The winds of religious rhetoric have begun to pick up speed again in the subcontinent. Be it the Taslima Nasreen witch hunt or the Gujarat pre-election campaigning where Modi is going all out with his Hindutva babble, religion is again in focus for all the wrong reasons.
I cannot help but wonder if our Gods up there are having a good laugh at all this insanity.
The Jews await their Messiah, the Christians the second coming, the Hindus anticipate their Kalki and the Muslims their twelfth Imam - Al Mahdi while the Buddhists await their Maitreya. Even the cargo cultists want their John Frum back.
And while the Gods confabulate on whose turn it is to descend into this mortal world, we can in the meantime go for each other’s jugular.
The idea of God’s descent on earth scares me. Not because it may happen soon but more because it may have already happened and it did not make a difference. We were too busy upholding religion to notice God. Or maybe just maybe the Gods may want us to sort out the mess we created before even contemplating on another visit down here.
One of the more mysterious verses in the Vedas is the verse “Tat Tvam Asi” (Thou Art That). This verse has been a source of many an epiphany for me.
What is ‘That’ and what does ‘I am That’ even mean ?. More I think about this, more I have come to believe that there is no ‘That’, ‘That’ can be anything we want it to be. And what we want it to be is what defines us.
If you want to see Peace around you, you be the peace, if you want to see Love, you be the Love and if you want to see War, you be the War.
There is a beautiful saying (some attribute it to the Talmud) “We don’t see things as they are but we see them as we are”.
I guess we all spend our lives trying to find our ‘That’ while it remains within us all the time. We have a choice to make, whether the ‘That’ we choose, builds hearts and minds or destroys life and destroys the spirit. Apocalypse and Nirvana both lie within, we just have to make the call.
The Gods may never come down. For they know they have bequeathed upon us the most powerful gift of them all, the power of choice.
And what we choose is what we will become……
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2 comments:
I agree with you. Religion from being a tool to advance humanity has become a tool surviving on strife between humanity.
I couldnt agree with you more on the thought that religion has become a "Weapon of Mass Destruction" (as George Bush would quote) for most politicians and fools following them instead of an individuals choice.But I beg to defer on the thought that gods will not come down,I am still waiting for my messiah to come again :-)
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