FAITH, REASON, REALISATION

FAITH, REASON, REALISATION

The human mind is more sceptical than believing. Scepticism is natural ; belief is imposed. Which is why there are blasphemy laws and apostasy laws to keep humanity in chains of induced and imposed conviction with an equal courage born of ignorance to fight for the imposition of such a doctrinaire creed on the rest of the world. Divine decree, revelation et al have all one aim, consciously or unconsciously, to keep men from thinking along unrestricted lines even unto the overthrow of such inspired injunctions.

Wherever there is a movement of the human mind towards absolute freedom, faith comes in the way. Perhaps, the evolution of the animal unto human has not yet been fully accomplished in the mind as it has been in the body. Genetic laws are inadequate in the explanation of human affairs where the mind derives knowledge from aerial sources no more restricted to the body. The cognitive faculties may be limited to the body yet but the analytical faculties break bounds with the body to roam freely in the intellectual realm. The animal man has been here supplanted by the human man and the war of attrition between the lesser or the more evolved of segments of the human population resolves out into the sociological developments, conflicts and crises that we witness. As there is a wide dispersal of attributes of varying kinds among different masses of humanity, these resolutions are never easily traversed through to final conclusion this way or that and the battle for supremacy of one ideology or the other carries on almost indefinitely. Faith and reason battle it out even as diverse versions of faith war on each other to establish their respective sovereignties. We are right now in the midst of such a conflicting scenario where nationalism, ideology, faith, scripture, prophetic injunction, divine decree, revelation, commerce, sensuality, reason, empirical evidence, philosophical thinking, spiritual realisation and science are the players in this global game of human interaction which we choose to term civilisation.

Irreverence is not quite irreverent as it might seem. Scepticism is natural as has been aforementioned. Scepticism towards blind belief in religious doctrines may even be deemed as reverence towards discernment and the right ascertainment of truth. Right thinking would deem scepticism as incumbent upon it as Buddhism enunciates in its Eight Fold Path. The Buddha's teachings were eminently the synthesis of reason and realisation the Hindu way, although, his followers in order to maintain philosophical identity forced a schism with the Sanatan Dharma which could have been avoided, perhaps, barring the problem of the inviolability of the Vedas from the Hindu standpoint and its rejection by the Buddhists. But the ancient spiritual traditions of India were all geared toward the perfect synthesis of reason and realisation, of spiritual perception and philosophical rational justification thereof, and they were never for once impositions on the mind and conscience of man. This absolute freedom of thought, the democracy of the human spirit characterised India till the Mohammedan invasions partially ruptured the seamless fabric of universal acceptance of opinion and pathways to the absolute truth. But the tradition, nonetheless, survived and India yet continues to be home to the richest diversity of opinion and expression on truth despite its degeneration in dharmic terms from its halcyon days when spiritual discovery was on par with what scientific discovery has been since the European Enlightenment.

Einstein had famously said, "Scepticism is my birthright." This may seem to be an ordinary statement of common consequence but it is not so in truth. It is a profound utterance of momentous civilisational consequence, of cultural calamity for some archaic civilisations built upon scriptural injunctions that have no rational basis. The ideals of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment are embodied in this pithy comment by Einstein and it provides thinking humanity the leading light in its exploration and understanding of Nature and Truth.

The distribution of the genetic material is not uniform all over the earth and there are geographical differences to account for as well which built up over millions of years in the primal phase and over millenia in the cultural phase make for significant divergences in attributes and attitudes, aspirations and associations. This diversity is the inbuilt feature of Nature itself on account of the separation of spatial points consequent on the manifest enlargement of the phenomenal universe where each and every point in space-time has its own field intensity and consequences thereof. Each and every creature is likewise located in a different microcosm of its being with respect to the external universe and has characteristic distinguishing features thus which in the societal plane cause interaction and conflict to begin with in the common endeavour of all to find a foothold in separate existence. Identity and survival are the twin features of this warring tendency of man from time immemorial and till he reaches evolution enough to comprehend the possibility of harmonic co-existence, man will continue to engage in fratricidal war to his own destructive end. This can be avoided if a broader sympathy be generated by man to brother man in the light of a higher realisation, that of the common consciousness within all.

Written by Sugata Bose [Sugata Bose]