Unable to comprehend infinity, we invented God.
Unable to experience God, we invented Religion.
In religion we found a graspable rope that reached all the way up to an imagined heaven.
Religion packages spirituality, that experience of the dazzling oneness with the universe, into something we can touch, feel, pray to, dress up for and fast in the name of. Religion is the most successful packaged good in the world, bar none.
The trouble with spirituality is that it is too raw, too freely available and too overwhelming. Without a label, it is a contagious form of madness that threatens the order implicit in the formation of the societies. Religion organises the quest for the spiritual even as it reduces it. A cursory look at the structure of most religious tells us their packaged nature. Most religions have a centralised text, one or a set of hallowed locations, a hierarchy of middlemen who interpret the religion for the layman, prescribed rituals that pave the way for divine access, a tangible form in which what it sells can be experienced, vast “showrooms” where the magnificence of the product is enthrallingly on display and a set of everyday rules that convert the abstraction of divinity into simple precepts of behaviour.
Steeples that touch the sky, temples that dwarf us with their grandeur, bells that advertise the presence of something otherwise ineffable, smells that wrap themselves around us; religion uses all our senses to speak to us. We not only consume religion, but are in turn consumed by it. We “become” the religion for we give it the status of carrying our primary identities. The social uses of religion go way beyond the spiritual; it allows for societies to be structured around a powerful organising principle.
For all the undeniable uses, religion fractures even as it heals. On the one hand, it allows millions of people a taste of the infinite and on the other hand it divides them, often into implacably opposed rituals. Because of its deeply embedded legitimacy, religion has the potential to override humanism and allow us to feel that we have a right, nay, a responsibility to defend our faith at all costs.
On the other hand, spirituality is an elusive experience. Without religion as our vehicle, we struggle to find other means of reaching there. We try and shrug off everything that is material and worldly in the hope that we can find this apparently pervasive but frustratingly evasive ladder. Unable to listen to the sound of the wholeness amidst the clamour of our lives, we escape to a place where we can focus on the sounds from within. This is often useful and is perhaps a less divisive way than religion. But if to be spiritual is to be whole then the material cannot be the opposite of the spiritual; it has to be its ingredient. The quest for oneness cannot lay down as a pre-requisite for the shedding of anything for how is one whole then?
At a personal level, there have often been times when one has caught a fleeting glimpse, a tantalizing flash of what it must be to feel this surging sense of oneness with the universe. Religion for me raises too many questions for it to be a vehicle of choice. Music or poetry, on the other hand, somehow allows me to transcend the “here-and-now ness” of one’s everyday existence and offers a connection to something universal. It is as if we forego our belongingness to this world for a temporary citizenship of the universe. Mountains too have the same effect for somehow they re-scale human beings into the puny things we are.
Every road to the infinite comes with its own constraints. To reach the infinite though the finite, can never be easy. We all look our own ways and as the noise in the world grows to cacophonic proportions, this quest will only grow.
My preferred way – music and mountains. Preferably music in the mountains. Or perhaps contemplating poetry under the serenading blue sky.
Unable to experience God, we invented Religion.
In religion we found a graspable rope that reached all the way up to an imagined heaven.
Religion packages spirituality, that experience of the dazzling oneness with the universe, into something we can touch, feel, pray to, dress up for and fast in the name of. Religion is the most successful packaged good in the world, bar none.
The trouble with spirituality is that it is too raw, too freely available and too overwhelming. Without a label, it is a contagious form of madness that threatens the order implicit in the formation of the societies. Religion organises the quest for the spiritual even as it reduces it. A cursory look at the structure of most religious tells us their packaged nature. Most religions have a centralised text, one or a set of hallowed locations, a hierarchy of middlemen who interpret the religion for the layman, prescribed rituals that pave the way for divine access, a tangible form in which what it sells can be experienced, vast “showrooms” where the magnificence of the product is enthrallingly on display and a set of everyday rules that convert the abstraction of divinity into simple precepts of behaviour.
Steeples that touch the sky, temples that dwarf us with their grandeur, bells that advertise the presence of something otherwise ineffable, smells that wrap themselves around us; religion uses all our senses to speak to us. We not only consume religion, but are in turn consumed by it. We “become” the religion for we give it the status of carrying our primary identities. The social uses of religion go way beyond the spiritual; it allows for societies to be structured around a powerful organising principle.
For all the undeniable uses, religion fractures even as it heals. On the one hand, it allows millions of people a taste of the infinite and on the other hand it divides them, often into implacably opposed rituals. Because of its deeply embedded legitimacy, religion has the potential to override humanism and allow us to feel that we have a right, nay, a responsibility to defend our faith at all costs.
On the other hand, spirituality is an elusive experience. Without religion as our vehicle, we struggle to find other means of reaching there. We try and shrug off everything that is material and worldly in the hope that we can find this apparently pervasive but frustratingly evasive ladder. Unable to listen to the sound of the wholeness amidst the clamour of our lives, we escape to a place where we can focus on the sounds from within. This is often useful and is perhaps a less divisive way than religion. But if to be spiritual is to be whole then the material cannot be the opposite of the spiritual; it has to be its ingredient. The quest for oneness cannot lay down as a pre-requisite for the shedding of anything for how is one whole then?
At a personal level, there have often been times when one has caught a fleeting glimpse, a tantalizing flash of what it must be to feel this surging sense of oneness with the universe. Religion for me raises too many questions for it to be a vehicle of choice. Music or poetry, on the other hand, somehow allows me to transcend the “here-and-now ness” of one’s everyday existence and offers a connection to something universal. It is as if we forego our belongingness to this world for a temporary citizenship of the universe. Mountains too have the same effect for somehow they re-scale human beings into the puny things we are.
Every road to the infinite comes with its own constraints. To reach the infinite though the finite, can never be easy. We all look our own ways and as the noise in the world grows to cacophonic proportions, this quest will only grow.
My preferred way – music and mountains. Preferably music in the mountains. Or perhaps contemplating poetry under the serenading blue sky.
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