Developing belief in God ?

[Guest guest]

Thanks to all the friends, who enlightened me with their thoughts about God.. It was very interesting to hear from you all.

I am an Engineer by profession. With all the intelligent and perfect creation of this world we see by the benevolent God; why is that he is not visible to a devotee ? Does he have a form or or not ?

I have some more questions -

a) There are so many gods and godesses in hinduism. Is it possible to have numerous such gods ? Does not monotheism of Islam or christianity appear more simple and convincing !

b) Why have so many religions in the world ? If truth is one, then why so many doctrines ?

c) Islam's prophet said, that Islam is the last and final form of religion sent by God to mankind. Howdoes it appear in relation to hinduism / advaita or whatever you may call it ?

regards

Sundeep

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Dear Sundeep,

"why is that he is not visible to a devotee ?"

This makes me go back to the nursery rhymes when we sang:

"who put the colour in the rose?

who painted the sky blue?

Who made the tree grow so big?

who put the green colour in the leaf?

Who put the seed in the mango?

who put the water in the coconut shell?

who made me grow into a human being in the mothers womb?

who made my hands and legs grow?

who made my heart work?

who makes my food digest?

who made me see, hear, feel, taste and sleep?

who made me take to study of vedAnta? this is a present question... This can go on and on.

Where Isvara "IS NOT"?

Quoting Swami Dayananda Saraswati:

<quote>" When I can look upon myself as very much connected to Isvara who is the infallible order, the sense of alienation is not there for me. Therefore every form that is here is HIS form, every pheneomena that is here is an expression of the Lord. In any one pheneomenon I can invoke the total or I can invoke the Lord as a phenomenon, as a devata. Space is not separate from Isvara, time is not separate from Isvara, and everything that is here, every law and every force is not separate from Isvara. In fact all that is here is Isvara. That is why we can worship isvara in any particular form. The natural phenomena themselves become the altars, where I can invoke the Lord, the total."<unquote>

In Chidambaram Nataraja temple space is worshipped as the Lord.

Ujjain time is worshipped as the Lord in Mahakalesvara

In Kalahasti in Andhra air is worshhipped as the Lord in the from of Linga.

In Tiruvannamalai, fire is worshipped as the Lord in the form of Linga.

In Thiruvanaikkaval Trichy, water is worshipped as the Lord in the form of Linga.

In kancheepuram, the very earth is worshipped as the Lord i the form of Linga.

We have temples for the navagrahas - for Sun , Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, Rahu and kethu in and around Kumbhakonam.

Lakshmi is worshipped as Godesses of wealth. Sarasvati in the form of books she is Venerated. We are taught from childhood ot to stamp even a small piece of paper by our foot.

All the rivers are venerated in India as Godessess. Only Brahma putra is a male river.

The list is endless, infact the entire jagat including the body mind sense complex of ours is Isvara.

Is isvara not revealing His form in all these? Do we have to look for or seek a special form elsewhere. For sure if he comes in front of us with his four hands dressed in pitambaram, holding gada, shanku chakram and wearing a kireetam and karNa kuNDalam, we are sure to doubt Him saying, " Hey look, here is a theatre person/a drama artist!" We are not going to believe nor see Isvara in Him.

" Does he have a form or or not ?"

Please read the very educative posts on suguna and nirguna upasana from the archives of this list.

Wishing you all the best.

om namo narayanaya

Lakshmi Muthuswamy

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

advaitin, SUNDEEP GUPTA <sundeep_gupta1

wrote:

> I have some more questions -

>

> a) There are so many gods and godesses in hinduism. Is it

possible to have numerous such gods ? Does not monotheism of Islam

or christianity appear more simple and convincing !

>

> b) Why have so many religions in the world ? If truth is one,

then why so many doctrines ?

>

> c) Islam's prophet said, that Islam is the last and final form

of religion sent by God to mankind. Howdoes it appear in relation to

hinduism / advaita or whatever you may call it ?

>

> regards

> Sundeep

 

 

Dear Sudeep,

 

Please viist the follwing site

 

http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_1/vol_1_fra

me.htm

 

Please read articles like soul,god and religion, the hindu religion,

and what is religion. These articles will give you some ideas on

religion and comparision of christianity and others with the

hinduism.

 

The following article answers most of your questions.

 

PAPER ON HINDUISM

Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893

 

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down

to us from time prehistoric--hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.

They have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by

their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to

absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its

all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that

remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect

arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its

very foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a

tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in

an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the

tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in,

absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

 

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy,

of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the

low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the

agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and

all have a place in the Hindu's religion.

