Vedanta - Follow Your Own Religion
ISHAN CHAUDHURI
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With spring upon us, and while listening to Reba Muhury's ecstatic rendition of Meera's bhajan, `Mohe lagi lagan guru charanan ki...,' something parted within me.As Muhury's voice pleaded with power -yes, pleading can be imbued with power if it conjures up the thing that lies at the heart of all human yearning -`I am wedded to my Guru's feet I can feel nothing except your feet All the world seems to me to be a dream' -it became clear that all of us contain our own religion, our own psychological architecture by which we engage with the world and within other parts of our own thought process.
It is pleasant and reassuring to have faith in something or someone. But far more secu re and close is if one cons tructs one's one-faith sys tem. Being a single follow er of a religion-of-one might not seem to provide the comforts of camaraderie or belonging that organised religion may provide.
But creating one's own custom-made religion has its own strengths. For one, being organic, it can be ever-updated primed to maximise one's existence in this sensory world.Literature and the utterings of other religions can be consumed to constantly keep stirring that personalised faith of whom you are the centre and the periphery , the subject and the object, the observer and the participant.
Meera's faith may seem familiar to us in the larger world of the worship of Krishna. But lost in her own making of Krishna worship, it was solely her religion. As is mine while listening to Reba Muhury singing, `Mohe lagi lagan guru charanan ki...' on a spring morning.
It is pleasant and reassuring to have faith in something or someone. But far more secu re and close is if one cons tructs one's one-faith sys tem. Being a single follow er of a religion-of-one might not seem to provide the comforts of camaraderie or belonging that organised religion may provide.
But creating one's own custom-made religion has its own strengths. For one, being organic, it can be ever-updated primed to maximise one's existence in this sensory world.Literature and the utterings of other religions can be consumed to constantly keep stirring that personalised faith of whom you are the centre and the periphery , the subject and the object, the observer and the participant.
Meera's faith may seem familiar to us in the larger world of the worship of Krishna. But lost in her own making of Krishna worship, it was solely her religion. As is mine while listening to Reba Muhury singing, `Mohe lagi lagan guru charanan ki...' on a spring morning.
