Religion and Social Values : 17.

2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook :6

There is, therefore, a necessity to undergo a new and true type of education. Here again, we have some problem. We may feel a need, but we may not be able to fulfil that need easily because circumstances in the world are not favourable. People frighten us by saying that Kali Yuga has come and this is not an age to gain an insight into the reality of things. Their gospel is that until Treta Yuga comes, until the Kalki Avatar is over, man has no hope. But the whole world is a mystery still, and this gospel is not the final word. I do not think that the Kali Age which people speak of is confined merely to the time calculations given in our almanacs. It is a perpetual process which can be called by this name of the cyclic movements of Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali.


In every moment of time, a circumstance arises in everyone’s life when the conditions of the fourfold cycle manifest themselves; and inasmuch as God is timeless, the conditions of time may not always operate, because there is also the timeless element in man. We have the power to summon God, though we also have the weakness of getting subjected to nature’s laws. So we are difficult individuals, very hard to understand, and every bit of the secret of the universe is present within ourselves. Every switch of every connection with everything in the world is present within us. Man is the switchboard of the whole cosmos. We can operate all the planes of existence by touching some parts of our body, without moving an inch from where we are sitting. This is the facility that is provided to man—the greatness, rather. But his utter weakness is that he cannot do this operation, for reasons that we have to discover by a further analysis. What is this difficulty?


There are people in this world who belong to two camps. There are those who say that religion has killed man; it has driven him into an imaginary realm of the other world of happiness which he is seeking, and which he cannot find in this world. Inasmuch as religions speak of another world where alone we can expect felicity, and it is always said that this is a world of sorrow—Mrityu Loka, the world of death—there is nothing that can attract us here. “Vairagya is my aspiration,” says the spiritual seeker. “I give up this world. I practice renunciation, self-abnegation. I take to religious practice.”

To be continued  ...