We live in a world full of people desperately hanging on to stringent belief systems only to keep their identities intact. Each one anxiously looking for something to latch on to or something to believe in. We’d do with anything that works in favor of the ego; anything that strengthens its illusive sense of self; that upholds the idea of ‘my rightness’ and ‘his/her wrongness’.
At the heart of all religion lies a universal message however badly smeared with convenient misinterpretations and customised ideologies. Through countless dusty layers of misconceptions shines the light, however faintly, of the intrinsic oneness of all life.
Over two thousand years ago, a few wise men happened to identify this light, and tried in their most humble endeavours to share the truth they saw with their fellowmen. But overlooking the larger picture, the fellowmen christened the message as ‘religion’, and tailored them as per the never-ending demands of their egos. An idea meant to promote simplicity and purity of the external form came to be interpreted as “‘My’ religion requires me to practice modesty by wearing a burqa. So all you ‘other’ women who choose to live otherwise, are contributing to a collective soiling of minds. That makes ‘me’ a superior being than ‘you’”. The ego extracted what it wanted out of the mind. It feels better – momentarily.
Missing the entire point, religion came to bring about more violence and hatred amongst mankind in the name of faith and further augmented the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Restrained by the narrow vision that their egos allowed them, people made distressed attempts to hold on to something to identify with, and stooped to the level of creating God in his own image and that infinite, unfathomable force was attributed as having eyes and ears and a physical human form, and began to be worshiped as ‘My’ God. And with that, came the fundamental assumption of ‘my’ god, ‘my’ religion preaching the absolute truth.
At the base of all conflict between humans, tribes, nations – lies the assumption of being in possession of this truth, and the unfortunate inability to accommodate a different opinion in the sphere of truth. More so in the case of nations in conflict, which fanatically choose to see themselves as right, often as a victim, and hence the other as evil, to the extent of feeling justified in resorting to violence to silence this so called evil inflicting pain upon ‘us’. While on the one hand, man made rapid advances through seemingly useful inventions, on the other hand, he felt the necessity to create weapons of mass destruction. Nations, each obsessed with their own versions of truth, found it appropriate to accumulate nuclear power on the pretext of self defense. And in the mission to eradicate ‘evil’, they turned into the very thing that they claimed they were fighting.
Today, we stand as distinct communities well-equipped to kill our own kind. Distinct, yet the same; suffering from a common lack of consciousness of the very insanity that defines our existence on this planet, which was once meant to be treated as home.
