The Christian idea of salvation is not quite the Hindu idea of liberation from primeval ignorance and the cycle of birth and death. Heaven and hell are ideas that are not central to the Sanatan Dharma, being of the order of ignorance as such. Even God is the final most refined form of relativistic ignorance that must be given up in the Hindu conception of the Spirit.
The Sanatan Dharma alone has this absolute idea of freedom that transcends space, time and causality, and in its such absolute conception all heavens and hells and gods and goddesses and even the almighty God dissolve into nothingness as so much eventual figment of imagination.
The non-dual Self or the Atman or the Brahman are ideas that are apprehended only in the Vedic scriptures and are to be found nowhere else. It is this solitary conception of the eternal solitude of the Self, the ground of all relativity, the absolute essence of existence transcending even God that is the gift of the Vedas to the world. Generations, perhaps centuries, may yet pass before the world in its wholeness appreciates this stupendous conception and then it may take millenia more to realise the essence of the idea for the world to be rid of the superstition of archaic, absolutist, exclusive religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The world has waited thousands of years to hear the glad tidings of the Vedas and it may yet wait several thousand years more, but heed it will for sure this truth of the Self for it is truth after all.
Written by Sugata Bose
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