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Empowering the mind : the role of religions

Religions are a kind of research work. Research on mind and life. There are a lot of things to learn from one’s own religion and an individual may choose to contribute to improve it. The stories you were told, which guided you how to live life, is to me your religion by default.

Now, to say that all our stories are better, is not correct on anyone’s front. The problems occur when these stories are used to create a negative atmosphere. The problem with the Muslim world today is the excessive distortion of such stories. And the same problem exists with other religious entities as well, but to a smaller extent. The point to understand is everyone needs to contribute to improve these stories we tell and rules we follow.  We should not do or spread something, just because a ‘so called’ representative of our religious ideology said so. We must analyze it and then decide to act accordingly.

The stories we tell our children are extremely important,  we must always continue to improve them by doing more research. Throw away the content that is irrelevant or was proved to be wrong. For example, just because many things said by Vivekananda are useful to live a better life, don’t assume that everything said by him has to be perfect. No one is perfect or can be perfect. Even Vivekananda was no exception. We must understand that, making mistakes is natural in the process of learning.

On a religious front, we must try to improve the existing stories or practices or even find out some better stories from other religions, if required, as well. We may even choose to write something new on our own to be told to our children, but let’s not forget to reuse what we already have. Improving a system from within is better than creating a parallel system.

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Empowering the mind : the God, the unknown and the universe

There’s no doubt that there are more unknown things in this world than what we know by means of Science. The theories that arrived to explain these things led to religions and faith in God as a superpower controlling this universe, because we tend to relate to someone like us easily.

So our saints, let’s call them, researchers in terms of the modern world, decided to put across to people, the experiences that they had or ideas they thought, through the stories, the most effective medium of conveying ideas till date. There were scientific experiments carried out to know more continuously, but the unknown part was so much more as it is even today, that they understood that this not how it’s going to work out, we need some assumptions, to structure the unknown, in turn the universe, in more familiar words, God, in order to achieve a balance in the society, by guiding people on how to live.

A lot of research was done by these saints on human mind, which led to a unanimous conclusion that expectation is the main cause of all the pain. When one starts working on what one believes in after defining the effect, that what needs to be achieved, and by identifying the causes, that would produce this effect, then one just needs to keep working on these causes and stop expecting the effect, as it will come automatically.

But this does not mean that don’t ever seek change or define the effect itself. If we start to think that whatever happens around is act of God, then everything will start appearing fine to us, there would be no motivation. It’s us and the one’s around us who make up the God, the unknown, the universe. So the only way to unify with the God is to make sure that our actions do maintain the balance of this universe and we always seek betterment by defining effects/goals that will ensure balance. The means of interpreting or the stories to convey this message can be different, but at the end the God or the unknown is within.