| How I Became A Hindu My Discover Of Vedic Dharma |
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| Books By David Frawley |
| ADDITIONAL STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM | |
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| Religions
rooted in the personal and historical tend to confuse the merely human with the Divine.
They invest an infallibility to certain prophets, books or institutions, which existing in
time must be fallible. They remain trapped in the needs of a particular community
and frozen at one stage of history. Books
like the Bible and the Koran are human inventions and contain much that untrue or out of
date. They may represent how certain people tried to connect with the divine, but they do
not represent the Divine itself. They are not ofs universal or eternal relevance but have a
niche in time and space that can be quite limiting. Even the Vedas are not literally the
word of God, which is beyond all form, but the spiritual records of the Rishis and the
various ways that they sought the Divine. We should never worship a mere book. A book can
only be an aid for our own inner inquiry, just as a guidebook can never substitute for our
own travel to a new country. That is why we are told that the Vedas are endless. Truth is
beyond limitation. The unspoken word or unstruck sound is greater than what anyone may
ever say. Religion in the world today still promotes many superstitions, not merely about the world, but also about the nature of consciousness. I am not speaking only of tribal beliefs but also of mainstream faiths. If we look at all the claims of salvation in religion, they remain naïve, if not absurd. The necessity for Jesus as our personal savior, or Mohammed as the last prophet, are contrary to both reason and to spiritual wisdom. Knowledge alone brings liberation and it comes not through belief but through meditation. We need not accept all these religious superstitions in order to be liberal in our religious views but should cut through them with the light of discrimination. Truth arises through self-discovery, which requires going beyond all prophets and intermediaries. In this regard truth is more important than God. Our real search should be for truth. That will lead us to the real divinity. But if we seek God according to the idea of a certain faith, we are likely to lose the truth along the way.
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