Dear Asha,
Ajay, Ravi and Ariana:
I hope you
remember what I said about organized
religions (February 8,2011). Here are more thoughts.
In an
article I read in The Times of India (January 2, 2010), Janke Santoke makes
several important observations on religion. He says: “religiosity is not a
matter of what your body does but what your mind sees”. “It is not about
symbols and rituals, but about recreating the beginner’s mind”. This is an
important point because when we were children looking at this world and the
universe with fresh and innocent eyes, our sense was one of mystery. That
feeling of mystery is probably the most original sense of spirituality.
(Boethius)
Unfortunately
most of the writings in and on religion use words with different meanings and use
them as if concepts become facts by repeated use of these words. (read Straight and crooked
thinking by Robert H.Thouless) They use circular reasoning. They tell you what
you can do and cannot do; what you should believe and what you should not. All of them talk about universal moral values
but forget to mention that those values should be applied to all forms of life
and to all human beings without conditions and exclusions.
As Ambrose
Bierce pointed out in his book on The Devil’s Dictionary, religion has become
somewhat like “a daughter of Hope and Fear explaining to Ignorance the nature
of the Unknown”.
Finally, there
are very few spiritual teachers who can introduce you to the concepts and let
you think. “It is the eternal problem of
the teacher: how to extricate you from words and introduce you to the essence”.
Ramana Maharishi, Nisargadatta
Maharaj, J.Krishnamurty and Thich Nath Hanh take the uninitiated to the essence.
Love, Thatha
