Crisis of spirituality: What Hindus stand to lose https://themillennialpilgrim.substack.com/p/crisis-of-spirituality-what-hindus This essay is a "must read.. We are hoping that the summary of our learnings will compell you to read this account..
Many of us are going through a strange kind of cognitive dissonance with regards to what’s happening in our country in relation to communal disharmony.
Buddha theorised a way to a less violent society. He had identified how overt identification to specific identities - what we consider to be “I” - our attachment to our desires was causing all the violence. His prescription was rather simple. Life is suffering. And our attachment to our desires is the cause of it. You really don’t have to give up all your materialistic possessions. You merely have to let go of the attachment to everything that you consider to be “yours”. And that “yours” contains not only our material possessions but also our multiple identities - our religion, our language and culture.
There is no possibility of co-existence without the ability to let go of what we consider to be ours. Our failure to do the first has impeded our ability to accomplish the second. We are stuck with tolerance. That I will tolerate you, despite not liking you. But that is hardly an ideal situation. Tolerance is a threshold value. There is always a possibility of violence whenever there is a minor breach. To be a truly inclusive society we need assimilation and acceptance...
Our spiritual journey is incomplete when we are hyper identified with certain aspects of our existence. Which is why we will never be able to become a truly inclusive society. The current violence we see at so called shobha yatras taken out by saffron goons is inevitable because we haven’t learnt to assimilate and then dissolve the many identities we are born with. They are in constant clash with the identities of others, who too are equally hyper-identified only with a fraction of who they are. Probably, also because we identify with that part which is attacked the most....
We, as Hindus cannot allow our religion to be sacrificed at the altar of petty politics and more importantly let it be used for the systemic exclusion, otherisation and increasingly what seems like extermination of a religious minority. The spiritual crisis of such bastardisation of our religion will leave Hindus anchor-less. In trying to excavate a mythical past and engineering a glorious ram-rajya, everyday we are denigrating the absolute beauty of what we have preserved, reformed, built and inherited from our ancestors...