The Western religious mentality is most baffled by what it calls Hinduism. There is more formal unity in the other Indian religions that have a recognized founder, a teaching that is more or less canonical. But even the fixed and systematized elements are not as fixed and rigid as in the monotheistic religions. Buddhism, for example, in its earlier stage was nothing more than one of the many explorations for the salvation of man at a time when there was an intense seeking in many directions. It was certainly not even a spiritual movement: Buddha has always evaded the question of the Spirit, the Self or the soul… The Western mentality finds it easier to understand a religious prospect based on fixed credos, fixed rituals and techniques of meditation and a fixed religious head.

Hinduism is quite baffling. It “admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures”. Within this complete system (or rather lack of system) the thing that was fixed, and that was often taken to define it, is not at all a religio-spiritual but a social law. Today even that rigid social caste structure is rejected by the liberal secularist democratic idea, and undermined by the growing intellectualism and freethinking. Moreover, the spiritual movements of India, throughout its history, have always rejected the caste-system… We shall see that spirituality itself has to evolve and become a higher spiritual adventure and a new discovery ringing in a new era of knowledge without the possibility of error, a creative and supremely effective power and bliss without the shadow of suffering.

Religion in the West hardly admits the free seeking of the aspiring human mind. Instead of the freedom of the spirit what matters most is the dogma, the theological credo. To attain salvation the adherent has inevitably to pass through Christ and his church. This idea of dependence is the premise on which the intellect builds the theological argument. Even theologians who are considered innovators and revolutionary… are not free of this basic dependence. There are people who think that they can know truth by themselves and can be virtuous and spiritual by their own effort and can be redeemed through personal discipline. It is concluded that “the view that we can and should gain the basis and meaning of our existence by our own power is not simply an error that might be corrected by enlightenment, but rather is nothing other than sin.” …

In the evolutionary philosophy of the Realistic Adwaita static religious view of credal theology cannot be of any constructive help. We have to look for a more subtle, creative, inventive and innovative form of religious living on which a higher and truly free spiritual living can be established. The Indian religious vision can be the spring-board for such an enterprise. There is in that vision “a union of unlimited religious liberty with an always orderly religious evolution ... It is this absolute freedom of thought and experience and this provision of a framework sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet sufficiently sure and firm to be the means of a stable and powerful evolution...”   more »