 

Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre

to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the

common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions

rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to answer.

 

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation,

the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and

without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can

be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant.

They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by

different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation

existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot

it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The

moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and

between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there

before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

 

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we

honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience

that some of the very greatest of them were women. Here it may be

said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have

had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without

beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total

of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when

nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it

was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes

potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable.

Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must

undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die,

which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no

creation.

 

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator

are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel

to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power

systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run

for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats

every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and

moons of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern science.

 

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my

existence, "I", "I", "I", what is the idea before me? The idea of a

body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances?

The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit living in a body. I am not

the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this

body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The

soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a

certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must

die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body,

mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable,

some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only

drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does

a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is

He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that

those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one.

Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and

merciful God?

 

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not

explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all -

powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth,

to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.Are

not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by

inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence -- one

of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations

answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the

existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been

evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable,

spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a

materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

 

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from

heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration,

through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There

are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions.

And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity

take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display

of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants

to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through

repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural

habits of a new - born soul. And since they were not obtained in

this present life, they must have come down from past lives.

 

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted,

how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can

be easily explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother

tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my

consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in.

That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental

ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try

and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of

your past life.

 

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is

the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to

the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the

very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up -- try it and

you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

 

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the

sword cannot pierce -- him the fire cannot burn -- him the water

cannot melt -- him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every

soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is

located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre

from body to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of

matter. In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and

perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter,

and thinks of itself as matter.

 

Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under

the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect

soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been

told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such

question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing

one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to

fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains

the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the

pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its

nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter

under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly

fashion; and his answer is: "I do not know. I do not know how the

perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as

joined to and conditioned by matter." But the fact is a fact for all

that. It is a fact in everybody's consciousness that one thinks of

oneself as the body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one

thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no

explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says, "I do

not know."

 

Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect

and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body

to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the

future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting

back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another

question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the

foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the

next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions -- a

powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing,

uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed

under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in

its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry? The

heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no

hope? Is there no escape?-- was the cry that went up from the bottom

of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words

of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he

stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad

tidings: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside

in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all

darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from

death over again.Children of immortal bliss" -- what a sweet,

what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet

name -- heirs of immortal bliss -- yea, the Hindu refuses to call

you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal

bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth -- sinners!

It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human

nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are

sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye

are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you

the servant of matter.

 

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful

combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and

effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every

particle of matter and force, stands One "by whose command the wind

blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the

earth."

 

And what is His nature?

 

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty

and the All - merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our mother,

Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength;

give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the

universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang

the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He

is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in

this and the next life." This is the doctrine of love declared in

the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by

Krishna, whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

 

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a

lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so

a man ought to live in the world -- his heart to God and his hands

to work.

 

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the

next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the

prayer goes: "Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor

learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but

grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward --

love unselfishly for love's sake." One of the disciples of Krishna,

the then Emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom by his

enemies and had to take shelter with his queen in a forest in the

Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked him how it was that he,

the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira

answered, "Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful

they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature

is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them.

Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all

sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love

Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask

for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him

for love's sake. I cannot trade love."

 

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the

bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will

burst, and the word they use for it is therefore, Mukti -- freedom,

freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and

misery. And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of

God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of

His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure

heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life;

then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made

straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a

terrible law of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital

conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words

and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous

existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a

soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful

universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that

alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives

about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen

God." And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu

religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a

certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising -- not in believing, but

in being and becoming.

 

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant

struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see

God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the

Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

 

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He

lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect

bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have

pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

 

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common

religion of all the sects of India; but, then, perfection is

absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have

any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul

becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and

it would only realise the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of

its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge

absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this

called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

 

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

 

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to

enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater

happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of

happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number

of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it

would become a universal consciousness.

 

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality,

this miserable little prison - individuality must go. Then alone can

death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease

when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease

when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary

scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical

individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little

continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and

Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other

counterpart, soul.

 

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as

science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further

progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not

progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all

others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to

fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the

others are but manifestations, and the science of religion becomes

perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe

of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world.

One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive

manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that

the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is

the goal of all science.

 

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long

run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today,

and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his

bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and

with further light from the latest conclusions of science.

 

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the

religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that

there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by

and listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the

attributes of God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not

polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the

situation. "The rose called by any other name would smell as sweet."

Names are not explanations.

