology contradicts mightily age-old superstitious assertions of the genesis of humankind based on primitive understanding of the workings of Nature and totally unfounded on reason, evidence or scientific scrutiny. Millions are leaving their religious fellowship as the inroads of scientific knowledge make their childhood fantasies of God and religion rationally untenable. A great vacuum has, so to say, filled up the lives of these hapless souls as they struggle to grapple afresh with a new orientation of life, Godless, and life revalued along secular lines. It is here that Vedanta must step in and provide an alternative world-view to stem the possible rot in human society precipitating from a surfeit of materialism, for the common run of humanity is apt to misapprehending the deeper import of scientific knowledge and prone to sinking in the mire of materialism which is the lower derivative of misconstrued scientific finding. Vedanta will provide a basis for all that so long has been cherished as the higher principles of the now-forsaken religion and help preserve traditional spiritual culture, now remodelled by the findings of science and devoid of archaic elements, arbitrary and irrational, and this will be its great gift to humanity.

The foundation of life and mind and matter cannot be material for the laws of physics break down where all phenomena meet, the singularity. It is by no means being suggested, thereby, that an extra-cosmic God is governing all of cosmic phenomena but what is here quite evident is that to understand reality one must transcend the limitations imposed on such understanding by the senses for they refract the vision and disperse the mode of comprehension. Whether such a leap into the great Void beyond is possible or not is the subject matter of deep discussion and never a frivolous one which is commonly the lot of such deliberations, unfortunately, where the objective is preset, that of establishment of a proposition anyhow by clever logic or, worse, by arbitrary assertions of articles of faith. This attitude must change in all who aspire to arrive at the truth underlying the cosmos, be it from the spiritual standpoint or the material, and Vedanta, here, will come in handy, for it rejects everything that is dogmatic or irrational and goes further to reject everything that is sense-based, for all sense-data is erroneous as even Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty avers. This supreme rationality of the Vedanta, however, is not at all denouncing in nature but respects all opinion as so many phases in the interpretation of the Supreme Reality seen through the mist of space-time-causality by the finite human senses and their governor mind. It, thus, is the harmonic meeting ground of all divergent opinion, beliefs and faiths, scientific or otherwise, and provides the rationale for all, for it, itself, transcends the limitations of the senses to apprehend Reality as it is and not merely as it seems to be.

On 8 April, 1900 Swami Vivekananda had delivered perhaps the climactic lecture of his life at San Francisco titled ‘Is Vedanta the Future Religion?’ This lecture bore the quintessence of his teachings, his final philosophy of life and is a most important document that highlights a modern-day prophet’s vision of the human spectacle around him and his prescription for the maladies of contemporary human society. Vivekananda deliberated at length on the relative virtues of the dualistic schools of religious thought and the non-dualistic school of Vedantic thought and arrived at the conclusion that to expedite the process of spiritual evolution of humankind and to make such evolution sure and secure, future humanity would have to be taught the golden principles of the potential divinity of man from childhood so that superstition did not accrete to the unsuspecting child-mind and ruin the chances of the flowering of its latent divinity. He hoped that the United States of America with its governmental democracy might be a fertile ground for the secure establishment of the Vedanta in practice as opposed to its mere theoretical status in the land of its discovery. He had further stated that the old superstitions would have to run out their natural course before a significant section of humanity would be rational enough to comprehend the Vedantic principles and successfully activate them in life. Vivekananda was wary of the pitfalls along the way for he full well knew that these pristine principles of the Upanishads were very subtle and required a high degree of refinement of thinking for them merely to be grasped in essence on the intellectual plane and a far greater subtlety of nervous organisation in the individual before they could be apprehended en masse for realisation to follow. He very much doubted the degree of success modern man at his current level of evolution would achieve in actualising these realisations of the Rishis in the thoroughfare of modern life. To him the Vedanta seemed to be the one hope of humanity caught in the traffic of chaotic impulses but realist that he was, the prophet in him could clearly discern that humankind would have to wait, perhaps, centuries or millennia before it would be ready to fully receive the gift that the ancient Rishis of India have bequeathed unto it.

