Tolerance Toward Other Religious View Points

[Guest guest]

Religious tolerance is the best strategy to avoid making mistakes. It is a sign

of maturity and not a sign of weakness. Religions just like languages are

nothing more than a communication medium. Language is a communication medium

between people and Religion is a communication medium between human and God.

The existence of many languages and religions illustrate individual human

preferences! The question: "Which religion is right?" is similar to asking? :

"Which language is right?" The world consists of many religions, languages,

people, culture, traditions, beliefs, color, geography, animals, birds, insects,

trees, mountains, rivers. We are fortunate to live in a diversified and a

challenging world than a monotonous boring world. The self-realization is

nothing more than accepting the world as it is and adopts us to this reality.

According to Shankara, the world is the creation of the mind, and the mind can

create the perfect world by removing the imperfections of the mind. Any

expression of intoleran

The purpose of Satsang is to awaken the divinity within us and remove prejudice

and bias. Our inborn nature is divine and we can witness our true nature by

looking at a new born child. The child accepts everything given and looks for

human contact at every opportune moment. The mother of the child gets back her

inborn divinity and showers the child with infinite love and kindness. Children

bring back the forgotten memory and we are able to exhibit enormous generosity,

kindness, tolerance and understanding while dealing with our children. We enjoy

their speeches and forgive their mistakes and mispronunciations. Birds,

animals, flowers and trees who do not have memory exhibit divinity all the time.

Nature is God's creation and we are responsible for the creation of intolerance,

impatience and misery. We are responsible for our own pitfalls and downfalls.

It is time that we regain our memory and divinity.

 

Positive mental attitude is the God given virtue. Negative attitude is human

creation. According to Advaita, Self-realization requires abandonment of

negative human creations! Tolerance toward other viewpoints is just a favor to

our-self. When we accuse others, we are the sufferers and not those who are

accused! When we learn to accept other viewpoints, we learn to become happy.

Politeness can never hurt us and rudeness will never help us. Rudeness is an

expression of the agitated mind and divinity will disappear from our heart and

soul. Duality will prevail as long we engage our mind in creating negative

attitudes. Momentarily, mind starts the cycle of evaluation between the

opposites - good and evil, joys and sorrow, sweet and bitter, love and hate,

giving and begging, right and wrong, action and inaction, like and dislike,

tolerance and rude, polite and crude, respect and disrespect, clean and dirty,

truthful and untruthful, honest and dishonest, moral and immoral, ethical and

unethical, etc. When

Religious scriptures signify TRUTH in different forms using different formulas.

According to Advaita, Truth and the Knower of the Truth are the same. When we

agree with this framework there, can be no observations. Observations come from

the creative mind and they have no place in Advaitic Philosophy. When we eat an

apple, it is a divine experience and tastes, textures, quality, etc. come from

human creation. Swami Dayanandaji will call Apple as God's creation (Ishwara

Shrishti) and the adjectives to apples (sweet apple, rotten apple, red apple,

golden apple, etc.) come from human creation. The goal of Advaita is to learn

accept God's creations without adjectives and pluralities. Adi Sankara

understood the fallacies of human creations and rightly declared that " all

creations are illusions." Conflicts and plurality come from the illusory mind

which projects intolerance and rudeness. Peace and serenity disappear when the

mind is disturbed . With the absence of illusory mind, serenity and divinity

Let me conclude this essay with some important points made by Shankara:

According to Shankara, those who read the Scriptures for scholarship and ego

(self-promotion) are just wasting their precious time. The story behind

Shankara's Bhajagovindham explains this clearly. This well known story

describes the circumstances in which this great poem, Bhajagovindham burst forth

the lips of Sankara. Once in Banaras when he was going along on his daily

rounds, he overheard a very old Pundit cramming Panini's grammer rules. Sankara

was touched with pity at the ignorance and folly of the man to be wasting away

the most precious 'dusk hours' of his life for a mere intellectual

accomplishment instead of spending them in contemplation on the Lord, praying

for spiritual enlightenment and for release from the bondage of Samsara.

Shankara knew that this was not the state of that particular old man only, but

was the general state of most of us. We waste and while away our lives in many

(or most) futile ways, grovelling i

Hari Om!

 

Ram Chandran

 

Note: I prefer Hari Om due to two reasons: Hari is the symbolic expression of

Saguna Brahman; Om represents Nirguna Brahman and the joint statement of the

two nouns Hari Om states that at Paramarthika level, Hari becomes Om! Also the

joint statement is an expression of our tolerance toward two distinct

philosophical beliefs. For practical reasons, Hari Om sounds like "Hurry Home"

to remind me that I should look inside (internal) rather than outside for TRUTH!