Some believe that ‘Oneness’ of God is an essential basis of belief because none can share his uniqueness (Monotheism). therefore creation is only a product and a reflection of His omnipotence (Dualism – of the creator and his creation being distinct). Others believe that divinity is manifested as many (Polytheism). Yet others believe that divinity is ubiquitous, the divine force being everywhere in the smallest atom and the largest cosmic construct(Pantheism) – It is within us as our soul, our innermost essence (Monism). For them the creator and his creation are not separate but one unity ( Non-Dualism).
These are interesting distinctions over which wars can and have been fought through history and people have been put to the sword or bullet or crucified. What do these views have in common? Whether ones faith consists in bowing to an external entity or to an internal essence, essentially the nature of the prayer remains the same – a process of purification, communion and spiritual experience.
Then there are beliefs in a Day of Judgement or in rebirth and transmigration of the soul. In the one case, after death the soul remains in a kind of limbo till the end of time and the arrival of all souls before the throne of the Almighty for judgement, when rewards and punishments will be meted out – heaven, Hell or Purgatory. In the other, there is the dynamics of Karma, automatically taking care of this process, with reaction precisely matching your actions from life-time to life-time – Heaven and Hell and all in between, are meted out in the incarnations you earn. For the latter, the bliss of the ultimate Heaven consists in the disappearance of Ego and merger with the true Essence of the Almighty at the termination of the illusion of being.
Again, Angels and Archangels are also common, though they may assume different cultural forms. Angels with wings or without. In the one, he may be Gabriel, whispering the words of God. In the other a monkey-faced ‘Hanuman’, the devoted worshiper of his Lord Rama the divine incarnation. He too is there to guide and protect one from evil, like Gabriel.
There is the conception of ‘Avatar’ or divine incarnation when the Almighty suffers descent into the material world, incarnating as a human and subject to all the laws of material existence from birth to death, pleasures and pains and all the ‘pairs of opposites’, for a purpose – to stand out as an example when evil and anarchy have crossed certain limits. On the other hand, there is the concept of prophet. Now if you were a theologian, you could split hair about conceptual differences but if you wish to recognize how similar the purport of the messages are, you would say there is hardly much difference between the concept of the supreme spirit reincarnating or being born to man through an immaculate conception as son of the supreme spirit.
The point is that the hereafter or spiritual concepts are nothing really to fight about. You may look at the truth from many angles and it still remains the truth, much like the same thing said in a foreign tongue may sound different. The same thing that is being said is that we are more than our physical selves, that we have responsibility for our actions and will reap the consequences. All faiths speak of the importance of overcoming our egos and our selfish preoccupations, in order to expand our consciousness into something larger and nobler than merely catering to our desires.
The Ego is tested in tolerance. Claims to great spirituality and faith are hollow or imperfect when the faith is dogmatic and worse when one is bigoted When one feels impelled to kill in the service of faith, the providence in whose name we perpetuate such atrocity, doubtless must shudder, much like one would if one’s son were to return home with bloodied hands and say ”father, I have just killed to protect your honour”.
No one should have the arrogance to claim that his faith is the only divinely ordained one and imagine that he alone is therefore God’s chosen one. To feel superior with the beliefs one holds over the beliefs of others and to hold others in contempt as inferior, to scorn and belittle others and mock them, is the true sign of an inferior. On the other hand to listen and appreciate and seek out the gold in the belief of others with the awe and wonder of an explorer of diverse horizons, is the mark of a superior spirituality.
Religions are great ideologies that civilize, that teach us humility and restraint. From religions arise morality, law, art and ideals.
Religions are different, not because some got it right while others have not. They are different because the circumstances of peoples and cultures differ and their needs for corrective action differ. Different faiths serve the needs and circumstances of different peoples and cultures in the regions they inhabit and at the level of spirituality best suited to them with which they are comforted and feel comfortable. They all serve the same divine purpose of giving solace to man in the trials and tribulations of physical life. They all try to help him become more civilized and less egotistical. If one wishes to move from one faith to another that is his right provided there is no coercion or compulsion.
Finally let us not insult spirituality by pitting religious beliefs, one against another. Let us believe that God himself created the difference for a reason – roses here, chrysanthemums there and just green leaves and grass over there. Let us respect spiritual diversity even as in the natural order. Remember, no two faces were created alike, no two fingerprints.
