Preserve India’s multi-religious culture

Religion should have made human beings Divine, but it is not even making them human. The moment man became religious it should have been the end of all conflict, but unfortunately, religion has become one of the main source of conflict everywhere in the world. In past thousand years religion has taken the maximum number of lives and caused the maximum amount of pain and suffering on the planet.
In many ways, today religion has become like a political party. This has only brought hatred, conflict, and separation among people. Today in the world the moment we utter the word “religion”, we are thinking of “which religion, do you belong to?”
The moment you belong to a group, it is natural that you want to protect your group. It is a very basic human instinct. Once you are identified with a particular group, you are always a threat to another group, you become an enemy to the others. Maybe you will talk to each other and you will be okay with each other, but the moment the lines are crossed, fight is inevitable.
So, you will see that the same people who are together today, suddenly separate the moment they identify with their respective religions. Ten minutes ago, they did not even think about such a thing, but the moment they get identified to some religious group, they are willing to fight and burn each other’s homes. If they did not belong to these groups, at least they would have no reason to fight. Maybe individuals would fight for some personal reasons, that is different, but whole groups of people would have no reason to fight and this kind of mass stimulation of animal energy would not happen.
Even though all religions started as an inward path, over time they have got twisted-up and have simply become a set of beliefs. Though all religions preach about the value of human life, unfortunately, today people are willing to take each other’s lives for the sake of the very same religion. This is only because people have taken to believing in something that is not a reality for them. This has become the basis of all conflict.
Wherever I go people keep asking me, “Sadhguru, is it not important, we should have one religion on the planet?” Just one religion – that is what lot of people are trying to create. I say, “No, that would be a horrible world.” I would say that we need 6.5 billion religions in world today and we do not have enough of them! That is because religion is an inward step; it is not something that you do on the street.
Religion is not something that you do on the outside. Religion is not something that you organise like a political party. It is an inward step; something very intimate that a human being does within himself; it is a step towards your creator which only you can take by yourself. You cannot take a crowd of people inward. Methods can be established, guidelines can be set in the society, but if we get identified with a particular process and think, “This is it, everybody should follow it” then we will break the fundamentals of why religion was created.
The moment religion gets organised, it becomes tyrannical in many ways. Once they take the stance of conquest, they are only into a process of conquering humanity rather than serving it. This is the manifestation that you are seeing in the world today - excessively organised and ambitious religious processes, which are taking a huge toll on the planet. They have broken humanity in ways. Human beings are divided so badly amongst themselves that it almost looks like you can never fix it. Unfortunately, this desire and ambition to conquer the whole world someday is the fundamental doctrine which guides most religion today.
So can religions not co-exist at all? The night terrorists created mayhem in Mumbai, I was driving back to Coimbatore from a small temple-town named Dharmasthala in Karnataka, after speaking at a multi-religious meet. Dharmasthala is a fantastic example of multi-religious co-existence? A Jain family runs a Shiva Temple that is cared for by Vaishnavite Brahmins and venerated by millions of Hindus.
The Heggades, who run the temple, are doing a truly wonderful job of it. But the multi-religiousness you see there is not just because of the generosity or magnanimity of one family. It is the outcrop of an entire culture, because I am sure that the thousands of devotees who visit the place each day bow down to the Jain saint Bahubali at the top of the hill with the same devotion and dedication as they bow down to Lord Manjunatha at the foothills.
True religion or spirituality does not require the crutches of secularism or multi-religiousness. It is ingrained in our culture. Secularism is an invention of the West - a need for respite from the hegemony of over-ambitious and aggressive religions that have ruled there for centuries.
When St. Thomas landed on the Malabar Coast in the 1st century AD, it was not secularism that welcomed him. When the persecuted Parsis and Jews from the Middle-East sought refuge in India, it was not the tag of multi-religiousness that protected them. When Gautama Buddha actively denounced prevailing Hindu practices 2,500 years ago and created a whole new order of 40,000 monks with lakhs of followers, he was continuously challenged to debates, but no one ever thought of eliminating him.
What the West glorifies as secularism today is something that has always been deeply ingrained in the ethos of this land. It is from this context that this culture grew. They called this Sanathana Dharma, which means an eternal religion that will always be relevant. This is the only culture that allows a person the freedom to choose his own God – a man God, woman God, animal God, tree God or whatever. This freedom was allowed in this culture. That is why it was referred to as an eternal religion.
Only if each person has the freedom to choose his own religion and his religion is not organised by somebody else, will you see deeply religious people who are not fanatics. Only then the fundamental purpose of having a religion is satisfied.
Religion is not about God; it is about bringing a certain quality in you to make you worshipful and reverential towards life. The important thing in life is that you learn to be reverential to life around you; you learn to sing the praise of life and bow down to every aspect of life which nurtures you and that which is the basis of your existence right now. The object of reverence is irrelevant. If you make reverence the quality of your life, then you become far more receptive to life and life will happen to you in bigger ways.
Constantly, there is talk of the dangers of mixing religion and politics. Again this is something that is alien to our culture, historically, in the East, spirituality or religion was never an organised process. Organisation was only to the extent of making spirituality available to everybody – there was never an organised conquest. Because religion is about you, religion is about your liberation, and God is just one more tool to find your ultimate liberation.
So in indigenous cultures, religion was never juxtaposed against the state. If you look at it, in the past, religion was far more important to people than it is now. Large number of people lived just for their faith. But still there were no theocratic states in India. The ruler had his religion and the subjects had the freedom to follow theirs. There was no conflict because people did not look at religion as an organised process.
Today, organisation is coming in even in these cultures because of the examples of very ambitious and conquering religions that came from outside. The way religion is practiced today, you cannot really dissociate it from politics, because in a way today religion is politics. We have a situation where politicians are openly and proudly calling themselves as “Hindu leaders” or “Muslim leaders” or “Christian leaders”. Once this is the situation, religion becomes a matter of number games and another disguise for politics.
This has reached a point where, unfortunate electoral politics and national interests seem to be poised to oppose each other to a point that our very nationhood is threatened. If this is encouraged or even allowed, this will spell doom not only for the political stability of the country, but also for the spiritual possibilities for individuals. If we fail to handle this without the needed balance, polarisation of the nation on religious grounds will become a widespread and ugly reality, for which we as a nation will pay a heavy price.
Today, I feel a time has come where there is sufficient intellect on the planet with which we can re-examine the very fundamentals of religion. Because religions of the world are not about pitching one man’s belief against another, but an opportunity and a possibility for human beings of all hues and colours, of various stages of evolution, understanding, and experience to reach to their common ultimate source. Just as many colours of the rainbow are an outcome of one pure light, the many religions of the world are an expression of one divine source.
We don’t need more Hindus or more Christians or more Muslims in the world today. We need more Buddhas, more Jesuses, and more Krishnas – the real ones. We need live ones. That is when true change will happen on the planet. And becoming that is a potential that every human being carries within himself, because who they were is also the innermost nature of every human being.
May all of us have the necessary sense and wisdom to prevent this beautiful, vibrant and all accepting culture of ours from mayhem caused by religious bigotry and conflict.

The writer is the founder of Isha Foundation.

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