 

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach

to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them

was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could

it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, "If I abuse your God,

what can He do?You would be punished," said the preacher, "when

you die.So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the

Hindu.

 

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst

them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality

and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask

myself, "Can sin beget holiness?"

 

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse.

Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the

face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images

in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds

of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think

about anything without a mental image than we can live without

breathing. By the law of association, the material image calls up

the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an

external symbol when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep

his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as

you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how

much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands

merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when

we repeat that word "omnipresent", we think of the extended sky or

of space, that is all.

 

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental

constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the

image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our

idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.

The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth,

omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms.

But with this difference that while some people devote their whole

lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with

them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and

doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is

centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the

divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports,

the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must

progress.

 

He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material

worship," say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to

rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is

when the Lord has been realised. " Mark, the same earnest man who is

kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the sun cannot express, nor

the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what

we speak of as fire; through Him they shine. " But he does not abuse

any one's idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a

necessary stage of life. "The child is father of the man. " Would it

be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a

sin?

 

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an

image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has

passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is

not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from

lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest

fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the

human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the

conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a

stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher

and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the

Glorious Sun.

 

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has

recognised it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas,

and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society

only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If

it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover

his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be

realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the

images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols -- so many

pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is

necessary for every one, but those that do not need it have no right

to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

 

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean

anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other

hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual

truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their

exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own

bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If

the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the

fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his

religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the

door of Christianity.

 

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a

travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various

conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is

only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the

inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many

contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The

contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the

varying circumstances of different natures.

 

And these little variations are necessary for purposes of

adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns.

The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna, "I

am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls.

Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power

raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there ." And

what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout

the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that

the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find

perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed. " One thing

more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought

centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism

which is atheistic? The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon

God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great

central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They

have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that

hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

 

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of

the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans,

but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one

which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite

like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the

followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike;

which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan,

but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for

development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite

arms, and find a place for, every human being, from the lowest

grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the highest man

towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity,

making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It

will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or

intolerance in its polity, which will recognise divinity in every

man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be

created in aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature.

 

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you.

Asoka's council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though

more to the purpose, was only a parlour - meeting. It was reserved

for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord

is in every religion.

 

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of

the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the

Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you

to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it

travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes

effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again

rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a

thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

 

Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to

thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never

found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing

one's neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard

of civilisation with the flag of harmony.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JAI JAI RAGHUVEER SAMARTHA

 

Yours in the lord,

 

Br. Vinayaka

[Guest guest]

Dear Gupta-ji,

 

My thoughts in brackets might perhaps answer your questions:

 

__________________________

 

Guptaji says:

 

With all the intelligent and perfect creation of this world we see by

the benevolent God; why is that he is not visible to a devotee ? Does

he have a form or or not ?

 

[if you have seen the intelligence and perfection in creation, then

you have seen God. Why the craving for a form?]

_______________________

 

 

Gupta-ji continues:

 

> I have some more questions -

>

> a) There are so many gods and godesses in hinduism. Is it

possible to have numerous such gods ? Does not monotheism of Islam

or christianity appear more simple and convincing !

 

 

[it is the God principle behind the so many gods and godesses that is

important. That principle is one whether a Hindu prays to Lord Shiva

or DurgA-MA or a Christian to Mother Mary or the Cross or Jesus on

it. Advaita says "There is nothing but God". Any day that is a

better understanding than saying "There is only one God" because, in

the latter so-called monotheistic statement, God becomes a second

entity separate from the speaker - the created.]

_

 

>

> b) Why have so many religions in the world ? If truth is one,

then why so many doctrines ?

 

[That is the magnificence of creation. Let us have variety. Liken

Truth to the Sun and religions to the many windows of a house. To

the discerning one, the same Sun shines through all of them. Any

problem?]

______________________________

 

>

> c) Islam's prophet said, that Islam is the last and final form of

religion sent by God to mankind. Howdoes it appear in relation to

hinduism / advaita or whatever you may call it ?

 

[Let us accept what the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) said without

qualms. That is true advaitic equanimity. The Prophet (Peace Be

Upon Him) would like that attitude any day. Now tell me who is

better - the Advaitin or the ones who thrust the Prophet's (Peace Be

Upon Him) words down our throats.]

PraNAms.

 

Madathil Nair

[Guest guest]

Dear Sundeepji,

Kindly visit the website www.avgsatsang.org and read the article on 'God. Man and the

World by Swami Dayanandaji.

om namo narayanaya

Lakshmi muthuswamy

 

 

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