A few days ago I was meditating about my own identity. Who am I really? For a long time I was known in the USA as a Resident Alien. The term, resident alien, came from the Alien Registration Card, more popularly known as the green card, denoting the status of a permanent resident. In the USA I was an Indian, in India I was an American. Over the years I began to see myself as an alien in that I feel terribly uncomfortable with a great deal of hypocrisy that goes on around me. By no means I want to imply here that I myself am free of all hypocrisy. At this point I can only say that I am striving to get rid of as much of it as I can. Also, I have great difficulty with the organized, institutionalized, strictly regimented religion that I was born in, and to that I devoted most of my adult life. As years passed I began to see my religion with its rigid doctrines, medieval theology, rituals, and practices more like the Pharisaism Christ condemned in his days. So I opted for spirituality beyond religions. It is a simple spirituality with a simple theology: 1. See and respect everyone as God’s children who are designed to join God out of their own free will, 2. Love humanity and live one’s life according to God’s will as communicated to one’s duly formed conscience, 3. Use this world’s natural resources wisely and frugally without exploitation of anyone, and share them with others especially with the needy.
The question then is: How many of us can live a life that is not defined by our religion, culture, nationality, and race? Not many. My own best estimate is that about 99.99 per cent of humanity are defined by external determinants, and only, perhaps, .01 per cent are determined by internal factors. And those .01 per cent, in my thinking, are not of this world. They cannot be contained or defined by any nationality, race, religion, or culture. In a world where truth does not matter, corruption abounds, and criminals get away, all of us may wonder once in a while whether we belong to this world. But when a religion that is supposed to connect us with God is practiced more and more for social acceptance and worldly prestige, I have no doubt that we are not facing reality. When the man born blind was healed by Christ, his parents did not want to acknowledge Christ for fear of being put out of the Jewish synagogue (John, Chapter 9).
That is why we in the ashram are looking for an alternate mode of living that is more congruent with our ideals. We think our community life paves the way for future forms of religious and/or spiritual living. Practically speaking, we attempt to live a simple community life of spiritualty following the will of God on the basis of our own rigorous discernment using the available knowledge and wisdom coming from the treasury of human heritage. We in the ashram pooling our resources come from different cultures, nationalities, religions. We, married as well as celibates, have not come together due to blood relationships. We heartily accept everything good that comes from everywhere. We choose to live this life and celebrate it because we find it highly satisfying and fulfilling in a world that is confined and limited by so many “narrow domestic walls” as Tagore described. We believe and earnestly think that we are representing realities beyond this world that humanity needs to march towards.
Swami Snehananda Jyoti
No comments:
Post a Comment