Video Information: 02.04.23, IIT-Delhi, Delhi
Context:
~ What are fanatic religious beliefs?
~ What are the effects of religious fanaticism?
~ What are some critical thinking questions about religion?
~ Do our festivals just celebrations or do they have some deeper meaning?
~ To whom we should blame for false culture and religion?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Context:
~ What are fanatic religious beliefs?
~ What are the effects of religious fanaticism?
~ What are some critical thinking questions about religion?
~ Do our festivals just celebrations or do they have some deeper meaning?
~ To whom we should blame for false culture and religion?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Sir, I am Saurabh Kumar from Rajdhani College, Delhi University. My question is that there
00:09is one or two days ago, there was Ram Navami. Some people were going and cheering Ram Ram
00:17at the mosque and figuring out some flags at the mosque and they are looking like Rabri
00:24Sena. They are cheering Ram Ram. How can people can go this down? I mean, they are kind of
00:34rubbish and it is called culture art. I mean, please take that.
00:39I do not really know the facts of this case. Even you probably do not know. You can only
00:46quote that which has been brought to you by the media. We do not know what is it that
00:51the media is bringing to you. One has to be very very sceptical these days. Anything can
00:58be shown to you, anything can be proved to you. This is the age of mass indoctrination
01:06and hysteria. Sir, sometimes before, that was a North Indian
01:14kind of things, but it became kind of like all pan-India movement. Some Maharashtra,
01:21Bengal, UP, Rajasthan, it is all over the India. So, it is more concerning how our society
01:28is growing. Even we are talking in this classroom or auditorium, but the others are doing something
01:35very dangerous, so that others are feeling insecure. How can we neglect that thing?
01:43See, those who do all this, irrespective of the side they come from, it does not matter
01:51whether it is a Ram Navami procession or a Muharram procession or a Christmas gathering.
02:01Those who are doing this, think of where they are coming from. Think of the entire ecosystem
02:09that breeds such people and then also tolerates them. I am asking you, had we been really
02:18different as a society, would you still have those incidents? Do we want to blame an event
02:30or do we want to rather responsibly look at the entire ecosystem? Please tell me. Whatever
02:37they are doing is more or less actively or passively socially accepted. That's why they
02:44can afford to do what they do. Had they known that for displaying all kinds of perverse
02:54attitudes and behaviors in the name of religion, they would be socially ostracized. Would they
03:00have still dared to do what they are doing? Make it even more personal. Let's say there
03:08is a rioter. The police may not be able to locate his identity. Either due to connivance
03:21or due to incompetence, the police might fail to know who that rioter is, but for sure there
03:27are some people who definitely know who that person is. His wife knows. Does his wife not
03:35know? His kids know, his parents know, his friends know or are even these people in dark.
03:46Think of a situation where this fellow engages in an act of rioting and returns home and
03:52is disowned by his wife. Would he still manage to remain the kind of ignorant figure that
04:02he is? Please tell me. But just as family members partake in the bribe money that you
04:13bring home, they also partake in all kinds of toxic attitudes that we have. When a fellow
04:21accepts bribe, is it so that his family does not know of it? The fact is that the family
04:28willingly happily enjoys the proceeds of the bribe. The fellow brings the bribe home. Does
04:34he not? Similarly, the family very well knows the attitudes that a person is cultivating
04:44and rioting, mind you, is also a bit of an economic activity. You don't just randomly
04:51riot anywhere. When you riot, you also loot. When you riot, often you also loot. Where
05:00do the proceeds of the loot go? They go to your house, right? The entire family is complicit
05:06or is it not? That's why I'm talking of the ecosystem. It's not a person, it's an entire
05:14It's just that the active rioters become visible just as the tip of the iceberg becomes visible.
05:20Beneath that tip, there is an entire system that has upheld that tip, right? Else that tip would
05:31have disappeared. So, we talk of the 10, 20 or 100 fellows that indulge in active rioting. But
05:40we do not talk of the thousands and lakhs who passively support these rioters. And if those
05:47thousands and lakhs disappear, would these handful of rioters still manage to survive? I'm asking you.
05:55Please tell me. Okay. One of you starts making boorish sounds here. What would happen? Just one
06:05of you, just one of you, just one of you starts making unpleasant sounds and starts distracting
06:12everybody. What is it that will immediately find? Let's say somebody at the back. If he does that,
06:17what would happen? Everybody would turn to the back and give him angry stares, right? So,
06:26he will have to stop. Is that not so? That's the power of the ecosystem. That's the power
06:33of the ecosystem. This is a society. One person cannot go astray here. The entire feeling,
06:45the cumulative feeling of this body has to be corrupted for something seriously active to
06:56happen, right? So, there are one or two fellows at the back who start creating noises and making
07:04faces and doing things. And what will the rest of the hall do then? As shared members in the
07:15conspiracy, they will either just gently smile or they will pretend as if nothing has happened,
07:23right? Somebody throws something at the speaker from the behind and the rest of the audience keeps
07:31sitting as if nothing has happened. What does that prove? Everybody is partaking in the conspiracy,
07:41correct? That's why I am talking of the ecosystem. You are talking of the 5, 10, 20 or 100 people who
07:49engage in active violence. I am saying behind that display of active violence, there is a lot
07:56of passive toxicity. And from where does that passive toxicity come to the society? It comes
08:04from a few nodes, TV, social media, some other places. When that toxicity is coming to you as
08:17a general member of the society, then you don't resist. But when there is arson and looting and
08:24murder and rioting, then you start saying, oh, why are these people actively fighting each other?