I don’t consider Hinduism or Buddhism religions as much as philosophy because they allow a great deal of freedom of thought to their members. Members have the right to question teachings not often afforded to the religious. Religions are threatened by questioning by anybody because they have always claimed the exclusive achievement of absolute truth and does not always hold up well under criticism based upon evidence and facts.
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thanks for your interesting comment. True spirituality both embraces and transcends all religions and is akin to science – as Einstein said:
” Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
on Hinduism he said :
”I have made the Gita as the main source of my inspiration and guide for the purpose of scientific investigation and formation of my theories.”
and what inspires me most in understanding ‘Spirit’ is his quote:
Science without religion is lame
Religion without science is blind”
and again:
”the more I study science
The more I believe in God”
but he did not believe in a personal God, though he felt spiritually inspired.
To conclude, I believe that the Spirit is science and science is spirit.
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When I was born I first realized that I was a body inhabiting a world that surrounded me. I was physical as was much of the world as I was capable of witnessing and experiencing it. This was the beginning of philosophy for me. The interactions within my physical world led to beliefs about the apparent internal and external orders about me and from this I observed consistencies and coherence. The simple acceptance that the world is coherent implies it has meaning, but I for one do not claim to have uncovered what this meaning is!
The philosophy of science is called scientific materialism. The philosophy of math is the result of the philosophy of logic. Philosophy is the source of all belief systems that exist including religion. Philosophy then is the original and most important inquiry into knowledge, not science nor religion.
Physical existence seems to me synonymous with spirit, and that spirit occupies all existence as a result, because they are likely the same thing….energies interacting within the framework of space. Life itself is not a fixed thing, but a process. Apparently a chemical process driven into existence by the highly charged energy rich aqueous environment in which we live. It is driven above all by charge separations driving towards entropic minimums. In some energy states we are happy, and in others we are not!
We are not separate, independent entities capable of self- preservation as we are often led to believe. We are rather borrowed from the very material of the earth itself being animated and maintained by much larger forces. It seems overwhelming, but the simple desire to struggle within this context determines your spirituality.
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Indeed yes – philosophy is the pattern of thought that evolves and crystallizes in our minds when we interact with our environment and experiences. All intellectual products rely on such a process, whether religion, theology, science or other disciplines. If these experiences lead us to believe not merely in the apparent physical reality in which we exist but in something more latent and difficult of definition say the metaphysical, then we begin to gain spiritual insight – this is aided by religion which presents cosmologies which like minded people have over millennia presented or by the discoveries of science. While these influence our beliefs, as you say, in the ultimate analysis it is our personal experiences that finally determine what will be the nature of our spirituality – thus I may partly adhere to some Hindu beliefs, some christian ones and some new age beliefs – as they appeal to my individual experience – in the end my spirituality will not be only Hindu but much more, or even be aspiritual and totally materialistic – that will depend on me and you.
Incidentally I am glad you have returned to enrich the commentary on this blog.
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The basis of spirituality is physical. My spirituality is affected by what I drink, what I eat, the company I keep, the condition of my general health, the amount of fresh air and sunshine I am exposed to, the TV shows that I watch, the hours I work, the hours I sleep, the number of beers I consume, the stimulation of the people around me and the weather. But also, my belief system(spirituality) provides my attitude in dealing with these things. I do not think your belief system can possibly be stronger than everything else upon which you depend and are surrounded by… to be so it would have to be infinitely strong. I make no pretense that I am anything other than limited and that external forces may always crush my spirituality if I am too bold and do not protect it from external forces!
If you consider that life is a process and not a thing, in the same way that stellar fusion is a process and not a thing. Then life is a process that channels energy through certain chemical pathways. The one common to all life, without exception is the Kreb’s cycle. This is the main fundamental energy channel that supports all living processes, and the evolution of higher multi-cellular living forms is the result of increasing the feedback loops that support this one central process.
I think that consciousness works in a similar way in that consciousness is the main energy pathway that can be supported by feedback into the main channel. It can be enhanced by your friends and enemies as well as impeded or blocked. In the end it is all about energy flow, everywhere within and about us, even thinking and spirituality itself.
