The
Mother and Religion
According to the Mother, the fundamental intolerance of the world’s
formal religions, stemming from the attitude that “mine is the
supreme, the only truth” and that “all others are in falsehood
or inferior” is absolutely necessary to perpetuate their existence.
Religious organizations, if they fail to declare that they alone have
the key to life’s fundamental truths, will not succeed in obtaining
converts, and this will lead to a decline in their power and influence.
In essence, this bigotry is born of necessity, and in the Mother’s
words, “natural to the religious mind.” And it is precisely
this aspect of religion that makes it a roadblock in the path of spirituality.
Because religions, according to the Mother, “want to standardize
the expression of an experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable
truth”, it prevents the individual from engaging in the process
of inner questioning and exploration that is a central component of
spirituality. By compelling its followers to follow identical paths,
religion leads only to a uniformity of thought which breeds dogmatic
practices. Only through the realization and acceptance that “God
gives Himself to His whole creation” and that “no one religion
holds the monopoly of his grace” can there be peace, within oneself
and in the larger world.
Despite the drawbacks of religion, men insist on clinging to it. Why
is this? Perhaps, in a word, laziness. Accepting religious teaching
requires no intellectual or spiritual effort. It offers the “truth”
as something that is “well defined, well classified, well established”
and absolves the individual of his responsibility to seek out the truth
for himself.
The Mother
has unequivocally declared that “the time of religions is over.”
For many people that is perhaps an intimidating prospect; religion is
their sole link with their inner selves. However, it blinds one to the
workings of the inner spirit, and offers the devotee comfort in that
darkness. Only by opening the eyes of the spirit by shedding the constraints
of religion will the truth be found. According to the Mother and Sri
Aurobindo, humanity is collectively opening its eyes to see beyond religion,
and this will result in an age of “universal spirituality, of
spiritual experience in its initial purity.”
- Aditya
Ranganath
(All quotes were taken from “Difference Between Religion and Yoga”
- AIM November 2001)
