Whatever the ancient seers discovered about the infinite range of the universe at the subtlest level of their consciousness was passed down in the form of seemingly mythological stories, which in fact are simple symbols used to describe greater truths. Everyone likes a good story. Using a story to pass on profound knowledge is a time-honored tradition. Unfortunately, over the years, many of these mythological tales got dismissed as fairy tales with no factual or scientific basis. The ignorant disregard the power of these myths because they only look at the superficial stories and not the meaning which they point to. The popular Sufi saying goes “ If a man points at the moon, only an idiot looks at the finger”.  To make it clear, mythical stories are not for children as bed time stories but for adults as pointers in their spiritual journey.

 A real life incident

 I like to share a very interesting incident in my life which is very apt to bring here. My Aunt’s son, my cousin, was very poor in studies. My aunt requested me to teach the 12 year old boy every day one hour English subject.  On the first day  I asked my cousin to read a chapter from his English text book. To my surprise he was not able to read anything other than two words “The” and “And”. I was very upset and closed the book and as a joke asked him to read at least the name of the book. It was shocking to know that he could not even read the heading “English book for seventh grade”. As an imposition  I told him to write 100 times the word  “English” with the thought that at least he will learn to spell and read the word “English”.

              The next day, when I met him I gave him a piece of paper and asked to write the spelling of “English”. He wrote  the alphabet “E” and could not complete the rest. I was literally angry and was also surprised how he cannot remember the spelling of “English” even after writing it  100 times. I suspected that he did not write 100 times and so asked him to show his imposition. He had  literally obeyed my instructions by writing the word “English” 100 times.

               This is the interesting truth I found out.  Instead of writing down the word “English” 100 times , he wrote E for 100 times and then N for 100 times then G for 100 times, L for 100 times and the rest of the alphabets 100 times.    He has completely misinterpreted my message to teach him. He has not understood the purpose of the  punishment (imposition) I gave him. My idea was not to punish but to help him, but he took my “teaching” literally and so performed the act but was useless. This is how in life we persist in repeating the tasks and end up in failures and never learn the mistakes.  

                This is how rituals in all religions are done very mechanically. All the rituals are performed with the sole intention of completing it without understanding the fact  that it is the means that matters and not the end. Thus rituals unlike in ancient cultures have now been reduced to meaningless stupid acts. In every religion we could see how people stupidly interpret things and miss the actual message. I see in Hinduism how people mechanically do rituals without understanding the intended purpose. Same in Christianity,  we can see  how people misunderstand Jesus Christ death and resurrection and the message of being the savior of mankind.  Death of Christ is the death of “Ego” in us and the resurrection is the transcendence to the higher level of spiritual state of being. Without knowing this fact they engage themselves in missionary acts without seeing their own "inner light".

             Like in the above example,  religions spiritual masters teachings are misinterpreted by the followers.   Every religion has a spiritual master as their leader.  The followers do mechanically what the masters taught them without understanding what the masters were helping them to learn. The examples and stories the master taught are taken literally and unfortunately the followers completely miss the point. With this misleading life principles they fight with students of other religious groups. This is the cause for all religious wars. All religious wars are fought because of the misunderstanding of the mythical images. The Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists  fight  with each other because they are not able to understand that they all have different names of the same God.  God is just a concept, which we would discuss later.            

 In the next article we would discuss the path of spiritual enquiry.

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