Random thoughts on religion!!

Spirtuality is all about connecting to God and how do u do that? Simple, by connecting to your ownself. So do have to be in saffron and chant mantras to do that? No. Then why do people do that?


All religions have symbols,practices and beliefs. How did these beliefs come into existence. Once upon a time, there were so very intelligent people who found the path to connect to God. Like true scholars, they wanted other men also to discover this secret of life and attain moksha. When i say moksha, i donot mean anything thats after your death. You attain moksha when you discover the purpose of your life.

Since these people found that the common folks didnt have the bandwidth to understand their teachings, they tried to explain it to people by telling them a story.Its like your physics teacher explaining you nuclear reacton by linking the neutrons to Arjun's arrow which would multiply over the flight to its target. And the story covered all aspects of life. It stressed on all the values that all of must have heard from so many priests and swamys. Its a waste of html space to list them here.

And like the students we were, instead of understanding the core concept of God, the disciples of these great men gave more importance to the story and its characters. And so Ram,Allah,Jesus came into existence. The scholars , created characters in a way that ordinary people would relate them to their own local environment. To make it easy, they wrote the so called holy books. And thus, Quran,Geetha ,Bible and more holy scriptures came into existence.

There is always some essence of knowledge lost when you pass it to the next generation. Its like the game thats played most of the personality development classes, the instructor lines up people in a line and to the person standing first, he would whisper a message in his ears and would ask him to pass it down the queue in a similar fashion. The last person in the queue says the message loud and more often than not, its completely different from the original message.

Similarly generations later, the original message the true scholars had intended to pass on somewhere got lost and a completely different set of concepts emerged. The dumb disciples started respecting the scriptures,the characters and all the symbols that they thought identified them while completely ignoring the core message which the scholars had intended to deliver. The religion united people and with it came a false pride which seeked to destroy anyone who would question their practices. Soon there was a strong sense of competition between religions with their heads taking a dig at each other's traditions. Heads ordered,the disciples
obeyed and nobody dared to question.This happens to a lot of extent in the present age also.

As Imeperialism started showing its ugly side, the so called disciples took up a mission on civilzing people by passing on their misunderstood values and beliefs to the so called 'barabaric tribes' across continents. These barbarians on the other hand were more civilized as they had learnt to respect nature and to live in harmony with it where as the so called reformists were going on complicating their environment in attempt to make their life easy and in the process ended making it even more complicated. Rightly said in the movie "Gods must be crazy" as a result of that his children are sentenced to spend more than a decade in school and
college just to learn how to survive in the complexity.

Religion was no more about connecting god. It was now more about who dominated. The think tanks now spent more time on how to get people from other religions to to accept theirs and they didnt hesitate to use all possible means to do so.

And this continues till date.

Pray before you sleep, do what u feel is right and try not to hurt anyone, unless its a case of your own survival. I guess thats all u need to be spiritual. Saffron is just a colour and so is green and white. Bothering about them is just a waste of time. I d rather blog than thinking about it!!