Thursday, July 3, 2008
Expressions Of Spirituality
Today we have a burning question - that in spite of so many preaching and sermons from different religions the actual conduct is not changing at all. Man is the same, unchanged. Anuvrat revolution (a movement initiated by Acharya Tulsi in 1949) explored its reasons and preached that human conduct is most important from religious point of view, not the worship or performing of rituals. The foremost is conduct; worship and rituals are secondary. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that nowadays a prayer, worship and rituals have become primary and human conduct, behaviour and character have been rendered secondary or ignored.
The second important subject is to authorise only the pious in behaviour for conducting worship and performing rituals. People with good character feel uncomfortable in the company of bad characters.
In Jain tradition, there is a categorised list of sins. In that, eighteen kinds of sins have been explained. If man can live avoiding them then he can automatically solve and check most of the problem in his life. I am just explaining four sins out of those eighteen sins. These sins are quarrelling, blaming, backbiting and censuring.
Quarrelling is eternally sinful. A religious man should always avoid quarrels; this is his primary duty. He should never indulge in quarrels knowingly.
The second doctrine of awakening is to be free from the act of blaming others falsely. Without proper and complete knowledge, we should never blame each others. It is the greatest sin.
The third doctrine of the awakened life is commitment towards the truth. Today, materialism is at its height and man will not have to do any work; the machine will do everything. That will be totally a machine era. Even after attaining the machine era, if man still does not reform then people will prefer to have that old, less developed era and culture, because, in due course, the situation may worsen to the extent that is may not be reversible and reparable. That is why, it is essential that man should develop his commitment towards truth.
Compassion is an important principle of social change. Compassion involves standing together with all. Man should not torture any creature. In spite of so many doctors, hospitals and advanced system of medicines, we have many diseases. On critically analysing with profound insight, you will observe that there is extreme cruelty behind the modernisation and advancement of medical systems. In order to diagnose and find treatment for a disease, thousands of frog and monkeys are killed in the wake of initial trials being done on them. The single, onerous purpose of the merciless killing of mice and monkeys is to keep man healthy. There is so much of cruelty at the background of health that obviously the number of diseases will increase.