A reply to the lecture given by Anil Bhanot, Gen Sec. of Hindu Council
HUMBLE SALUTATIONS to the speaker.
Prannam namaskaram
PLEASE FORGIVE ME WHOEVER SENT ME THIS BRIEF CONTENTS....
Kindly forgive me but I need to reflect upon its contents.
With your permission may I please state my views ?
"The American model, which holds onto the flag more or less, leaves a void in people who are so facile as to just become media fed. Media can turn them every which way at any time, and the quality of such a media also falls. The French model of assimilation through secularism seems also to fall apart as we saw recently because people who want to hold onto their culture gets neglected altogether. The old
= not an objectively true statement - very subjective opinion of mind......Every stream of entity is the same regardless of colour, religions, caste, creed, culture, and race.....Issue is not that of models rather that of KARMA - individual and collective human karma.
"I believe that if we can learn to separate the metaphysical from the worldly matters which are both intrinsically infused in each religion and then see our unity in purpose in the metaphysical domain but in the worldly domain, accept that we are different, we need to be different and we need to celebrate that difference, God created us as such and if we can accept that simple fundamental law of nature, then we could easily unite where it really matters, in the metaphysical plane where we all do have a single unity in purpose."
= Does not make sense towards a human world filled with history, karma, vikarma, and more so 'hanta' (violence) due to the very reasons of division implanted by the "I" the collective human mind...If so how come the collective human mind has only accumulated one catastrophe after another...... How could one separate prakrutti from atman? it is like separating shiva from shakti. Do you see my point? We are only different in our KARMA, our fates therefore differentiate us. Our destiny is one - we are different rivers that eventually submerge into the grand ocean and loose our individual names, forms and shapes and time..........Our karmic time differentiates one another....ONLY KARMA.......differentiates one from another.....
FACTUALLY: the svastica = the yantra for kaal and akaal the nine points become the kaal from akaal and the four dots become the four vedas..........THE FOUR MANUS. Four therefore represents the four Vedas and four purposes of life, four karmas, four stages.....etc......
I have read nearly most of the scriptures of BUDDHISM and intriguingly fascinating are some of the wisdom emanating from them....However,.....
Buddha never mentions about Ramayana or Mahabharat in any of his teachings? why? how come? Yet his moksha mantras emanate from Vedas despite his disclaimer of VEDAS.....How contradictory is Buddhism then? One wonders ......
All 'isms' are man made religions over time disintegrating and breaking down the one universal soil into many different colours, creed, caste, and giving birth to political umbrellas, political systems, political camouflages, differences in beliefs, differences, and differentiating one entity from another due to quality of the physical soil rather than the QUALITY of karma.........Only karma can determine fertility of the soil..........Strange but so true, most of our food, agricultural crops, green vegetables, rice, gold and minerals still come from MAMA Africa and Mother India.....Yet these two continents are suffering from highest corruption, political camouflages mass poverty, mass ignorance and cultural chaos.......
The human karma - the collective human karma is responsible for this present state of the mother earth suffering and silently bleeding with great hurt, grief and agony...........
There is the distant echo from Mother India: " Oh my child you have become such a distanced foreigner come back home your mother needs you...."; Poor mother dies in so many deaths but the child is busy making his name, fame,accumulating power, control and much more......When epiphanies strike the earth - people all over the world show sympathy and make grand contributions towards disasters and natural epiphanies.....as if it were a matter of showing how sorry we are......rather than out of obligation and without any hesitations of any expectations whatsoever....even those funds raised for the good cause get pirated in vicious cycles.....
Wishing you good luck in your model structures and model visions of U.K. but there again i have strong reservations towards your commentaries about making models out of pertinence and giving no mention whatsoever to the regime of our own VEDIC fragmentation under different political umbrellas and now more political systems. Do systems of congress really produce solutions towards the reality of this universe withering away in a universal right a universal truth and can your so called powerful umbrellas and centres render solutions to the VEDIC heritage that is totally fragmentised by so many powerful control centres each claiming to be right?
At least let us realise and re-awaken ourselves towards the hurting grief manifesting in the HINDU dharma - the great VEDIC heritage abused, misused and controlled by the very same imperialists and imperial powers that long in the history of this world colonised, ruled and culturally distorted the individual HINDU or AFRICAN values..............That is the core of the issue here...today here and now that is bothering us and that is causing so much chaos.....Problem manifesting in one individual household cannot be different to another household......Every household shares the same problem (ONE OF jealousy, envy, greed, competition, desires, dishonesty, selfishness, possessiveness, obsession, control, power, INSECURITY, FEAR, ANXIETY, NOISE, HASTE, WASTE, VIOLENCE, SCREAMING, SHOUTING, ARGUING, ETC.) and these difficulties in return reflect in the social, economic and political circumferences and infrastructures.
