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A Dialogue on the Human Prospect
Introduction
The Holy Quran: Sura XXIII, Verse 44
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I
Revelatory Religion in Historical Perspective
Revelation is like a constant rain that saturates the knowing of man, yet many reject it, dulled as they are by gross pursuits. The Guru, enlightened preceptor who dispels darkness and ignorance in people helping them in their spiritual evolution, intercedes and sensitizes him to the perennial rain.
Even this intercession is fraught with danger. Systems arise from it, exclusion, and the eventual denial of the perennial totality.
Mohammed had said:
When you meet the people of the Book (Jews), and the Christians, tell them that the God you worship is the same one as theirs.
Even the Guru is put to test, test exceedingly harsh and he also responds with exceedingly harsh truth. A Gentile woman sought the aid of Christ who responded: "My mission is to the children, not the dogs." She replied: "Lord, the dogs eat what the children discard. Grant me but that." Full of joy, the Redeemer said, "Woman, your faith has made you whole."
The early Christians limited their apostolic mission to the Jews until Pauline Christianity made the apostolic concern universal.
A Guru by historical accident, functions within inherited traditions and images. But his message eventually transcends these and fulfills itself as Revelation.
Human societies have tended to reject the mystical because it is
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strenuous and perilous, and without the guidance of a preceptor fraught with demonic perception. In the Christian tradition as elsewhere the mystics have been preserved as saints, as cult figures, the dispensers of miracles while the perenniality of the mystical itself has been rejected by the ordinary worshipper. Even so the mystical keeps company with man all the time and it merely takes a look around the shoulder to discover it.
II
Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru
Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru is a Teacher in the absolute sense of the term, in the tradition of revelations and prophecies, and the acceptance of this in a civilization overwhelmed by chemical and mechanical cleverness, is perhaps the initial hurdle before the reader. If one accepts the Supreme, its immanence in our midst becomes familiar reality. In his life and mission Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru, exemplifies this familiarity; he does not speak a language of theology, or at least keeps it to the minimum and discourses on practical paradigms. Santhigiri Ashram, residence and teaching center of Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru, he has set up near Trivandrum has no doubt a core of renunciates and seers, but is sustained by a large number of resident householders. They are the task-force of the Guru and he expects them to cleanse themselves through right action and right thought and become vehicles for a purer progeny, in which will be born the seekers of the future. The Ashram´s
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mission is predicated on the certitude of such births as the revealed Will of the Absolute.
Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru is no island in the flux of Prophecy and Revelation. There have been Teachers earlier who said much the same thing, but perhaps not with such immediacy and fullness. The purpose of Creation is the elevation of all creatures through tortuous stages to the realization of the Absolute, which is the Supreme Light. The ancient Indian called it the Brahman -the Absolute God. In other ethnic bowls the same has been known as Allah, the Holy Spirit and so on.
The simplicity of man’s communication with the Supreme Light, was lost by the very process of historical duration. Evolution has left us with different orders of beings, from the visible and gross creatures to tiers of astral entities. These represent stages, with all the impermanence, and passing, that we witness in the biological World. The Supreme Light alone endures.
The intermediacy of revelation has caused the limitation of human vision and its confinement to these different stages. Thus the cosmic ‘gods,’ which the Hindus call the Trimurti -Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva- and the devas -‘gods’ misconceived by the Hindu tradition as spiritual liberated souls- have been mistaken for the Supreme, an instance of arrested vision.
All religions, to a lesser or greater degree, have thus been seduced but in the case of Indian religion, Hinduism, if we might use a convenient term, the investiture of the cosmic ‘gods’ has been widespread and spiritually
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retrograde. By mistaking the Trimurti and the devas for Brahman -God Almighty-, and their revelation with the Revelation of the Brahman, Hindu society has put limits on its spiritual growth.
This spiritual retardation in turn has led to widespread societal distortions. It is the bane of social sciences to keep the mind out, certainly the spirit out, and embark on analysis with purely secular-historical tools. Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru does not repudiate these tools, but tries unobtrusively, and in the language of the wood-hewer and the earth-tiller, to link these tools with tools of the Supreme Consciousness.
The cosmic beings namely the Trimurti and the devas are rejected as objects of ultimate worship by the Guru, but he does not deny their veracity or the spiritual eminence they have achieved. Theirs is a splendorous astral World, and if the worldly human is overawed by it, it is understandable. Their eminence too is sanctified by the Supreme as a necessary stage in astral evolution. But they are not the Supreme and the path of the jeeva -soul-, is not to end in them, or at their stage of astral evolution. If worship leads to such a destination, it will fall short of the realm of Truth. Because they have not attained spiritual fulfillment, it is obvious that they cannot lead us in the correct path towards mukti -spiritual liberation.
These are the spiritual pitfalls in the practice of religion. The splendorous deva, is mistaken for a manifestation of Godhead, and the epiphany for the exercise of God-energy. In fact God does not manifest himself in Trinity;
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the Absolute God in Trinity -in the Trimurti- will be a contradiction in terms. Creation, Sustenance and Destruction are not separately structured processes, but coexistent aspects of the same evolutionary process. It is almost mechanical to designate these as separate tasks to separate gods.
The idea of the Supreme Godhead, manifesting itself as avatars -sanskrit for divine incarnations- has caused havoc in the Indian’s response to Brahman. We have the reality of designated World Teachers, some of whom were spiritually higher than the Trimurti.
