YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

When people pray, they commune with the one and only God who resides in the human heart. But when they rationalise thereafter, it is then that they create divisions, distinctions and differences that lead to sectarian rivalry, hatred and violence.

The human heart is organically the same for all but the conditioning of the human mind differs from place to place, time to time, culture to culture. If religion were left to individuals to be pursued as personal endeavour, much of the evil centring it would have not been. It is institutionalising of religion that has caused all the mischief and created seemingly unbridgeable barriers between man and man. Yet, we have to work through these divisions, for the gregarious nature of the human species necessitates the formation of groups, and human society inevitably throws up cultural collections as religious sects which become the mainstay of religion, develop multifarious excellence of art and architecture centring religion but which dilute the standard of spiritual perception through their programmes of scriptural indoctrination and regimentation of the flock along lines of structural suitability and organisational interests. 

Sages and saints, though, transcend these societal impositions and the doctrinaire cult to strike the core of their human consciousness and arrive at the universal religion of love and knowledge. But their followers subsisting at lower planes of consciousness pollute their thought in due course of time by the rationalisation process and by routinising the spiritual culture to hold the flock. This has been the lot of all great spiritual movements which began on the high note of inspiration of a seer but which inevitably petered out into a socio-political movement of sorts with spirituality remaining merely a fringe element. Thus, with the existence of so many world religions, humankind remains hopelessly divided along lines of warring ideologies centring a God whose children we supposedly all are. And this God is the God of love and mercy that knows no bounds by all scriptural admission. Yet, history bears testimony to religious carnage that have wiped off populations and rendered human life unbearable for centuries at a time. But their day is done and all past superstition must give way before the deluge of scientific knowledge, and the universal symphony of the Vedanta orchestrated by Ramakrishna-Vivekananda.

Change, however, will not be easy for scientific advancement and technological progress cannot arbitrarily quicken organic evolution of the human species. Superstitions deeply ingrained in the mind of man take millenia to drain out and no amount of rationalisation may help evolve men to see reason. Or, if even they may be convinced by the force of reason to behold their superstitious folly, they are powerless against past habit to shake off enmasse the dead weight of their ignorance. Such is the plight of man caught in the dualistic trap of religious superstition ever fulled by nefarious elements to perpetuate the sorrowful state of things for their own ends.

Progress must then necessarily be slow in order to ease out the age-old superstitions of bondage to an extra-cosmic being governing the fate of man. It will take ages for all of humanity to come to the understanding that their fates lie in their own hands and not in any outside agency however potent. But the effort must be on to rationalise education along Vedantic lines so that children may at least grow up with the notion of their inherent freedom of soul so that they are better equipped to battle against the inequities of life. However, this very endeavour to sanitise the academic process will meet with the stiffest resistance from all that is toxic in tradition and will have to be carried out with circumspection and care. And all this will be a painfully slow process much to the disappointment of those hyper-energetic activists who would grant you the millenium in a trice.

So, onward with the work of slow transformation of society along lines laid down by the Rishis of India ages ago when they trumpeted the spiritual oneness of sentience, nay, of all phenomena, and declared in the forest retreats, in the hills and dales, and by the river banks that man is divine, that divinity is his birthright, that he is born of bliss and not of sin, that his earthly folly is his hallucination fraught with ignorance and not his fall from Paradise, that he is the ever-free Atman (Self), pure and effulgent and beyond all sin, that he is the maker of his own God, that no God save he himself and his karma has any power over him, and that no God save he himself can save him.

This is a tall order to achieve and needs the lifeblood of thousands of spiritual heroes who will sacrifice their all to bring about the regeneration of humanity. A spiritual renaissance it will be for mankind considering that such an awakening had come about in grand old India millenia ago when the Sanatan Dharma (Eternal Religion) had been discovered on the banks of the Saraswati and the Ganga and in the high hills of the Himalayas, and its universal principles had been lived out in the plains of the Ganga and the Sindhu (Indus) before the ravages of time sent India careering into the dark abyss of self-oblivion, a state compounded worse by machinations of foreign powers attempting to subvert the Indian spiritual culture through enforced conversion and crafty ideological indoctrination.

But let none conclude that thereby India had lost her spiritual moorings. Life on the outside had been touched by the foreign aggressors. Millions had been converted to the Semitic religions, Islam and Christianity, by force or by circumstance. But the philosophical undercurrent of the Indian race had remained untouched for the vast majority of the population. This was because the Indian religion, that is, the religion of the Vedas is fundamentally free of institutions, and its intangible element, being too subtle for comprehension by alien aggressors abounding in grossness, was beyond the ruinous range of their arsenal. Thus, destruction and desecration of stone temples and images could scarce sully the Indian ideal of the free spirit of man where enshrined lies the indestructible Self in its own majesty.

Each soul is the sanctum sanctorum of the Most High, each form the temple of the Divine. And to teach these in times of great spiritual-cultural peril of the Indian race a succession of sages and saints, prophets and incarnations trod the holy land, the Punyabhumi Bharatvarsha, resurrecting the Sanatan Dharma and breathing fresh life into it.

Thus has spiritual life been through its ebb and tide in India without ever it giving way to wholesale materialism as in other lands, although its flow has been inconsistent, following the dynamics of time, now a river narrowing up in the summer heat, now a river in spate deluging all with its monsoon current. But through it all India has held on fast to religion as the very basis of her national life and the vicissitudes of time could scarce make a dent in the fabric of her spiritual being. And where it at all did so, the outcome of the clash of spiritual forces was that the ancient religion of the Hindus sucked up the new movements of the Spirit, absorbed them and assimilated them and in its wake refreshed them with the touch of the eternal Self that animates the soul of the religion of the Vedas.

India has been saved by the Rishis of yore, and her vast diversity of peoples, unified ever by the singular bond of a pluralistic spiritual philosophy, have lived the religious life down the ages in peace and harmony, although there were a thousand different sects operating within the ambit of the Mother Religion. Unity in diversity has been the call of India ever with her catholic spirit accepting all religions as true, be they be bred in India or elsewhere. The call of the Spirit has been honoured in India like nowhere else. Here alone we hear the Upanishads declare in trumpet voice, "Hear ye, O peoples of the world who art the children of immortality. Even ye hear that reside in higher spheres. I have known the Great Being whose colour is of the radiant sun and who resides beyond the realm of darkness. Thou too shalt have to know Him if ye shalt conquer death. There is no other way."

Time it is that this message of the Shvetashvatar Upanishad addressing humanity as children of immortality is disseminated across the wide world that this uplifting hopeful principle of the Vedanta may raise the consciousness of man by whatsoever measure and help usher in a golden age of peace and light, amity and goodwill in the remote future when man will have learnt to live with brother man in love and not in hate, respecting each other's difference of perspective in the envisioning of the same integral truth.

Now no hour of rest. Upon our labour of love lies the fulfilment of the future age, the birth of a peaceful posterity. Shall we fail our children? No, certainly not. So, friends, let us combine the forces of good, as Vivekananda was wont to saying, and combat the prevailing darkness of the world that the light of the coming age may shine through the future inhabitants of this storm-tossed planet and render them whole, that fratricidal battles may be a distant nightmare never to haunt humanity for ages to come and that civilisation may for once get a chance to speak for itself.

Jai Ma! Jai Ramakrishna! Jai Swamiji! Victory to humanity!

Written by Sugata Bose

P.S. Reader Comment :

By Debaprasad Bhattacharya : Excellent write up worthy of publication in a journal. But I am afraid generally readers of social media like FB have too little patience to go through such large exhortations and much less comprehend and practice. Please forgive me if I have been a little harsh.