Each family comprises individual people and their karma; each household contribute to make a society and societies contribute to make communities and communities and societies and institutions and organisations all together compose a country a nation.....What we have as a basic problem of infrastructure in this country cannot be isolated and be classified as being different to that of U.SA. or EUROPE......I am sorry but the biggest difficulty the younger generation children whom we call the tomorrow's future face (tomorrow's leaders) exhilarates over life STRESS, TENSION OF BECOMING BETTER THAN OTHERS, COMPETITION, conflict between the soul (atman) and the lust of material luxuries (maha-maya). For example, a child in many household homes is put under pressure to become aggressively competitive, to be powerful and to be more prestigious. At a time in a this young spirit's life, a CONFUSION emanates when things go wrong and they do not quiet work out as planned for example sudden deaths in families, sudden tragic illnesses, sudden tragedies, sudden misfortunes, etc.. From adversities these younger generations children and widows get confused what to actually hold on to????????? Whom to trust and whom to believe? What sect to follow, what cult to belong to and what religious umbrella to hide under/Between so many claimants and so many owners and so many leaders?????? Do you see my point of view? Here first of all we have to address our own HINDU dharma problems and re-awaken our own children of the basis of human life - that which is truly based on karma......TRUTH is one, the light of the soul divine is beautifully divine in every beautifully nice person regardless of his or her culture, caste, creed, race, religion, etc....One is known from his or her karma only and karma only decides fate and destiny...............To realise ones own soul divine is to realise every other soul divine............this is simple truth......that when we become aware and realise that everyone's soul divine is as fragile and delicate as a new born baby then we will begin to treat one another with respect, love, compassion and above all INTEGRITY......When we give love, compassion and self-respect to the virtues of our own spirit of life, we will respect without prejudice INTEGRITY and value one another not because they are rich or poor but because they are simply NICE human beings......THIS IS THE KEY MESSAGE to put across to younger generation children who have lost faith in many camouflages of political leaderships and mirages of falsities all of which reign with ego power and power of the mind, prestige, position and political systems.......
In particular time shall speak for itself how people will react towards your views and how you will succeed in actually integrating the HINDU community in the
I have a right to express my views about how saddened and how disheartened i am with the individual political power centres arising throughout the world at large under the name of VEDIC Hindu dharma.....It is my duty, my problem in as much as leaders of powerful political systems need to listen to the true echoes of the bruised weeping poor old man/woman in INDIA and AFRICA.
One cannot eliminate the CORE issues of our dharma VEDIC DHARMA being controlled, fragmented, divided, misused, abused, divided, and differentiated by increase in cultism, sectarianism, imperialism, and political camouflages.......What did we achieve if we continued to close our eyes to this simple truth? I am sure that there are more persons out there who wish to be part of the transformation from darkness to lightness, from falsity to truthfulness, from mortality of the wretched of this earth to the immortality of the divine light of the soul and from being controlled to being free. However, so many may be hurting within themselves and keeping their hurt in silence letting the hurt grow. DHARMA leaders should encourage and bring together the expression of many facets of identities and let these individual entities freely grow in love, infinite wisdom, compassion, and encouragement without the confines of control, systems, bureaucracies, and confusions....Let each spirit of life discover, adventure and experience its course just a river does......Life oh life! Let it be a flight of delight!
Jaya SiyaRama
Hari Aum Tat Sat Swaha.
Sincerely Jyotikar Pattni
Without prejudice whatsoever...
Hari Aum Tat Sat Swaha
From: Hindu Council UK
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Subject: A lecture on an Integration Model for the
A short lecture at the Inter Faith Network of UK
by Anil Bhanot, General Secretary, Hindu Council
Cultural Diversity & Integration
Rabindra Nath Tagore, a great Indian poet, said,
Faith is a bird that feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark.
