Asuryā nāma te lokāḥ andhena tamasāvṛtāḥ
Tāṁste pretyābhigacchanti ye ke cātmahano janāh-
Tāṁste pretyābhigacchanti ye ke cātmahano janāh-
Curious I read further to see what the sloka meant.....A man who is not aware of his divine nature is like a man living in a deep cavern where sunlight has never entered. He who ignores this ever present reality of the Self is keeping away light and clutching at shadows. "ātmahana" means people who kill themselves. BY neglecting our true nature, by ignoring it and by clutching at the shadows of the non-Self all the time, we commit suicide; suicide of the most serious kind. In an ordinary suicide, only the body is killed, which is something external to us, but here we kill ourselves, our real Self.
Interesting thought.........
7 comments:
Comments from hi5ena
His idea was not to make the young generation to strictly follow religion but to follow the fact that Religious feeling must establish itself as a rational way of living and Religion must express itself in reasonable thought, fruitful action and right social institutions
http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~ramamurt/srk_phil.html
so the fact that you are doing good may have actually come out from the values that you have picked up from your parents who are actually following values that they have due to their beliefs on their religion and so may be unconsiously even you are.... :) Hope it didnt sound confusing
hi5ena: For some reason that I dont know, your comments on this post seems to have been deleted. I am not sure how .... so, I am posting them again separately.
hi5ena: Or was it this same reasoning that Dr S Radhakrishna was talking about. To me and to many people, doing good things in life and never hurting others, are the major guidelines of life. And we assume that, that is enough. However, I am led to beleive repeatedly, that religion is goading us to take the next step. The step to evolve into something more than just being the do-gooder, to realise the reason for life.
Like I said, I dont know much of metaphysics. May be its time to .....
:) finally its personal choice.. If you feel good about doing something more than just doing good, go ahead but if you are satisfied with whatever u r doing, stop rt there.... I never said we should follow religion blindly..
hi5ena: I agree with you almost completely. Yes, doing good to others is a personal choice. And not to follow religion blindly.
The point however that I was trying to make is, that there may be more to life than as we see it, (that is to be good, to do good and not to harm others). If doing good was just enough, our forefathers would not have come up with the idea of "religion". "Religion" perhaps has more to it than just worship. May be when we explore it further we will understand it better. So, may be religion is not just a set of prayers, rules and regulations. May be it has something to do with something more elegant and grand. May be it has to do with man achieving the next state.
I read this interesting thought somewhere. It took us millions of years to evolve into the man that we are right now. Surely evolution has not ended here. And maybe the learned forefathers understood that we have a long way to go to evolve completely. And so they came up with this brilliant idea of religion to help us achieve that evolution faster. Its a thought... may be true, may be not... but then we would understand this, only if we understand religion.
Dr Radhakrishna, I think may have been referring to this.
u said something that actually bounced off my head hehe.. never thought so much about religion.. may be worth givin it a thought sometime...
hi5ena's first comment makes a lot of sense...or I agree with it :) Ultimately religion is the only tool that helps man seperate himself from the beast. Society which evolved soon after man could never have the kind of impact in raising the conscience of the human being like religion did.
Doing good to others is the corner stone of a peacful and progressive society.
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