On Religion

Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore in English) was a person whom very few can comprehend and even less can speak about. However there are many so called "experts" on him. I do not profess to be one and I am simply delighted to read him and interprete him in my own way. Here is a piece which I got on his viewpoints on religion. Towards the fag end of his life in 1937 he was delivering a lecture in the parliament of religions organized by Ramakrishna Mission.

Religions at their most profound level, he indicated, help to reveal a spirit of harmony that bridges the dark abysms of time and space…that reconciles contradictions…and imparts perfect balance to the unstable. Yet, “when these same religions travel far from their sacred sources,” he noted, “they lose their original dynamic vigour, and degenerate into the arrogance of piety, into an utter emptiness crammed with irrational habits and mechanical practices, then is their spiritual inspiration befogged in the turbidity of sectarianism, then do they become the most obstinate obstruction that darkens our vision of human unity.”

He continued:

All through the course of human history it has become tragically evident that religions, whose mission is liberation of soul, have in some form or other ever been instrumental in shackling freedom of mind and even moral rights.

…The pious man of sect is proud because he is confident of his right of possession of God. The man of devotion is meek because he is conscious of God’s right of love over his life and soul….the bigoted sectarian nurses the implicit belief that God can be kept secured for himself and his fellows in a cage which is of their own making…

Thus every religion that begins as a liberating agency ends as a vast prison-house. Built on the renunciation of its founder, it becomes a possessive institution in the hands of its priests, and claiming to be universal, becomes an active centre of schism and strife…This mechanical spirit of tradition is essentially materialistic, it is blindly pious but not spiritual, obsessed by phantoms of unreason that haunt feeble minds with their ghastly mimicry of religion.

How very true and how very prophetic. When we see every religious institution we find that they have formed shackles of ruthless rules and rituals which bind their aspirants and which restrict freedom of the soul to mingle with the free spirit and respond to the inner yearnings.

Then again religion cannot be a liberating force, it is merely a tool which can be exploited easily by a select few to hold sway over many. Also most people are simpletons, they believe that by merely uttering some meaningless chants or merely adhering to doctrines, dogmas etc. they attain heaven or salvation. Only a very few can comprehend what true religion is all about and even fewer succeed in attaining the realization. As it is said in Gita - Of millions only thousands truly seek, of thousands only a few get.

Scriptures are difficult to understand and subjected to multiple interpretation. Only a true man of god can interprete scriptures, not the scholars or ordinary priests. When these latter people try interprete scriptures it becomes disastrous as they often take the literal meaning or force feed their own interpretations, and thereby make lives of others miserable, by asking them to follow the prescribed rules.
Every soul in this universe seeks freedom. Any activity or dictat that restricts freedom cannot be the means of attaining it. Those who are involved in petty politics and regulating day to day social norms of people cannot realize god and hence have no moral authority. And yet, a large majority of people obey them,thinking that they are pious and following the doctrines, merely because very few have got the capacity of seeking and understanding the truth. They are content to follow their leaders. It is like the Upanishad's example of a blind leading another blind, both falling ultimately into the same pit. It is only a fool who would assert that his path is the only path or a better path than others and the rest would have to follow that. The supreme being is not so restrictive as to pass favours to only the "chosen ones", it is available to all who seeks it with true devotion. The attitude of my religion is holier than yours is much like a child's claim of his toy is bigger than the other fellow's.However most established religions broke into several sects or paths, while professing all along to be the "only true path".

Religion also restricts openness and confines the thoughts to narrow boundaries. Thats why there were so many tussles between scientific thoughts and semitic religions as they were less prone to accept anything outside their doctrines. Take for instance the battle over theory of evolution or the heliocentric universe. Several mystics from had been prosecuted by the established religions because of their direct experience which did not conform to the preached doctrines. These mystics only have a few followers but they understand and respect other religions and are much more tolerant than others who decried these mystics. There is a striking similarity in the experiences of mystics from various backgrounds, the essential theme is unity with the divinity which is stranegly very similar to the experiences narrated in Upanishads by the sages and is the core of the Vedantic philosophy. However that theme is anathema to the established religions.