Rites, sacraments and ceremonials are valuable in so far
as they remind those who take part in them, of the true Nature of Things and of
what ought to be their own relation to the world and its divine Ground. Any
ritual or sacrament is good provided that the object symbolized is, in fact,
some aspect of divine Reality and that the relation between symbol and Fact is
clearly defined and constant. But the problem arises for those who have been
brought up to think of God by means of one set of symbols, when it becomes very
hard to think of Him in terms of other sets of symbols, words, ceremonies and
images.
Idol worship helps devotees to concentrate on the Divine.
Though the Divine is immanent everywhere, an idol becomes the centre of
concentration of Divinity based on the true faith of the devotees worshipping
it. A cow delivers milk only through its udder when the cowboy properly and
affectionately approaches it, even though milk is present everywhere in the
cow.
But most men worship the gods because they want success in
their worldly undertakings. This kind of material success can be gained very
quickly by such worship. Men, whose discrimination has been blunted by worldly
desires, establish this or that ritual or cult and resort to various deities,
according to the impulse of their inborn nature.
But no matter what deity a devotee chooses to worship, if
he has faith, his faith is made unwavering. Endowed with the faith that God
gives him, he worships the deity and gets from it everything he prays for. But
this man of small understanding, because of discrimination blunted, prays only
for what is transient and perishable. The worshippers of the lower gods go to
them for personal ends. Those who worship the supreme Godhead realize Him.
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit
of faith and devotion, an enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium,
crystallizing personalities, according to the more or less perfect development
of the bodies with which they are associated. Within this psychic medium or
non-personal substratum of individual minds, something persists as an
independent existence with its own derived objectivity.
Those who perform the rites with faith and devotion
actually discover something distinct from the subjectivity of their own
imagination. As long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith
and love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but
powers to get people's prayers answered. However, all this happens in
accordance with the divine laws governing the universe in its psychic, spiritual
and material aspects.
There is profound truth in the notion that the gods (lower
forms of the Godhead) feed on the sacrifices made to them. When their worship
falls off, when faith and devotion lose their intensity, the gods sicken and
finally die.
There are several temples, mosques and churches around the
world where even the most irreligious and un-psychic visitors cannot fail to be
aware of some intensely numinous presence.
If is rather the psychic presence of men's thoughts and
feelings projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place, in the same
way as thoughts and feelings haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime.
The presence in these consecrated shrines, the presence evoked by the
performance of traditional rites, the presence inherent in a sacramental
object, name, etc are all real presences. But, they are not of God, but of
something which, though it may reflect the divine Reality, is yet less and
other than It.
The relation subsisting between ritual and real presence depends
upon the character of the worshipper's reaction to each. Systematically
cultivated ritual contributes to the evocation, then results, for certain
souls, in the immediate apprehension of the Presence which brings with it joys
of a totally different and higher kind. The Presence is always that of the
divine Being - the god form that has been previously remembered. The projected
objectivity of the Presence is occasionally so complete as to be apprehensible
not only by the devout worshipper, but by even indefinite outsiders.
Similar is the experience of ardent devotees. Whoever
recites the name of the divine form he or she worships in heart and soul will
surely apprehend the form and does not get separated from it. By reason of that
association, just as one associating with a maker of perfumes becomes permeated
with the same perfumes, he or she will become perfumed by the divine form's
compassion, and will become enlightened without resort to any other expedient
means. Kabir, Mira and Tyagaiah are well known examples.
The intense faith and devotion, coupled with perseverance,
by devotees in the same forms of worship or spiritual practices, have a
tendency to objectify the idea or memory, which is their content, and so to
create, in some sort, a numinous real presence which the worshippers and even
their associates actually apprehend. In so far as this is the case, the
ritualist is perfectly justified in attributing to his hallowed acts and words
a power, which, in another context, would be called magical. The mantra works; the sacrifice does something; and the sacrament confers grace. These are
all matters of direct experience, facts that anyone who chooses to fulfill the
necessary conditions, can verify empirically.
But the grace conferred is not always spiritual grace and
the resulting powers need not necessarily be from God. Worshippers can, and
very often do, get grace and power from one another and from the faith and
devotion of their predecessors projected into independent psychic existences
that are hauntingly associated with certain places, words and acts. Therefore,
a great deal of ritualistic religion is not spirituality, but occultism, may be
a refined and well-meaning kind of white magic.
There is no harm in this kind of white magic as long as it
is treated that it is not true religion, but a certain kind of psycho-physical
make up to remind people that there is God in the knowledge of Whom stands
their eternal life.
If the real presences the ritualistic white magic evokes
are taken to be God in Himself and not the projections of human thoughts and
feelings about God, then there is idolatry. This idolatry is, at its best, a
very lofty and beneficent kind of religion. But the consequences of worshipping
God as anything but Spirit, and in anyway except in spirit and in truth, are
necessarily undesirable in the sense that they lead to delay the soul's
ultimate reunion with the eternal Ground.
Though spiritual masters of all major religions are
opposed to ritualism, the history of religion clearly demonstrates that very
large numbers of men and women in all religions have an ineradicable desire for
rites and ceremonies. It may be that most people do not want spirituality or
deliverance, but rather a religion that gives them emotional satisfactions, answers
to prayers, supernatural powers, etc.
Further, some of those who do desire spirituality find
that, for them, the most effective means to those ends are rites, ceremonies,
incantations, repetition of name or mantra, etc. It is by participating in these
acts and repeating these mantras that they are most powerfully reminded of the
eternal Ground of all being. Everything, event or thought can be made the
doorway through which a soul may pass out of time into eternity. That is why
ritualistic and sacramental religion can lead to deliverance. But, at the same
time, every hallowed ceremony, mantra or sacramental rite is a channel through
which power can flow out of the fascinating psychic universe into the universe
of embodied selves. As every human being ordinarily loves power and
self-enhancement, the power flowing into the embodied selves can lead away the
worshippers from deliverance if they have not abandoned their self in the
process.
All the masters of spiritual life are agreed that without
self-knowledge there cannot be adequate knowledge of God and that without a
constant recollectedness there can be no complete deliverance. It is desirable
if man transforms the whole of workaday life into a kind of continuous ritual
that every object in the world around him is regarded as a symbol of the
world's eternal Ground and that all his actions are performed sacramentally.
The man who has learnt to regard things as symbols, persons as temples of the
divine Ground and actions as sacraments is a man who has learned constantly to
remind himself of what he is in relation to the universe and God.
‘That the Logos is in things, lives and conscious minds
and they in the Logos' is the emphatic teaching of the Vedanta. Because
of the indwelling of the Logos, all things have reality. But a vast majority of
human beings believe that their own selfness and the objects around them
possess a reality in them, wholly independent of the Logos. This belief leads
them to identify their being with their sensations, cravings and private
notions.
In its turn, this self-identification with ‘what they are
not' keeps them off divine influence and the very possibility of deliverance.
To most of us, on most occasions, things are not symbols and actions are not
sacramental. And we have to remind consciously and deliberately ourselves that
they are.
This process of conscious sacramentalization can be
applied only to such actions as are not intrinsically evil. It is not possible
to sacramentalize actions whose psychological byproducts are completely God
eclipsing.
Rites, sacraments, ceremonies, liturgies, etc belong to
public worship. They are devices by means of which the individual members of a
group or congregation are reminded of the true Nature of Things and of their
proper relations to one another, the universe and God. What ritual is to public
worship, spiritual exercises are to private devotion. They are devices to be
used by the solitary individual when he prays to God in his privacy.
K. R. Paramahamsa is an author of book Living in Spirit.
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