Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook : ( Last part ) “Yoga is union” has often been repeated, again and again, by teachers and masters—but, union with what? You suddenly say, “Union with God; union with the Atman.” This is your glib reply. This reply will not be sufficient unless it is properly interpreted and understood. It is union with Reality. And if you think God is the only reality, the Reality, and yoga is an attempt at union with that Reality, we grant this definition as perfectly valid. But the weakness of man insinuates itself even into this definition of the concept of Reality and God. The weakness of the religions that went to the extremes, about which I mentioned just now, begins to operate even here, and the true concept of God does not enter our heads. We always pray looking up to the skies: “O Lord, have mercy upon us. Free us from these sorrows of life, from this encumbrance, this torture. Take me to Your abode and keep me on Your la...

2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook :9 This was the mistake of the religions. That is why religions are now tottering with feeble legs in this world, and people think that perhaps religions will be wiped out completely, even as your post of a Commissioner or a Collector can be wiped out by one jolt from the body which will snatch you away from this world. If your physical condition is ignored, if you do not know that you are a sick man, your Commissionership can be wiped out in one second by that blow of death. Religion can vanish in one second, as is the tendency these days, due to reactions from ideologies, outlooks and philosophies which have something else to say. The philosophy of the stomach is sometimes different from the philosophy of the brain. It is not the same thing. It is the philosophy of the stomach that is speaking nowadays, and the brain is keeping quiet. Thus, the sorrows of people, which are manysided, are the consequences o...

 2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook :8. The cults and the creeds and the movements in society today, whether they are social or political, are reactions set up by nature, not by man. There is no man. Such a thing does not exist anywhere. Nature does not see people around; it sees only its own limbs. It simply shakes its body. As we stretch our legs when we are tired of sitting in one asana for a long time, nature will stretch her legs when her leg is aching because of a forced bending of that limb to the needs of certain sections of human beings. This is a larger outlook with which we may behold things, rather than studying things only from a political angle or historical viewpoint, or a merely geological or astronomical way of thinking. The universe is neither political, sociological, geological, nor astronomical. These are only our complacent ways of studying things. For the whole of the universe, there is no astronomy, geology, politic...

 2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook :7. If this is the attitude of all people, there is nothing that one can do with this world. There is no such thing as a welfare program for human society, or even a love of one’s own neighbour. The question does not arise at all. There is no neighbour for us because the world is not there for us. This is a religious gospel that can be found in the scriptures of all the faiths of the world, and sometimes it is regarded as the interpretation of the teachings of the prophets of religions. Many have taken to this line of approach that the world is Satan’s dominion; it is evil to the core. It is a temptress, it is a network of sensory relations, it is a three-dimensional illusion, and the earlier we get out of its clutches, the better for us. God is in the heavens, and the love of God cannot go hand in hand with the love of the world. Renunciation is the high watermark of religious aspiration. Vairagya is the ...

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 ...

2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook : 5. You stand on unstable ground when you conduct yourselves in this world on the basis of the knowledge that you have acquired through your studies. Your studies are not studies of the truths of things. That is why with all your studies, degrees and qualifications, you are still at a loss, and find yourself in a most unhappy situation, and do not know how to live in this world. This difficulty manifests itself after your studies are over. As long as you are a student, you have no problems because you are with your books; parents, or somebody, take care of you. You have no worry of any kind. But when the studies are over, the world looks at you as it is really: “Now, what do you say about me?” Just as an unsatisfied wife may keep quiet as long as her husband is in the office but puts forth her grievances the moment he returns from work, nature seems to be behaving in a similar way. It keeps quiet as long as ...

 2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook : 4. You love beautiful things, artistic arrangements. There is what is called the aesthetic impulse. Why does this impulse arise in you? How is it that you love only beauty and not ugliness? What is wrong with ugly things? You cannot answer this question. Ugly things are ugly things; beautiful things are beautiful things. “I do not like ugly things.” Why do you not like ugly things? What defects do you see in that which you call ugly? Why do you give it that name? Who asked you to give that peculiar designation of ugliness to that which you do not like? And why do you not like it? You cannot answer this question. “I like this. I do not like this. That is all.” The matter ends. There is an insatiable hunger of the intellect and the reason to know more and more. Here again, an insatiable appetite operates within you, in the body, in the mind and in the intellect. You pursue your studies, and pursue the...

2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook : 3. Now I come to the point from where I began. The world does not appear to be constituted in the way in which we think it is constituted, and our laws and regulations are not going to operate here. They have to be subjected to the higher law. What is this higher law? I have taken up for these days’ discussion a theme which I have designated as ‘Religion and Social Values’, which epithet will give you an idea as to the goal so that I may not baffle you with any philosophical disquisition or lofty ideas which go over your heads—things which are usually associated with religion, philosophy, meditation, etc. It is, again, necessary to stand on our own feet and not stand in the air, without any support at the bottom. We have to move onwards and forward, ascend in the direction of the basic urges of the spirit within us under the circumstances which we have been able to discover with this little psychological a...