An example is Krishna. He has been degraded by the ritualists into an avatar of Vishnu, one of the Trimurti. Krishna was a human Guru, sent to relate and to guide humanity to the Almighty. Incidentally, if we go by the lore of Krishna, we find him exhibiting the miracles of the devas, but all the while going beyond them, and prophetically proclaiming the path of the Teacher, the path of the Almighty.
Many such Teachers have been sent to many ethnic communities and regions, some of the most significant in recent history being Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and Adi Shankara. One says recent history, because there is a calendar infinitely vaster, awesomely so, than the historical one. This is the Manu -progenitor of mankind- Calendar, made up of agequartets, the Chaturyugas, and quartet clusters, the Manvantaras. Fourteen Manvantaras make a Kalpa. The modern man with his limited historicity, will find this hard to accept, but such is the mind boggling trajectory of the soul. The Gurus
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are humans who have been given visions of these spans of time, and the relative stature of each Guru varies with the extent of revelation he has received. Very often, it will not be possible for a Guru to receive it all in one life-time. So he repeats his life, or stays content to remain in whatever stage of spiritual evolution he has arrived at. However some Gurus, by the grace of the Supreme, are able to take in their visions in relatively short spells of time. Thus we have a hierarchy of Gurus, which is really a hierarchy of the Absolute’s instruments.
The purpose of Creation is the elevation of all creatures through various stages, to the realization of the Absolute which is the Supreme Light. According to Navajyothisri Karunakara Guru, Yugadharma -Divine Law to be observed in a certain era- is worked out through the Manus -progenitors who preside successively over the fourteen Manvantaras. The Dharma -Divine Law- of Manu works out perfection in the World, as per the Will of the Supreme God. There are time segments in this scheme of perfection. A Kalpa -aeon- is one such time segment (4,320,000 000 human years). This time period called Kalpa is divided into 14 units called Manvantaras, each headed by a Manu, so there are 14 Manus. Each Manvantara is divided into 71 Chaturyugas -age quartets. One Chaturyuga -4,320,000 years- is made of four Yugas (eras) -Satya, Treta, Dwapara and Kali. We are living in the Kali Yuga of the 28th Chaturyuga of the 7th Manvantara. Kali Yuga has 432,000 years out of which only 5,100 years have passed now. Dwapara Yuga is two times
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the span of Kali Yuga -864,000 years-, Treta is three times -1 296,000 years- and Satya is four times that of Kali -1,728,000 years.
Yugadharma -Divine Law for this era- of this present age, Kali, indicates that Trimurti -Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva- or any other divinities, such as angels, saints, devas, etc., cannot be accepted as the object of worship, only God Almighty. The reason is that these deities have reached certain stages in spiritual evolution, though they have not attained full spiritual realization and they are attached to their senses. They are not free from their emotions -anger, hatred, jealousy, egoism, envy, etc. and when we pray to these deities, some of them might become jealous of our spiritual progress, blocking our spiritual path. Another problem is that material gains and fortunes are prayed for and accrued by the devotees, then the deva-devi powers take away in turn punya -merit or light within the soul- of the devotees, which cause further lowering or descend of their soul.
Each Manvantara can be considered an evolutionary step towards the final goal of perfection in a Kalpa. As we know there are millions of life forms in this World. All these life forms are in different stages of evolution. If all created beings should achieve godly perfection it cannot be possible all together. For example this is the 7th Manvantara and we are in the Kali Yuga of the 28th Chaturyuga. After this Kali Yuga, the next Chaturyuga i.e, the 29th Chaturyuga starts. The souls who deserve liberation depending perfection on their spiritual evolution merge in the supreme light of God
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in this Kali Yuga. All other souls are guided to take birth the next Yuga, i.e. Satya Yuga to work out their remaining goal. Similarly all life forms try to achieve perfection phase by phase in the creation.
According to Revelation a major error occurred in the Guru-tradition, This was in the third age-quartet of the present Manvantara and in the Manu-lineage. This recoiled on the Manu-lineage, and its memory ceased to be alive. From the third to the seventh Chaturyuga God Almighty gave us the chance to correct this error but human beings evolved directionless. From the seventh through to the eleventh quartet the Supreme sent the cosmic ‘gods’ to rectify this error, mainly the Trimurti -Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva-. However, lulled by the
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adoration they received from the humans, these cosmic ‘gods’ perpetuated that worship and failed the Supreme. The last five thousand two hundred years were the ongoing Kali, the concluding age of the quartet. It is during Kali Yuga -age of tremendous purification where suffering plays a major role-, that the karmas -all sort of actions- of the quartet are resolved and hence the Absolute enriches it with Prophecy and Redemption. A fresh attempt has been made in this Kali, starting with the advent of Krishna and following through the prophets worldwide, to redeem the Error of the Manu-line.
All this is precarious as secular history. But the Santhigiri Ashram and its Guru have borne testament in numerous, experiential cameos to which we can only invite the reader’s attention by first stimulating his primary receptivity. To those who might think it absurd, we would only request to take a humbler look at the absurdities our present civilization is founded on: chemicalization, pollution, genetic distortion, environmental degradation and the constant possibility of the nuclear holocaust.
New Delhi
O.V. Vijayan
Next Chapter: Vasana. Sanatanadharma (Everlasting Spiritual Law). Castes