Back to the city of varanasi. After a long sojourn. after a journey through the oceans of this world. How does it feel ? Being back to your roots. Being back to ur religion. Being back to ur ancestors. Being back to your ownself. I have come around. Quite literally. But only literally . Not psychologically. There, one only advances up. Only a little more closer than before, I am. To what? Read the first few lines to learn that. Then what took me so far from them. ? The job , or the time-space continuum, or the History which is but a huge volume of time.
This same river, river ganga, this same heat, these summer seasons, these same lanes, the narrow cow dung laden smelly dirty ones, - they seem to become dear to me. I wonder why and how. I feel so peaceful. I try to reason out why. As I write this blog, I attempt to put my account of explorations yet again for my friends and my generation to read. To think, and to know, and to tell me,- how did we as a member of one religion, member of same native lost away our true self in our yearn to know more, and become more determined when it was the confusion which is actually supreme. Confusion, which some entropist also call as the chaos. The chaos of this universe even when the factor of time works on it momentarily to give it it's Dharma, the Ethics. A knowledge which we call the Brahma. and yet we get confused , literally to resolve out the effect of time on the changing nature of Dharma, ending up creating our own chaos in this already chaotic universe. The formula for finding peace and happiness for the human live that we mortals souls are living today is to not add more man-made chaos to this already chaotic universe. To know the dharma and to live by it.
This theme takes me to one sunk in oblivion conversation with my ship's agent in the port of skikda, algeria , last year. It was on 17 july 2010, I recall. We were talking about the religions , Hinduism and Islam. He wanted to know from me as to what my religion is about , what are my ethos, what are my beliefs, what does my religion teach me. He was surely well-read about my religion , as I was about him. He saw the gold ring in my finger and told me that honest muslim men never wear gold on their bodies, only women do.
I thought for a while. So much of arguments and so much of reading that I kept abreast with on Orkut came on my mind. it all downpoured heavily. Rained cats and dogs. I controlled myself.
Then, I said , my religion is all about endorsing 'confusion' as the supreme law of the universe. He looked baffled, ... I was also. I continued, we are the oldest religion on the planet. So much that either we are not a religion, or else we are its only religion while others are sects. We began with the beginning of humans on this planet. I come from varanasi, the holy seat of this religion. Microsoft Encarta says that Varanasi is one of the oldest surviving city on this planet. It is over 3000 years old. It was what Mumbai is today. Commerce is the business today. Spirituality was business then. It happend from there. Ram, shanker, swaminarayan- they all came from the ganges valley.
We have our believes. but so do we have the opposites also in our fold of believes. U may believe Ram, so may u believe in Ravana. U may believe in Shanker , but so u may do in Vishnu. We are polytheist. U always remain a hindu. Some orkut friends say that only ur respect for Vedas defines that one is a hindu or not.the religion turely is the vedic dharma, while there are no universal rules, no universal good and evil, the local beliefs are allowed to happen. That adds to it's confusion, or say that, that pushes further wide its boundaries of encompassing. U can perhaps do anything u feel like, as a true vedic believer.
He asked me, then, that how do hindus find their peace of mind then? How do they know what's right and what 's wrong? It is too much complicated to practice hinduism as ur guiding thought of mind.
His cross examination for once really got me adopt his believes. So did I do, from inside, to atleast admit that it is so much non-sense and complicated for ordinary humans to live with immense self-contradictions, and yet call some of them a hypocrisy and others as valid ones. Isn't it like that? U call some things as Dharma and yet u allow the opposites to happen by some indistinct remote application of some weird philosophy and call that dharma too. And yet you apply again some philosophy to call somethings Adharma.
Anybody will question- What are you, mister? What are your beliefs ? Do u say that only what u say is correct and the others are incorrect? What I say is incorrect? Is that what is ur religion? Boo to it , and boo to u.
Hinduism is also about being close to nature, I thought. And doesn't the nature encompass the mutually contradicting laws? U want to live , but death is inevitable. U want to love, but it fades away, u want to live peacefully, but there is always struggle. Some creatures can live only on land, some only on water and some on both. Some only in air. Nature always held exceptions to prove its rule. Infact the rule of death also seems to be violated in case of sharks and viruses.
Islam and other Abrahamic faiths are so easy, so less confusing, he suggested to me. In these relatively newer faiths , U know clearly what to do and what not to do. U have ur set of practices.
In my religion, there is only Dharma which in itself is so complicated to understand. One man's dharma can be other man's Adharma. Only knowledge and experience gained from your constant Karma, can teach u what are dharma. It is so complicated.
I sat down to think, is it my confusion again, or my religion the epithet for confusion; but which allows me to endorse change , the law which is an anti-thesis of peace and tranquility. or is it the steadfastness of Islam, it's simplicity which has been attempted to weed out all confusions which makes it , although a fundamentalist in one sort, but also a religion of peace in the other.
I felt confused. That was my religion. I am a vedic dharma practitioner. I am ever-assimilating, ever-flowing. I reason, I argue. It is through my flow (that one wave crushes against another wave or the river banks, and thus) I find my dharma, the method to get rid of the muck which I take in with everything that comes to me. I am a dweller on the banks of river Ganga.
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