Approach 1: God is a being with infinite strength, and His grace can lead us to success in this life. For this reason, we pray to him for things like strength, peace, and material success.

Approach 2: God is not some outside being, but rather, We are God — that strength, peace, and success all comes from within us. For this reason, we pray to be able to find this source of inner strength so that we can spread strength, peace and success to others.

My ideal has always been to be so grounded in my spirituality that I no longer prayed for myself (the first approach) but rather that I prayed as a way of reminding myself of my inherent divinity. In other words, I want to have such inner strength/peace/happiness that I don’t need to ask any outside entity to supply me with it. Then, prayer will be a way for me stay charged and strong, so that I can constantly give without asking for anything in return. In that way, achieving that second approach to prayer is my goal.

Given that, I thought I would share the following poem with you – a close friend sent it to me, and it struck me as a beautiful way of expressing this goal. The poem was written by the venerated Saint Francis of Assisi, a Catholic friar and preacher — its similarity to the sentiments echoed in Hindu philosophy are striking!

“Prayer of St. Francis”

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

How do you approach religion? Do you think the sentiments expressed in this poem can actually lead to inner peace and happiness, or is it just meaningless self-sacrifice? What is the point of prayer?

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“What is mind but that ceaseless enquiry into the meaning and mystery of life?” -Swami Vivekananda

I really liked it, and thought to share it with you all, especially since we are all (theoretically, haha) using our minds ceaselessly during finals right now. I’ve always found the most rewarding classes to be those that showed me how to use my mind in the way that Swami Vivekananda expresses above — the material that sticks with me is that which has shown me how to better apply my mind to understand the world around me, and my place in it. And as much as possible, I try to derive this sort of lesson from every class (or more broadly, every possible experience) I have.

Hope this provides some inspiration and direction to everyone’s studying during the next week!

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Yesterday, I found myself lamenting the disappearance of Hinduism’s heroes, such as the venerable Bhishma, the motherly Sharada Devi, the wise king Janaka, the devoted Shabhari, or the inspiring Swami Vivekananda — people whose character and energy are timeless.

It seems like Hinduism has nowhere to turn, and that all of its modern representatives are either weak, market-oriented, or fraudulent. I don’t think Deepak Chopra and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar are anywhere close to Swami Vivekananda in terms of “heroism”, and I am yet to meet a Hindu spiritual leader who qualifies as anything more than well-read and traditional. Certainly, there is no shortage of charitable people in the world today, but for many of them, their attachment to the objects of their charity strips them of the quiet power we find in Hinduism’s most revered heroes. Not that these people are bad (except the dishonest ones), but they’re hardly inspiring — nothing like Mother Teresa or Gandhi, for example.

Then I remembered a scene from one of my favorite movies, V for Vendetta, in which the main character says (watch it here):

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.

That concept of living for an ideal is what I find to be missing — people who burn in pursuit of their principles every second of every day, who nurture an ideal to immortality through their brief existence. It’s, of course, understandable — such intensity resembles idiocy and insanity. But to the individual in question, no other way of life would be truthful.

I realized, then, that every day I have a choice: either to live for an ideal or to live for comfort. (Not that living for an ideal wouldn’t be comfortable, just that it’s more likely to lead to uncomfortable situations.) The lack of heroes in Hinduism can be fixed through my actions, by my deciding to be such a hero. And by that, I don’t mean acts of courage or securing wealth and fame, or even affecting others’ opinions in any way, but just the fundamentally heroic act of adhering to an ideal for its own sake — like the many people who work quietly and inspire those around them.

There are three principles I adhere to, for my own satisfaction, which are grounded in Hinduism:

1. Integrity. The continuous pursuit of truth in how I think, talk, and act.
2. Helping people. If someone asks me for help, I help them.
3. Creativity. To build and invent all the useful objects, ideas, and institutions that it is possible for me to create in my lifetime, and to always do it better than I think is possible.

It brings me immense satisfaction to lead a life which prioritizes honesty and productivity, and equally immense pain when I violate these principles. Nonetheless, the point is that I want to live this ideal for its own sake.

