THE RELIGION THAT CONTAINS ALL THE OTHER ONES

NAMASTÈ: good is the Indian greeting!

Namastè comes from the Sanskrit “namaskar” and means “I bow to you” or, better, “I bow to the divine that is in you”. Life itself, in India, is already religion in all its gestures and expressions, recognizing in everyone of us an expression of the infinite manifestation that is God. But while I’m doing it, I join the left hand that represents the female principle, with the right one, the male principle, the diversities, the two opposites, and I unify them into an experience of unity, that is God in the most evolved Indian thought.
It soon emerges, from this symbol-gesture, that when one goes near the divine, the psychosomatic has to be unified toward a single idea. I suppose that, if I was a spaceman, once I overcame the dizziness, I suffer from dizzy spells since I was a child, I would feel reassured, leaving the Earth, seeing that the Earth is round. We never completely trust what the others tell us.
Trusting is a very serious problem today. First of all, we lack self-confidence, and consequently we don’t trust anyone. This blocks the practical application of our ideals and inner intuitions today.
The third millennium has started and, even if we decided the date, and I think it doesn’t have any importance for the universal development, we got excited. I would like that this banal emotion increases in everyone, always more, and causes a reawakening of real will of change and quality of conscience.
I would like that in future we’ll produce more “round” thought as our Earth and that humanity will work hard to unite and not to divide, becoming mentally more plastic and less sharp-cornered. The human mind, in its evolution, at a certain point produced the concept of infinite but, at least for the moment, cannot put it into practice. This could be the most revolutionary thought of this new millennium.
The real conception of a society that believes in a universal and infinite Entity, in which everything is both itself and its manifestation. In this field the diversity would represent a reassurance of the concept that the infinite exists, and the diversity wouldn’t scare anymore and would be respected.
Many disciplines try from the dawn of time to walk this way of intuition, Yoga in particular, but sometimes they fail because their supporters never really had a walk of inner experience in this sense and they get lost in separation. The error is when one thinks to be in the right or believes he knows the only truth without thinking that man, for his nature, cannot get free from the subjective. In this way he continues to subdivide the “Only Truth” in many parts, by offering it as a whole, maybe in good faith, without being aware of what he’s actually doing.
Already in the Rigveda, the most ancient text India refers to, we read:
EKAM SAT VIPRA BAHUDHA VADANTI
THERE IS ONLY A TRUTH, BUT SAGES CALL IT WITH DIFFERENT NAMES.
I think that this sentence brings with itself an objective vision that, on the other hand, can come out only after the complete self-sacrifice in the fire of knowledge. Practically a utopia… Especially if we observe the human behaviour nowadays, when man seems to be more willing to sacrifice himself for his personal success than for the society’s one.
Anyway he is aware that he’s paying for his irresponsibility a high price, founded on his unhappiness. He knows it but, as a child, seems to be lost and scared. But this is the time to do something: trying hard to think and act in a “more positive and objective” way, aware that the way of subjective has already shown its faults. The subjective has been a failure, not only when it has been in the service of humanity. History teaches…
In my opinion, for the accomplishment of a better quality of the existence, it’s essential today to start by recovering a more ethic and “dharmic” behaviour. The study of Dharma, even better, should come before any other kind of research. I would say rightly! Just see what happens in our society to understand that, without Dharma, we have to live in unhappiness, in the reciprocal mistrust and in insecurity.
The word Dharma comes from the Hindu-European word DHR that means to support, to keep being and sometimes to create. So, Dharma is both something fixed, steady and firm as in Sanatana Dharma (the eternal rule), and the shape of things, their nature, what makes them to be what they are, and not anything else.
It’s on the strength of Dharma, in fact, that celestial bodies follow their way. So, Dharma is a manifestation’s quality like so the fragrance is a Dharma of the flower. Anyway Dharma, analyzed from the closest to us point of view, is law of the Nature and order both of the cosmos and of the personal life, because it suggests the rules of the individual behaviour. To live following the Dharma, the Dharma that is in the conscience of everyone, means to go to oneself true nature and to bring it in harmony with Sanatana Dharma (or universal Dharma) is the real essence of spirituality.
From a practical and human point of view, Dharma is a code of norms, as the one constituted by the Yama of Yoga to assure both the balanced social cohesion and oneself spiritual health.
There are five Yama:
Ahimsa: non-violence, first ethic law, limitation to be observed and realized to be able to follow the way of realization.
Satya: veracity. It consists in coherence of words, thoughts and actions.
Asteya: abstention from the theft that is from taking something does not belong to us but also to suppress in oneself the desire of that appropriation.
Brahmacarya: control of instincts, chastity; first step of the ascetic walk.
Aparigraha: non-avidity, non-possession.
Not to try to follow the Dharma means to be in the Avidya (Sanskrit word that usually means ignorance). But Avidya (as we read into the Yoga Encyclopedia) is failed adhesion to the truth and, consequently, to God and that brings to destroying consequences as in the whole Hindu culture is proved by Ithiasa: Mahabharata and Ramayana, ancient epic poems that assume big importance for who is looking for behaviour norms that harmonize themselves with the divine.
So, Dharma is a Sanskrit term that combines the meanings of divine and eternal law, religious and moral duty, virtue, true doctrine, and justice. To conclude, I underline that in a developed social context, everybody is worthy of respect, because everybody is part of the infinite Entity. Even more the enemies, our best masters, that try to hit us where we are weak, by enlightening us.
I state that a qualified society of the third millennium (if we really want to be better) has to be founded on respect, on the awareness of diversity as expression of the infinite and of the inner experience of the unity. The experience of the particular that offers itself to the universal in the rising of a new conscience and nourishes itself with the light of the more objective truth, burning in the love’s flame. A qualified society of the third millennium must hope, trust and believe in the realization of its best ideals, by nourishing itself with the joy of belonging to this manifestation and working for a unifying project of brotherhood. Only in this way we can have faith in the experience of the “One” that the laymen call universal experience and mystics call God’s experience.

by Amadio Bianchi