My religion, our religion.

(via Sunny Narang)  Those who need proof of God are not Sanatanis .

Meera did not need to know where Krishna was born to love him. We don’t need a history certificate for Shiv, Vishnu , Brahma, Durga or Ganesh.

We don’t care when they were born or re-born.

Those who belong to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths have a need to ground their faith in “body” – They need “proof” of “existence” to believe . Their love of God is dependent on a Son or Messenger who has been collectively seen, recognized and stamped upon by bureaucrats of Time .

We don’t and never will.

For we all are the sons and daughters, messengers and manifestations of Divinity. Not only humans but snakes, tortoise, wild boars , tigers , monkeys , trees and shrubs too . Dogs can accompany us to Heaven, while brothers and wife are left behind. We don’t need milestones for true faith, religions are busy storing time and space so no breath is left outside of them , they soon become the millstones around the neck of freedom.

They might occupy all the lands on earth and maybe the moon and Mars too, with their Churches and Mosques , the sanatani believes that the stars are the “diyas” of this cosmic temple.

They might want to convert all of us and our pagan rituals. They hate the infinite diversity of divinity through Nature and as Vivekananda remarked, they can destroy every temple in India and it will not make an iota of difference to our faith. We are “bhakts” of a million “strings” of emotion or “rasa” , dancing around the invisibility of all that truly matters – beauty , love , chemistry , meditative stillness and oceanic energy . These perpetually invisible strings connect the billions of parallel universes of our cosmos.

They might sell and buy everything, quantify , document and secularize life and nature. Make us all a random collective of forces and particles with no particular purpose and suicidal angst . They like Ravan have absolute and total arrogance of “Knowing” and “Doing” , but we will always win back our “Sita” and “Gita” – our deep engagement with faith and life . For our myths are not stories of fiction, they are the most sophisticated psychological , emotional , intellectual and spiritual pathways of me to me , of us to us.

We lost our confidence the moment we pettified our diversity of temperament and being from a free and open dance “maharasa” to a “varna-vyavastha”. We never stopped at the idol, that was our first step to our own universe , it is they who stop at holy books , time-bound ideals , swords and guns. Their blind-faith in the revolution of the machine and the printed word make them into the fingers that press buttons and minds transfixed by virtual brands.

Our brands are our communities of songs and conversations “sampradaya” along our emotional pathways “isht” . We take a “pagdandi” sometimes, a “kumbh” at other times, we oscillate like our seasons , sometimes “tapasvi” , sometimes “ megh”.

They want a constant thermal balance, either air-conditioned or heated . They manufacture humans or try to create a Talibanic Rock against the shifting sands of time.

We celebrate change every instant and know that everything of worth is not catchable or holdable, regardless of the terra-bytes of memory we create. We are not about memory and forgetting, we are a whiff of life – momentary and timeless simultaneously.

Let us not become like the developer-construction mafia, build for the sake of scale and power *. Despite all the pragmatists and think-tanks. We are Sanatan. From forever to forever. Not born, not dead. No Kingdom of God or Devil. No Final Judgement. Only our personal , mutual and collective celebration of life , living and transition to life again. We are not martyrs to any man made theory or construct . We are the flow that floods all that lies in our way.

Forget the courts of law, forget the constitutions , forget the ruins and pathetic histories of hate and victory , of defeat and destruction . Values are alive if humans believe in them, no institution can keep the faith , only humans can. Corporations are about replication, and today every religion and ideology is about market-share . Sanatanis, Sufis and other fellow-travelers just walk , don’t follow or want to be followed.

And invite everyone who is Human. INner, Directed. Unlimited. (H.IN.D.U.) to the Great Dance of Flavours as some of our seers imagined eons ago, as the only viable , harmonious , sustainable way to being and becoming.

* For the Sanatani , the tree is the shadow under which realization takes place , a small shapeless stone can be the form for any imagined love . Your body is the temple.  

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Sunny Narang Ecological Traditions Of Goa- A Lovely Lecture By Claude Alvares On Local Knowledge And Development Mishaps " (Key note address for a seminar on the subject at Carmel College held in November 2008) 

"In one of the many different versions of the Ramayan, Lord Ram finally comes to Sri Lanka and he has to cross the water, the sea, to get across. Of course, he can’t do anything because of all that water in front of him. So his advisers tell him, “What is your problem? You are Lord Rama, the King of the Universe. You can ask the god of the ocean to come up and get rid of all this water, enabling you to cross over on the dry sea bed. 

Lord Ram thinks this is a very good idea, so he calls up the ocean god and tells him: “I want to go to the other side so will you please do something and remove all the water?”

“Yes, of course I can remove it,” says the ocean god. “After all, you are the master of the Universe. If you ask me to do something, I have to do it. But there are some consequences. Just remember that by removing this water, all the fish which are there in the water will perish and all the boatmen who are plying a trade in these waters will have no job and they will be without employment and they will be in misery and they will become poor and all other life dependent on the ocean will also perish. Now if you still want me to go ahead and do what you seek, I will still do it but these consequences will have to be on you because it is your decision and not mine.”

The story goes that Lord Rama opted out of that solution and the horde of monkeys then created an artificial bridge so that he could cross the sea. 

But this is the beauty and toughness of the Mangala principle. It is a very very remarkable and beautiful principle and if any of us, any government department, any university, any college could have adopted this principle as their basic ecological principle, as the standard to judge their economic activity, we would stop a lot of human suffering. We would call a halt to much of the suffering we inflict on nature. We would prevent much damage to insects, animals, birds, forests, plants, lots of things. We would be forced to use our intelligence to do our economic activity in such a way that we not violate the Mangala principle. That is all the advice that I want to give you. In the next season when Ganesha – Goa’s greatest deity and best loved as well – comes, please go and worship. He is the only way to save us, to provide a route out of our present ecological crisis. Thank you. "