Vivekananda was the first Indian monk to venture forth across the seas to the New Land carrying the message of India, the call of the Divine, the immortality of the Being and the ephemeral nature of the universe perishing every moment. He was not a prophet of doom but the harbinger of a new hope, that of the infinite possibility of man in altering his destiny on earth and giving it a new direction along the royal avenue of godhead. Such a turn of events would surely come to pass even if it meant waiting for centuries, for he knew his power and of the one behind him and, so, set to working out the channels for such divine self-expression of humanity by activating its subliminal consciousness. And this was the great work Vivekananda did of which he often made oblique references but which was beyond the capacity of his peers even to comprehend. This ever is the task before a prophet of the stature of Vivekananda, an Avatar whose life’s mission is to raise humanity from the degenerate sensate level to the heights of supernal consciousness where all is integrated in the oneness that passes understanding but is, nevertheless, the core of reality.

Shall such a religion be food for the masses ever? I do not know but only hope that many will be ready even now to accept their own divinity as ‘the’ fact of life and proceed thereon to conquer the base senses to emerge modern Rishis who shall bring about a golden age of renascent humanity. The Vedanta promises to be the religion of future humanity and as such needs to be widely propagated. It is a philosophy that is entirely positive and so requires widest circulation for effective flow of its ideas into the mainstream of human culture for a radical transformation of human society for the better. It is entirely impersonal in nature but has the capacity to include all of personality as well within its gamut for it is antithetical to none and consonant with all, being the fundamental basis of all of diverse phenomena which it holds as its various phases seen from diverse standpoints, different planes of relative existence, levels of evolutionary appreciation. The Upanishads are the only hope for humankind as it struggles to come to terms with the challenges that threaten its very existence on Earth today. If it has to grip the consciousness of the masses, universal scientific education will be an immediate imperative, free of religious or any ideological doctrine diffused in it. Generations of young minds trained in the rational, scientific way where every bit of information input will be subjected to evidence-based scrutiny will eventually evolve intellectually sufficiently to be able to appreciate the subtle truths enshrined in these texts and some of these will spearhead the movement of propagating these truths after having realised them in their lives. Only then, and that too over a protracted period of study that may span centuries or even millennia, will humanity be ready to absorb and assimilate the golden principles of the Vedanta whereby a new civilisation will spring forth, the civilisation of humankind for the first time in history that will transcend the impositions of such limitations as narrow nationalism or interest-based internationalism and will embrace the whole of the human race in a single familial bond.

However distant such a day may be, it is our great calling to work towards the coming of such an age when divinities will abound on Earth in a springtime of human harvest, blossoming buds of humanity sprouting everywhere, a veritable forest of flora, a riot of colours lighting it up all. The times are ripe, the hour flies by, the field is set, why tarry friend? Here and now, we must embark on our great mission, the spiritual regeneration of the world, the re-orientation of humanity towards the noblest ideals it is heir to. Come ye all and join in this mission to usher in a new age of hope and light and reason and the transcendence far beyond. May the message of India from a far-off age bring succour to modern man as he fumbles his way through the maze of life, a solitary pilgrim in a far-off land by the edge of the Milky Way! May the New Religion of the Age, the Perennial Philosophy of the Vedas, the Sanatan Dharma (Eternal Religion) of the Hindus fraught with the wisdom of the sages who transcended the limitations of the sensory universe and came face to face with the Absolute Truth of Brahman and the Atman, the underlying cosmic and the individual principle, and who then demonstrated the identity of the two, bring hope and harmony, light and life in our tempestuous terrestrial existence and set us up on the royal avenue of godliness! This is the mission of India, the dissemination of the message of the divinity of man and that of all existence, stored for millennia in her bosom, for which she must render account to the rest of mankind. This is India’s grand discovery, the divinity of man, and this shall be her great gift to mankind, the symphony of the soul where all nations and peoples of the world are so many concordant elements playing out their parts. Let us then all join hands to resurrect humanity from the abyss of primeval ignorance by propagating the perennial philosophy of the Upanishads, the ancient texts which are ever modern, for timeless they are, those forest treatises which denounce nothing but are ever afresh with invigorating principles inspiring the best that is potential in the soul of man. And this promises to be the new religion, the religion of renascent humanity.