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My conception of the Hindu faith
Advaitism of God
How to define the basic concept of the Hindu thought? I have read somewhere that, when one is not able define a thing at first, it is advisable to start by defining what it is not. So, let us start by mining the cornerstone built patiently by the Westerners to reject Hindouism as a real religion and to consider it as a mere fetishism, using their classical opposition between pantheism or monotheism and polytheism. Those believing in the truth as teached by the Bible think to God as the creator, almighty, eternal and external to His creation. They consider themselves as distinct entities, created by definition at a given time, hoping to be granted with immortality beside Him if they comply with the rules of behavior that He enacted and if they pledge Him allegiance. Then the opinions diverge (if I understood well) about their duty to please the Father, since the relationship is definitely of the father to child type. I mean by that the expression of respect, the relative freedom, the manifestation of love in both directions (His will to save men souls for the Christians). Because it is question of love in religion isnt'? Let me borrow to Premchand, novelist author of Godaan a sentence defining the difference between love and devotion: " a state of love preserves a certain pride and self-importance, whereas a state of devotion destroys the self and make one desire self-effacement. ..The highest joy of devotion is a self-surrender in which egotism is completely demolished". You will see that if the idea could have been expressed by a believer of any religion, the used terms are typically Hindu. For coming back to this love story, the atheists would say that we created God like a remedy for our loneliness, which idea is not either completely false. But for us, believers, that is only part of the truth. One of the legends reported in Bhaagavata Puraana (among other versions in same book) about creation seems to me very tasty and the fables contain often contain a part of truth. The Universal Spirit would have thought “I”, thus inventing the Ego, and continues by thinking that He is alone, from where He decides as a solution to multiply A basic concept of the Hindu thought is that God is indivisible (advaita), indifferent to Time and that we are of comparable nature than Him, and one may infer either that we always make part of Him or that His will is that we join Him. I wrote Time with a capital letter intentionally because Time is one of His major creations. God does not exist at all times but in the moment and He recreates the cycles of time (called Kalpa and Yuga) according to His goodwill. The history is not written once and for ever but reinvented at the beginning of each Kalpa together with the Universe. We will reconsider this temporary nature of the creation, which idea is not foreign with the conception of the Bible (myth of flood) and constitutes just a generalization of the temporary and cyclic character of Life (including days and nights, seasons, birth and death, etc.). Then there exist several cosmologies which would lead some to define Hindouism as a pantheism or a monotheism (the later being the conception of the Veda and Samkia philosophy). To quote only the Bhaagavad Gitaa (Song of God shloka 7-6) (2):
Bhagvan uvacca "Aham kutsnasya jagatam, prabhavam payalas tathaa"
God says “I am the Whole, the source of all manifestations and of their destruction”.
He is more than the Supreme Spirit and the Universe (or the Universes which may as well be created simultaneously), both belong to Him and He is more still, out of our imagination. At all times the Aryans (3)) believed in an almighty single God and tried “to give Him” a personality, because the intangible One is frustrating for our limited spirit. In Veda, the Lord is successively the Ether, the Sky, the Earth (the first verse of Gayatri mantra- Om Bhu Bhuva Swa- is a reminiscence of this preliminary feeling which no means exactly that for more advanced spirits- see appendix about sacred texts). To express the things in a somewhat simplistic way, Bhaagvan being All, nothing prohibits to pray the god of War (Inra), the god of water (Varuna) or the god of fire (Agni), the goddess Nature (Uma, Parvati or Durga, to try to propitiate the god of destruction (Shiva role in vedic times) or the god of cosmic order (Vishnu). The main thing to remember for the believer is that they all pledge allegiance to the Almighty and are themselves subjected to the cycle of creations (strictly speaking an involution of God in Himself occurs at the time of destruction). The god in charge of the completion of the creation of the material Universe, Brahmaa, himself lives only 300.000 billion years according to my calculations (in equivalents of human years).
The Almighty does not mind that we worship a demigod or a saint, recalling us however that he is the real Actor behind this divinity/saint and that it is always better to address to Him than to His saints:
yo yo yaam yaam tanum bhaktah
shraddhayaarcitum icchati
tasya tasyaacalaam shraddham
taam eva vidadhaamy aham|
sa tayaa shraddhayaa yuktas
tasyaraadhnam ihate
labhate ca tatah kaamaan
mayaiva vihitaan hi tan
(Bh. 7-21,22): I strengthen the faith of one who desire to worship some demigod. Inspired by me, he obtains what he wishes. But in actuality, the benefit is bestowed by Me.
note 2: Gitaa (pronunce Gi like in give) and gaanaa meaning song being male kind in Hindi and French, I adopted the male article in this case. For other terms such as jiva (conscience), although the majority of the Hindi names finishing in "a" are male kind, I adopted the kind of the French word, not being expert in Sanskrit, language of the original text. The quotations are in Sanskrit.
note 3:Aryans , originating from Central Asia, would have migrated in Anatolia, Iran and India during the 2nd millenium before the Christian Era according to most authors. They were speaking Indo-European language, of which one can find many common trends in the structure of sentences, roots of the words in Sanskrit, Persan but also in Latin words. An example is the name of God in French which is Dieu, who was called Dyaus in Indo-Iranian at the beginning of the time of Veda and deva in Hindi (utilized for the demi-gods only).
Invested during a certain time of a material envelope to enjoy the creation of God, our soul must learn to get freed of this subjection by detachment and meditation for recovering its true nature. "Two are the objects of the soul, to make one with the Supreme Brahman and to be for ever for the good of all the world; whether here or elsewhere does not essentially matter" (Sri Aurobindo).