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Feedback is an important concept. Quite often a belief system can be more important than all else.
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Indrajit,
Have you seen any of Rupert Sheldrakes work on Morphic Fields, or looked at the science of Noetics?
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Robert
I wrote a post on the subject some time back and if I remember correctly you made several comments – I will check to see
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i have checked – you made several comments – i quote one:Interesting to read about Sheldrakes morphogenetic fields and your interpreation of it. Nice hypotheses if we cant explain biological varity and ‘morphic resonance’ by better ones and scientifically proof them.
I like the idea of the ‘two-way-traffic’ and ‘god yearning for the devotees too’.
The post was called:
Biology and Metaphysics : Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic Fields
there you are
Indrajit
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Each spiritual tradition can be seen as an individual facet on the great diamond of reality on Earth. No matter the practice, human beings have a built-in moral compass called the conscience, and every person will live with their following that guidance or not, as the conscience is impossible to ignore in each and every situation. Looking at the Earth from space gives one the awareness that labels have become useless, and that everyone is truly on the same boat (planet).
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Jerry
The analogy of the facets of the diamond is apt.
thanks for your complimentary comment.
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Indrajit,
I’m looking for an article that I haven’t found again. It stated that as a result of experimental research that the second law of thermodynamics has been falsified. The result was experimentally achieved and indicates in a system of increasing disorder that seeds of order were found to form spontaneously within it. This means that in a system of randomness that order self-generates out of chaos….I’ll look for the experiment again. This result contradicts a long standing pillar of modern physics! It also denies that the argument that the process of life contradicts the physical law…it doesn’t because the second law is false!
This provides quite a revolutionary concept of the idea of chaos, and order arising from chaos. I think it also has implications in the development of mind and soul as well.
And to tie the above result in with the development of life on earth is the below article in which the author asserts the self-assembly of life from disorder and randomness.
http://mantlethought.org/content/life-process-not-thing
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Robert
I’m not a scientist at all or claim undrestanding of scientific concepts in depth – but i have as a lay man read on chaos generating patterns of order – the random is not as random as it looks – it has behind it some kind of order that generates patterns – so probably we haven’t yet understood that chaos is a kind of order of a more complex kind – maybe I’m talking nonsense – but then a lot in Quantum physics makes logical thinking turn inside out – no wonder Einstein didd’n’i want to touch it..
No wonder that the great Upanishadic philosophic seers of the 3rd millennium B.C. spoke in parables and appeared to contradict themselves, confounding us with their complex thought – when in philosophy your mind is about to implode with inexplicables then one rises beyond in meditation to resolve the apparent contradictions and things then fall in place quite simply – the spirit in matter is a hard task master.
Incidentally i continue to enjoy your provocative commentaries as before – where have you been/ (lol)
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You may like to read
”Chaos – making a new science”
by James Gleick
Penguin2008
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Thanks Indrajit, The book you mention is in audio-book format on YouTube…I like it because I can loaf about and stuff and listen!
Also you might want to look up Adrian Baaijen and his Fractal Law theory. It’s all about energy flow patterns. Interesting because he applies it equally well in both non-living and living systems. He also applies it to social interactions. I do not see why it should not be applied to spirituality, and consciousness and culture as well.
I’ve been around but haven’t seen any of your posts in my reader for some time now, you just happened to pop up yesterday like MAJIC!!! 🙂
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Ive been around a lot – just visit my site and scroll – why you haven’t seen them in your reader may be because the subjects you choose may be restricted – my blog however shows you as among a handful of most commentating readers – hehe
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Sorry Indrajit,
It was Adrian Bejan and his constructral law!
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Can’t people be moral and good without religions? Given the kind of damage that religions do, why not look for a saner alternative like humanism without religion? Or at least, we should try to humanise religions.
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Of course they can, provided they have intellect and conscience elevated enough to guide them – but do not expect humble folk to have it all – religion has always served the purpose of guiding those who need guidance – you or i may not need such guidance – then its ok – you are on your own – religions do not do damage – it is people who prostitute religion that do. – religions have reform movements to change with the times – but i believe they have always been the fountainhead of humanism – they are the ‘brand’ that sells – humanism without a brand no matter how excellent may find no takers – simple marketing?
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