 2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook : 2. But more than all this, topping the list of all our difficulties, there is the unsolved problem of birth and death that clinches the whole matter before us. The final judgement is delivered by the world upon everyone here when it declares that it is not going to listen to our opinion in the matter of this great order which we regard as the phenomenon of dying and being born. We have absolutely no say in this matter. This is the last bolt that the world has struck upon us. “If you talk more, I will deal with you in this matter, in this way.” No man has escaped the notice of this operating law called birth and death. While we may, under a pressure of necessity, accept that there is such a thing called subjection to birth and death, and we also concede that we have no control over this phenomenon, we try to push this event to a future date with the power of our imagination. We want to rule s...

  2.The Mistake of Religions :  The Need for a Larger Outlook : 1. It is necessary for us to recollect the passage we have traversed in the study of our own life. Very often, if not always, we expect that the world in which we live should be made in the way in which we see it, and in the manner we understand it. This is an attitude of self-confidence which brooks no interference from any other point of view of understanding. Man expects to live in man’s world only, as we see obviously demonstrated in our own personal lives. As we are men, we expect only men to be alive—as if no one else can coexist with man, as that would interfere with his outlook of life and way of understanding. This has been a very staunch behaviour of man throughout his history, and any failure in the fulfilment of his outlook has been attributed to causes other than the real ones. We have not learned to be charitable in our feelings. There has been a very egoistic presentation of even o...

1: The Circumstances in Which We Have to Live in the World : Most of us are only socially related individuals. We have nothing to call our own except that which is bestowed upon us by our social relationships. Family circumstances also come under social relationship; and nothing can be so brittle as social relationship. If that is the stand we are taking to assess ourselves, sorry indeed is our state of affairs. Let each one take a diary or a notebook in one’s hand. Keep it secret. You need not show it to anybody else. “What is my importance? What have I achieved? I am twenty years of age—thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years of age. What are my achievements in the social field, the vital, artistic, intellectual, scientific and spiritual fields?” Each one of you will get an answer from your own self. That answer is the stand on which you have to take the first step. The first step that you have to take in your ascent towards the perfection that you are aspiring for is the an...

Many of you cannot know your own level, and will not find it easy to discover the circumstances of your life. It requires a superior investigative faculty. Rarely can people know the truths of their own selves. You can know your strengths and weaknesses to some extent, if you are honest to yourself. But if, as it is the case with most people, you are wrongly convinced that milk and honey are flowing in this world and you are on velvet, that would be an overestimation from which you have to guard yourself. There is no need to underestimate yourself as a sinner and a good-for-nothing fellow in this world. That also may not be a true picture of yourself. Nor may it be true that you are on a high pedestal of living and you are a master of all the arts. So, let there be a true assessment of yourself. How are you going to make this assessment? Many of you would find it difficult to find a guide. People live in distant places or large cities, and have many difficulties in life. How...

Now you should be a little clear as to why you are unhappy in this world. Nobody makes you unhappy—not your boss, not your subordinate, not your husband, not your wife, not anybody. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” as the poet put it. There is something very strange within our own selves in many a sense, not only in one sense. Anatomically and physiologically, we are strange complexes. The more we study the anatomical, physiological and biological structure of man, the greater is the miracle and marvel that we see in our own self. Strange is the bodily performance—the muscular and the nervous operation of man. Strange is the way in which the vital breath blows. Miraculous is the way in which we are breathing and how the lungs operate. Wonder again is the way in which we digest our food and one substance is chemically converted and transmuted into another substance in the alimentary canal. Wonder again is the way in which we are thinking and apprehending two things ...

The Circumstances in Which We Have to Live in the World : Part-8. Sometimes, you may be warned that this is not the true state of affairs. You get warnings from various sides—from your office, from your social relationships, from your own body also—that things are not exactly as you think. There is something different from what you are imagining in your mind. Now, this is a point which is not visible outside to the naked eye because it is only inside, not outside. But the urges of your mind, which channelise themselves through the avenues of the senses, pull you out of yourself in the direction of your activities in office and factory, etc. so forcefully and impetuously that you have no consciousness that there is a dark patch within your own self, which even an X-ray cannot discover. This dark patch obstructs the movement of light from within you. And, just as a dark spot in a moving film may be projected on the screen and you will see the black spot on the screen, althou...

1: The Circumstances in Which We Have to Live in the World : Part- 7. Now, the time that you have to devote to secular pursuits, as they are usually called, is large in extent. These pursuits are very pressing, with great commitments and impossible obligations in life, due to which you have to run and catch the fastest vehicle that can take you to your destination. Let each one ponder over one’s own obligations and aspirations in their collaborative relationship. How is it that you have persuaded yourself to believe that the larger part of the day has to go to that which presses very heavily upon your head? This persuasion comes because of the reality you associate to these obligations. They are very real, very necessary, and their reality is of such an intensive nature that any neglect on your side will catch you by the throat. You know it very well. What a reality is enshrined in these secular calls of life! How can you ignore them in the name of God, in the name of...