In this one sentence Tagore has encapsulated the essence of faith, that it is when the first rays of the sun have not yet shone, it is still dark, but the bird anticipates that first ray of light and starts singing. We too live in hope for that light which will overcome the darkness completely. As different faith groups, we may have different approaches to find that light but we are all at least united in the same purpose. In reality even our different approaches are different only in style not so much in content. Yet some people refuse to look at the deeper meaning and treat God’s revelations as partial, prejudiced because they happen to be so written in a book. They glorify these books so much that these books become even greater than God himself. Lord Buddha in fact said that no one should simply believe what they read or what others say until they have examined it in their own conscience with their own intellect, Buddhi, and additionally, that unless it is for the benefit of one and all. For instance, the Kabalah, an ancient Jewish religion, says that the world is 1% order and 99% chaos and that before you act make sure that you add to the order not the chaos. It’s a wonderful principle but we may not all agree with those ratios of 1%, 99% exactly applying today. We need to separate the permanent principles from the worldly arguments that may have applied when a book was written in a certain region for a certain people.
Metaphysically speaking, the revelations of a permanent nature to attain the inner light, or be one with God or near God or whatever your religion dictates, to my mind are all very similar. Hinduism asks for the renunciation of ego, Islam asks for complete surrender, Christianity asks to go through Jesus, with teachings of humility, turning the other cheek even when facing death. All these ways sound very similar but even if they are not let us accept it as God�s design on creation. Even the religions which are fiercely singular have multiple divisions, some almost at loggerheads with each other. Surely it is time to accept that not only God moves in mysterious ways but also in multitude ways giving multiple revelations for a multiple of ways. History bears witness to that and all your good presence here today, representing a multitude of faiths, proves the point, I hope!
Its not as if God started giving his revelations only a few thousand years ago to the select few. He started that as soon as he created our species, Manushya, for Man in Sanskrit, and he did so to the first man, Manu, at the beginning of time as some of us know it and he continues to do so to this very day. According to the most ancient scriptures in the world, there are 4 original races, the Caucasian, the Negro, the red Mongoloid and the Chinese and in the Hindu symbol of Swastik they are still represented as 4 dots within a diagrammatical representation of our solar system. The Hindu Swastik worship includes a prayer for the welfare of all 4 races, for the whole of mankind, in accordance with one of the primary revelations of God.
Bishop Tom Butler said in a recent TV programme after the 7/7 that faith can be creative as much as it can be destructive and he even said that if we are not careful we may destroy ourselves. Of course, destruction comes when there is an imbalance in the natural order, and I think, in the case of faith, when religion and books begin to be worshipped more than God himself. If a revelation written in a book cannot withstand the test of time then is it God’s or is it Man’s?
I believe that if we can learn to separate the metaphysical from the worldly matters which are both intrinsically infused in each religion and then see our unity in purpose in the metaphysical domain but in the worldly domain, accept that we are different, we need to be different and we need to celebrate that difference, God created us as such and if we can accept that simple fundamental law of nature, then we could easily unite where it really matters, in the metaphysical plane where we all do have a single unity in purpose.
In this worldly domain, however, the need for our different cultural identities cannot be overlooked. The American model, which holds onto the flag more or less, leaves a void in people who are so facile as to just become media fed. Media can turn them every which way at any time, and the quality of such a media also falls. The French model of assimilation through secularism seems also to fall apart as we saw recently because people who want to hold onto their culture gets neglected altogether. The old
Here in the
Furthermore, with the migration increasing, which may bring in new challenges, and some problems like religious apartheid, the need for some local mechanisms to be in place is now even greater. These structures would tie in with active citizenship programmes running in parallel, their interaction with each other will increase respect, in time, leading to trust among different communities, which would lead ultimately into a more pragmatic and achievable integration, for the country.
Tagore�s bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark is beckoning us to work both with the external light of the sun at the ground level but with an inspiration through the true spiritual light from within, at a metaphysical, united in purpose level. Another ancient Vedic revelation: Vasudevaya Kutumbakum, the whole world is one family, we simply have to learn to live with each other.�
In the Q&A session that followed, Mr Bhanot explained that the local structures must be community based not worship based and if in temples, churches, synagogues, Mosques etc. then the area allocated has to be separate from the worship area but the cultural aspect is very important. Secularisation among youngsters will give way to a cultural richness once the connection through such local structures is made. If its done in the right format the young will even find it cool to go there.
Unless we can "facilitate" the teachings of respect towards fellow beings it may be unfair to expect everyone to simply behave in the manner we have learnt to take for granted. Mr Bhanot said that for the second phase of inter community interactions, senior religious leaders, Bishops, are prepared to help it succeed.
Immigrants who come from countries where Religious Apartheid is practiced legally, we need to undo those learnings before some may cause damage here by having local centres for them to come and participate in the culture of their own community, here in the
End.