This resolution reminds me of Gandhi’s aphorism: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” After all, our commitment to our personal ideals is not an accident, but a choice. If you’re the type who wants to live for something beyond yourself, think of yourself as one of the very heroes you admire, hold yourself to the same standards, and see what happens.

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Such learning requires that we take full responsibility for our actions, and this is where I find a contradiction with pujas. In performing a puja, if one asks for divine help or prays for success in an endeavor, one ascribes a component of the resultant success or failure to divine grace, and thereby fails to take full responsibility for one’s actions. Our poor understanding of the exact mechanism through which divine beings assist their devotees erodes our faith that such help will actually arrive — rare are the souls who truly believe they will receive such help and whom the divine never disappoints. So I find it hard to ask divine beings for assistance when doing so absolves me of some responsibility for the results of my actions.

In particular, I find that the Ganesha puja, with its avowed aim to propitiate Lord Ganesha to remove obstacles from our future, is contradictory to karma yoga. This is the same for any sort of prospective puja, such as the Saraswati Puja, which seeks to create auspicious conditions for action. Such pujas leave room for absolving oneself of some responsibility for one’s actions, which I find is less effective when it comes to learning from what we do. On the other hand, retrospective pujas, where we shower gratitude upon the divine for its hand in our success or failure, allows us to remain humble, which is a critical factor in viewing the world objectively. Such pujas let us take full responsibility but little credit — the optimal mix for a scientific way, karma yogic of life.

Note that a puja is not itself prospective or retrospective, but the way in which it is performed is. I find that the verses in the Ganesha, Saraswati, and Satyanarayana pujas, with their requests for auspicious conditions and hopes for specific outcomes, embody the prospective attitude. But pujas in which we only express our gratitude for the outcomes of our actions to the divine are excellent because they are effective for maintaining humility — for this reason, I enjoy the offering sections of the aforementioned pujas. It is just such things as calling Ganesha as bhaktavanchhitadayakaya (he who grants his devotee’s desires) in his 108 names during the puja which alarm me as contradictory to karma yoga.

I don’t think the prospective attitude is bad, merely that it contradicts the principles of karma yoga which I value. In keeping with this, I do not plan to attend pujas which I perceive as prospective, so that I can try to be as purely retrospective as possible in invoking the divine, on my own. But when there are pujas or bhajan sessions or some other spiritual get-together in which the emphasis is on gratitude and praising the divine, then I see no contradiction and will be happy to attend!

What do you think?

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I wanted to write a quick note about a couple of different things.  First, on happiness: I think that happiness and spirituality are largely interconnected.  Put simply, your relationship with God affects your outlook on life, and a generally positive outlook can be all that happiness means.  If there’s anything (relevant to this blogpost) that I’ve learned so far this summer, it’s that we are quite in control of our lives and our outlooks.   For some people, casting off the “the grass is always greener on the other side” comes naturally – for others, it takes work.  Either way, I personally think that appreciating the circumstances God has placed me in and believing that I have a future, a fate, a destiny – that “everything happens for a reason” – significantly improves my own outlook on life and in effect, my overall happiness and well-being. I think this is a useful thing to keep in mind as the school year approaches, where “making lemonade out of lemons” isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

Another thing I’ve come to believe is that God not only comes to different people in different ways, but seems to even reside or resonate within different people in different ways.  I’m thinking of some good friends who are extremely religious, and of others who are barely so, at all.   I’m starting to think that God works for everyone in such a way that reciprocates how they allow Him to enter their lives.  This borders on the abstract and non-sensical, but think of a time in your life when your spirituality was at a much different place than what it  is now (if it has ever changed at all):  chances are, when your approach to God was different, the way you approached every-day things in your life was different as well.

These insights are coming alongside a flurry of cleaning and organization,  a day of introspection and a newfound commitment to self-improvement.  I’m somewhat of a procrastinator and stress-ball – and call me weak-minded  - but for me, changing these habits seems like a much less daunting task when I think of the support I can sustain from spirituality.

Finally, I’ll end on a nice Swami Vivekananda quote I ran across the other day: “Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin – to say that you are weak, or others are weak.”

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