Exploring Religion Without An Intermediary

                                                                                                *Saumitra Mohan

            Things are definitely better today than the Hobbesian ‘State of Nature’ or the medieval era when there were sanguinary wars and internecine conflicts among different communities for supremacy and control over vast tracts of territories and human congeries. However, as civilization advanced, superior values and understanding brought better sense among humans to lead a more harmonious life in peaceful coexistence even with people who did not share the same values, ethics, ideals, standards and principles.

            With the onset of a globalized world and faster means of communications, a better interpersonal and inter-community relationship was expected in human society. Nevertheless, what we are witnessing today is far from inspiring. All the Panglossian optimism of ‘End of History’ with the triumph of liberal democratic values towards the end of last millennium seems to have been hugely compromised with Huntingtonion ‘Clash of Civilization’ looming large on the horizon. The ascendancy of right-wing forces and authoritarian regimes all across the globe belie all the expectations of discovering the proverbial ‘Pot of Gold’ at the end of the rainbow.

            If we look at the various insidious developments around us, all the gains made through the long-drawn struggle to make our lives better and more orderly appear to have been squandered. These gains are slowly being chipped away through recidivist and revisionist relapse to the seamier times of human history. The parochial forces seem to be gaining sway over the liberal values by way of an ominous rolling back of the constructive gains made thus far. Brexit, Grexit, a truncated Kyoto Protocol, an emaciated European Union and other regional groupings, a toothless United Nations and mounting international discord - all point to the shape of things to come.

            It is against this bleak backdrop that we find a sinister avatar of religion suddenly taking centre-stage for all the wrong reasons. While religion ought to have been utilised as an instrument for consolidating and integrating human society, it has actually been playing a diametrically opposite role. Many social scientists feel that religion should be least important for the present civilization which is richly endowed with advanced education, knowledge, information and improved means of communication; it is actually exercising more disturbing influence over our policies and policymakers today.

            While many of us thought that religion would slowly die down with an increasingly modernizing and liberalizing world, the same is just not happening. Religion has intelligently mutated and survived. This is because after a basic level of affluence and cultural growth, humans have a natural tendency to expand. Once the basics of survival are mastered, humans start looking to extend and expand their limits. As an intelligent living being, the humans have an unbounded capacity to keep stretching the existential frontiers of their being. But they baulk at a point when science and technology stop supplying them with the much required explanations and rationalisations for unresolved mysteries of divine Creation.

            And it is here that the cult of the occult and arcane comes to the fore. Since nothing authoritative is known about unknown dimensions of our infinite Cosmos or its Creator, people start groping in the dark, accepting and believing whatever comes their way. It is here that the charlatans and imposters take advantage of our gullibility by dishing out half-baked knowledge which goes against the very grain of a civilized society.

            Belonging to different religions or beliefs, today we are pitched against one another without comprehending the reason or rationale for the same. Like the few blind men describing an elephant as per their own constricting vision, there are today different blind men dealing in diverse religious and spiritual truths while offering their own blinkered vision as the final truth, something which has brought us all to the present sorry pass and something we must all guard against.

            Religion being the primeval laws and being something which controls the mundane aspects of our quotidian life even today, it needs to be approached with care and consideration. As long as education and knowledge were the preserve of the privileged few, the same was understandable. However, now that we have the benefit of a progressive wisdom from an enlightened and advanced education relatively more accessible than ever before, should we not try to understand the religion ourselves rather than through some bogus middlemen who often try to con us into believing something to advance their own selfish interests?

            Instead of seeing it through the compromised prism of some vested interests, we should approach it directly. It is high time that we get out of the patronizing influence of these ‘Brokers of Religion’ to give it the importance it deserves to explore the mysteries of the Divine to discover the divinity within ourselves through gradual movement from our sundry imperfections to divine perfection.

            It is because of a garbled understanding of religion and attendant values that we have all the existential turmoil in the society today. It is advisable that the seekers after the truth and Divine Drama should browse the wisdom enshrined in various religious scriptures and tomes themselves to get a direct insight into the same. We should not only try to understand our own religion diligently, but that of others as well. It is only then can we actually realize and appreciate the functional and spiritual significance of religion.

            Such an exploration into the inscrutable Divine has often revealed profound insights about the ageless Creation to Indian mystics. There are many spiritual dimensions of our cosmos that we don’t fathom though the same has recently become scientifically amenable as done by many scholars through an intelligent correlation between Quantum Physics and spiritualism. If we can all understand religion in its right perspective, we could easily see the basic truth and unity among them all.

            Many well-read people and scholars think it infra dig to attest to any religion or discuss spiritual issues as they find the same beyond the domain of logic and reason. Notwithstanding the humans only being capable of uplifting themselves through gradual spiritual evolution to eventually merge with the Divine; still very few indulge in the same. But lack of a drive for self-exploration into the realms of the Divine has led to the rise of thousands of cults and sects which promise different revelations of the Divine as also seen in India through popularity of various ‘Babas’ and Gurus.

            The sudden proliferation of these Godmen and divine middlemen is actually a reflection of the void that human find in their lives after they reach a certain level of affluence and contentment like Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. While most of these so-called Gurus and Godmen are phony, some are really genuine. Through a conscious judgement and discretion, we should start engaging in spiritual discourse and discussion over such matters to discover the truths and import behind this huge Creation otherwise we shall remain doomed to be stuck in ‘history’ as Francis Fukuyama once declaimed.

            Hinduism, as the oldest of all religions, is said to be the most federal of all religions because of a rich traditions of exploring multiplicity of ways to discover the divine within. With march of time, all religions of the world have benefited from the wisdom of each other. Whatever be the truth, if we really wish to advance and survive as an intelligent being to move further in the evolution stepladder, it is advisable that we often start approaching and understanding religion without the instrumentality of an intermediary amongst us.