Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The Religion of Future - Atheism+Advaitism !

I love the Atheists. They are a breed who dare to challenge any funny stories about dependence on God. They are individuals who dare to stand on their own feet rejecting all hearsay about supernatural powers controlling their future. They design their destiny and hold themselves responsible for success and failure unlike most of the theists. They are intellectuals, who believed that anything and everything is within oneself and one has to continuously challenge oneself and evolve. The arguments between theists and atheists is legendary. Much nonsense had been said about these atheists. Theists call them "infiedels" while many label them as "Satan's children" while unsure about the existence and morphology of Satan ! Recently I had been reading some literature on Advaita Vedanta and it suddenly struck me out of the blue that Atheists are actually Advaita Vedantins in action! Read on if you are struck with this argument...
Atheism
To have an insight about what is atheism, one needs to tackle the question of origin of God. The theists may not like it, but the concept of God never evolved as a unifying force of love, but as a unifying force of fear. God was a mental construct of a personality who is always on a judge's seat deciding the rightness and the wrongness of activities and giving the relevant rewards and punishments. The worse part is no one can see HIM !! So one never knows from where does the reward and punishment comes from. Hence it forces man to be submissive to a unknown power without knowing the origin and the implications. This ignorance was highly abused by the priestly class who made bucks, turned their own lucks by playing with the fortunes of millions in the name of God. As a reaction to these painful incidents, a group of individuals refused to believe in this "Godly" concept anymore and thus rose the school of atheists. These people aptly beleived that "God was a fanciful imagination who is a product of human cognition and the perfection it can achieve". Just view at the definition critically and let the Dashavataras of Vishnu dance through your mind ! You will find it to be so true! First there was a fish - an aquatic animal, then the tortoise - an amphibian, followed by the boar - a mammal, then Balarama - symbolising that strength is power, then Rama - an ideal man who behaves according to prescribed law, Krishna - who uses his brain to create laws, Buddha - who goes beyond laws and at last Kalki - who symbolises elimination of evil anyway is the path. Well you see that as man develops and matures in his faculties his Gods change! The old one becomes irrelevant and the new one takes His place depending upon the existing cognitive maturity and the perfection wanted. God is thus a dynamic concept and is thus a product to match, a frame of reference for personal evaluation and not a person to be scared. This also explains why different societies have different Gods, for their maturity level was different. So while the Jews proclaimed Jehova as unforgiving and ruthless, Jesus proclaimed Him as loving and a Father. It basically differentiated the maturity level of Jesus with respect to the Jews. Thus atheism volumnously propagates the growth and expansion of human mind to achieve its highest power of comprehending anything and everything.
Advaita Vedanta
This is by far one of the greatest contributions of Hindu philosophy to mankind. Advaita Vedanta basically says that the entire world is just a mental construction of the individual. If you recognise the existence of a sky, it exists for you but if you do not recognise, well it does not exist. So if you realise that you are God, well you become so and thats what Shankara means when he says that realization can be got right here and right now ! So all of us belong to that Supreme Atman if we recognise ourselves to be. And after recognition, we realise that we are indeed BIG individuals who cannot be limited in this fleshy cover. We are indeed FREE beings who control rather than being controlled. We are PERFECT to the core. So as you think so you are - dust you think, dust you are; God you think, God you are!
Just analyze both the thoughts processes of Atheism and Advaita Vedanta. You will see that both of them are literally speaking the same tongue. Both emphasize that the individual is supreme and can be what it wants to be. The individual is the master and makes his/her own destiny. In the end, it is the conquest of human mind - master the mind to be a mastermind! Both force you to think hard on your follies and direct you towards perfection. Atheism is indeed Advaita Vadanta in practice.
The Synthesis
But there is a problem here. Though atheism speaks of perfection, yet where does it derive its frame of reference for perfection from? What is the motivating force for atheists to change and perfect themselves? With what do they compare themselves with to improvise themselves? Usually in these circumstances the atheists take one of the "successful" persons in the society as the benchmark, but how to evaluate that "success"? These are some questions that atheists need to tackle and then they will find that however they may define God, but He is more complete a benchmark where all of us aspire and can be. So I say Atheism is nothing but fragmented Advaita Vedanta.
In the end, I would like to say that we have actually reached a point where we can integrate the two so called conflicting schools of thoughts to evolve a religion that can be practiced to achieve perfection. God is nothing but an ideal man. He is a benchmark each one of us should evalute oneself and try to reach. He is a milestone to be crossed and atheism provides the fastest way to reach the milestone. For it realizes that every power to cross the milestone is within oneself and hence it forces individuals to continuously challenge oneself to be the best and march towards perfection.