STRIKE OFF THE FETTERS, BE FREE

STRIKE OFF THE FETTERS, BE FREE
Stop subscribing to the belief that some extra-terrestrial being will come and save you for none will, none ever has. It has been man alone that has saved man from his terrestrial predicament. If it is Islamic terrorism that threatens you, then practise fearlessness knowing that this life at any rate is an ephemeral dream, a bubble that may burst any moment. So, why fear? It is strength that you must cultivate through the practice of purity and concentration rather than succumbing to inactive invocation of some divine dispensation which will never answer your pious pleas. Your strength will in turn strengthen the nation to combat this evil menace. If it is conversion to Islam or Christianity that disturbs you, then, as Hindus, you will be well advised to study well your religion and stop going into the fold of these proselytising faiths who, for all their tall talk, have only one agenda---global domination through mass conversion, the creation of a monolithic so-called spiritual culture. If it is drainage of wealth from the pockets of the poor to the coffers of the rich creating an unholy class divide that disturbs you, then begin to act on behalf of the dispossessed and the under-privileged by studying the problem, finding its solution and applying such to bring about a transformation where everyone will have a fair share of the earth's resources to be able to live a life of dignity and meaningfulness. Feel, think, act---this is the three-fold path to overcome the problems of the day. Feel the misery of the masses daily sinking into the mire of material existence with seemingly no hope of redemption for such is the stranglehold of crony capitalism. Then meditate deeply on the problem of poverty and economic exploitation that has reduced the images of gods and goddesses to veritable beasts of burden. And when you have found the solution to the problem, apply heart and soul to redress the situation. Then I will call you patriots, humanists, real men, not until then.

Now, in all this you will not get any divine help from outside of human society and all its tangible heritage and history, remember. For all help will come from within you which is a mine of infinite strength, a repository of infinite power, the real seat of divinity. When the Nazis were eliminating the Jews en masse, how many prayers and supplications to the Divine must have gone out from their hearts but to no avail! It was left to the Allies to rescue them eventually after they had suffered the holocaust. When marauding Muslim invaders plundered and pillaged the Hindus and later stayed on to subvert our religion, kill us by the millions, destroy our temples by the thousands and force-convert us to their Islamic faith, how many tears of the tormented mothers and daughters of the Hindus, whose physical form had been outraged by the barbarous beings, must have gone up to the highest heavens only to rebound ruthlessly without a response! It was the mighty Maharana Pratap Singh, the valorous Chhatrapati Shivaji, the lion-hearted Guru Gobind Singh who came to our rescue and all these were men of flesh and blood, not gods. So also must you arise and take charge of your destiny by the study of your glorious Hindu religion, the Sanatan Dharma, to phrase it correctly, and by the practice of the golden principles enshrined in your sacred books that speak of the glory of the human soul, the essential oneness of all sentience, nay, of all of phenomena. It is time to stand up to the challenges of the times, the threats to our Motherland and to our Hindu heritage and culture, and to spread our benign influence across the wide world that is thirsting for the spirituality of India that may yet save the world from a catastrophic annihilation arising out of a conflict of culture that threatens it, Western liberal democracy pitted against Islamic totalitarian theocracy.

Let us once and for all understand that so long we are dependent on help from imaginary beings residing outside of our beings, call we them gods or goddesses or whatever, we will remain terribly ineffective in transforming our human condition. This is no preaching of atheism but is the right attitude to adopt if truly we are theists in line with traditional Hindu wisdom. We are divine in origin, not sinners as the Semitic religions ingloriously denounce man, and we are divine even now and so shall remain through eternity for space and time float within us and not we within them. Religion, God and the whole of this universe and countless others flow from our divine Self, the Atman, the Brahman which is infinitude itself. This glorious truth we have forgotten as Hindus and we must remember it from now. If we do so, then no harm will ever befall us. And when we do pray to God, let us do so out of a feeling of strength and love for the divine within us and never from a sense of hopeless alienation from some cosmic autocrat whose business is to send curses on the blasphemous and the infidel and to exhort His unholy followers to kill the same. What a preposterous proposition in the name of the Divine whose nature ought to be of the essence of love and not such malevolent hate as induces His adherents to millenia-old persecution of His other children who for superior wisdom or otherwise choose to reject Him or worship Him in another form! Can God be so gullible as to behave worse than enlightened humans? Therefore, my friends, do not be pessimistic about your fate or present state and do not let yourselves be preyed upon by preachers who try to subvert your glorious Hindu religion and, for heaven's sake, do not convert to Islam or Christianity from Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the like, that is, from religions that have sprung from the sacred soil of our Motherland Bharatvarsha. The religions that have originated in India are infinitely superior in philosophical strength and wisdom to the Semitic religions and require their adherents to be true to them and steadfast in their study and devoted practice. On no account must you be induced to an act of disloyalty to your nation by succumbing to unscrupulous inducement of missionaries or half-baked preachers of the Semitic faiths and change your religion. We need to build a strong Hindu community who owe allegiance to the Motherland and her ancient culture. Only then may we build a strong and vibrant India that will show the path to the rest of the world how all races and nations, all faiths and philosophies, all cultures and communities may co-exist harmoniously by affirming what is good in each one and discarding what is baneful for humanity. It is this role of the spiritual conductor that is the lot of India to play in this symphony of nations where each nation is the score-keeper of a particular phrase of the divine melody and each people the player of the music thereof.

So far as the widening rift between the rich and the poor that is increasingly developing in a fast industrialising world where economic drainage is making the lower half of the vast human form progressively bloodless while a surfeit of blood in the upper half is tending to cause a cerebral thrombosis, the situation is indeed grim and demands immediate attention. Else, violent revolutions across the world will soon shake up humanity to bring about rough adjustments which will not be wholesome for the overall betterment of human civilisation. We must frame laws and formulate policies whose immediate application must improve the human condition of the poor. There is no time to waste. Human life is too precious to dilly-dally over decisions and our historical experience with communism, fascism and the like have taught us lessons enough not to repeat the mistakes of the past for the price of it is too high to pay. Better by far will be for all to cultivate character so that this economic barbarism be banished from human society for good. And with the abolition of celebrated greed, as is the wont of elitist social culture today which hides its fangs behind a facade of wealth-welfare for all, will ensue a golden age of human progress where man will be the focus of this terrestrial drama and not some medieval God whose business is to barge into human affairs to which He has no clue whatsoever and yet has the temerity to pronounce judgement on us who have so far been fooled by our own delusive selves but have now comprehended the message of the Hindu Rishis and have rightfully become the arbiters of our own fate which no divine dispensation may influence or alter. May we be inspired by this message of the Upanishads that we are, after all, God, each one of us, and that beyond us there is neither heaven nor hell nor any god who can dictate terms to us! Jai Hind!