I
am sharing here my responses on a discussion themed ‘being spiritual and being
religious’ on a social media platform. One many find jumps in the content as I
have put my responses here to different sub-questions of the discussion subject
but reading the whole will give a whole picture of it, I can assure.
Religious
and Spiritual people - are they really different?
Do
we need to separate Spirituality from Religion?
Haven't we created a world of ambiguities
without realizing that these two terms are essentially complementary to each
other?
Yes, it is a political problem. It might be
cliché to say, but is universally true that no religious text, if read as a
pure text, with objectivity, would allow all that has been happening today,
that we call religious wars or civilization clashes.
Evolution began bare and naked and it has been
shaped by both, religion and spirituality, and in-turn, religion and
spirituality have shaped each other and are shaping each other.
I don’t see it as good or bad religions. Rather,
it is good religions and their distorted versions and spiritual quotient is the
segregator here.
Yes, partly, it is because, we listen to the
fundamentalists and not what the 'texts' say. We listen to their
interpretations by others and not what they actually say to us.
This distortion of religious views and their
preferential interpretations began much early in the evolutionary history of
the human civilization and strengthened with 'people worship' and 'cult
following'.
In India, the early Vedic period doesn't speak
of the caste system but now, we are a country riddled with thousands of castes
and sub-castes.
The Sufi saints, considered the embodiment of
Spirituality, read and interpreted the Islam Spiritually and they are followed
across the Globe, by people of every following who love the aesthetics of
culture and tradition. Rumi is the best known example of it.
That is
what I mean when I say 'distortion'. What about if the text has been distorted
as in the case of the Vedic tradition and the caste-system in India?
Manipulation of the written text - it’s in a history that no one can go back to
validate, but almost every religious text has been distorted to suit the
leadership of the time.
And
it will go on.
The herd mentality! The need to have a leader
to follow! No realization of the quest to know the 'self'. And so the space for
such doctrines and so the push for the fundamentalist bigots!
But, there were always the Souls, in every
generation who kept preserved the true essence of the concept of 'god' or
almighty or whatever we say - the 'spiritual Connect of a religious symbolism'.
For being religious, one doesn't need to read
the religious text or follow some religious doctrine.
The written literature and so the prevalent
notions are juxtapositions of individual viewpoints that find connecting vibes
in every generation.
It is up to us, how we want to move ahead.
Whether we want to go ahead with the misplaced symbols perpetuating such
dichotomies or we opt to strive for the light that could clear our vision.
The world began to see the same Vedic
tradition and Vedanta that had seen manipulations for thousands of years, in a
new spiritual light when Swami Vivekanand started spreading it beginning with
his historical lecture at the Parliament of World's Religions in 1893 in
Chicago. Swami Vivekananda was an atheist initially and his Guru, Swami
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was illiterate.
No one can deny the influence of the great
Souls who have prevailed throughout the history, contemporaries of the brutal
warlords, tearing and manipulating the religious texts. They have been the
'healing balance'.
Buddha didn't create a religion of his own.
Instead he filtered out the good from the 'distorted', from the existing bad
and interpreted it in the universal language of humanity.
And
we cannot say Buddha was 'not religious' or 'not spiritual'. He was both.
True. I wrote of Buddha. I wrote of Vivekananda.
For me, they and many others like them are the people to go back to. Their
legacy makes them qualified. Like in the Indian tradition, there would be many
in every other tradition.
A Nazi party worker, Oskar Schindler, could
find the good in him and could save over a thousand Jews.
Yes, it’s individual. What I think, other
would think and interpret in a different way. But the final goal has to be to
'see the light', to find the 'peace'.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/