08:31They are fighting each other because of the content that is being beamed to you daily on
08:38national television and on social media. Now tell me, do you want to talk about the tip of
08:48the iceberg or the entire mass? The entire mass. And since all of us are responsible when that
08:57act of looting or rioting happens, therefore each of us has to turn to himself or herself and ask,
09:04why does this happen? Why does this happen? Terrorists sometimes hide in a particular
09:27house in a village. They cannot hide in that house if the rest of the village is not complicit.
09:37Right? Now, do you want to blame that terrorist, that house or the entire village? We will fight
10:02because we are animals. We require the enlightening effect of wisdom literature to
10:16transcend our animal disposition. Note that when someone stabs another one in the heart,
10:36you can capture that on the camera and you are quick to denounce that as an act of brutality.
10:44You just saw that happening in front of eye. The dagger was sharp and it went right into the flesh
10:53and blood, it just sprouted out like a fountain and all that is so dramatic. You can see that.
11:07How about those who are killing you daily by poisoning the air and you are getting killed
11:19daily, right? But is that so visual, so optical and so dramatic? Is it? We never come to know
11:27of that. But the principle behind both these murderers is the same and as intelligent people,
11:35you must recognize that. The principle behind the stabber and the polluter is the,
11:42and that is the principle of the animal, the beast. I will live in my self-centered ignorance.
11:53That's the principle of the stabber and that's also the principle behind the polluter. Therefore,
12:02you require wisdom. You require wisdom and that's the entire purpose of spirituality,
12:09to take us beyond the bodily instincts. See how animals fight. If in a particular space,
12:25there are n number of rabbits and more rabbits are born, the elder, stronger,
12:34typically male rabbits kill the younger ones, because they want to have some kind of a
12:42monopoly over the resources. They say if we have more rabbits, that's not good for our physicality.
12:50Food will become scarce, divided. That's who we are. We all come from the jungle,
12:59don't we? Historically, how long was it? Very recently, till very recently, we were chimpanzees
13:10and orangutans, were we not? You can say a few million years, that's a blink of an eye,
13:17when it comes to the historical time scale. Till yesterday, we were in the jungle as beasts. So,
13:25we share our basic instincts with the beasts and that's the reason we stab and we pollute.
13:32And that's the reason why we require the Bhagavad Gita so much. That's the reason why the Upanishads
13:44have to be the central documents, the most respected scriptures. Otherwise,
13:54we will continue to be violent. Irrespective of whether you are a man, a woman, a religious person,
14:03an irreligious person, a devotee, an atheist, it does not matter. A Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist,
14:11a Christian, does not matter. You will continue to be violent. You could be very well-educated,
14:20you would still be violent. You will be violent now in a subtle way. You could be a rustic fellow,
14:28crude and uneducated, and you will be violent, violent in your own crude way. So, the ways of
14:36violence will change. The internal violence will remain because the beast is violent. What is
14:43meant by that? Ignorance is violence. Ignorance is violence. What does ignorance mean? The feeling
14:53that I am the body and I have to live by the bodily dictates. That's ignorance. Ignorance
14:59does not mean not knowing. Ignorance means living in the wrong kind of identification.
15:09Not knowing your central identity is ignorance. Are you getting it? So much ignorance is so
15:28powerful, it consumes even religion. You were talking of writing in the name of religion.
15:39Do you know that more people have died in the name of religion than due to any other cause?
15:50You have to keep biological causes aside and you have to keep mass extinctions aside. So,
15:56we are not talking of cosmological events here. We are also not talking of things like
16:01the black plague here. We are talking of wars that human beings fight and the atrocities
16:08that they commit. More people have died in the name of religion than anything else. Think
16:17of the Crusades, the long wars between the Muslims and the Christians. If you study history,
16:27you will know how bloody they were. More recently, look at 1971. When we talk of genocides, we
16:43often ignore that place and that year. That was not that much in the name of language. Though
16:55language was an issue, Bengali versus Urdu. That was also not so much in the name of ethnicity,
17:01Punjabi versus Bengali. That was more in the name of religion. Because the Pakistani army,
17:14when it got violent, it killed both Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus, but mostly and the
17:25murders and the rapes were just countless and all that in the name of religion. And it is not as
17:39if the so-called peaceful religions have not indulged in violence. Look at Burma. Even the
17:52struggle that you had in Sri Lanka was religious in some sense, Hindus versus Buddhists. Ignorance
18:06is so powerful and its appetite is so huge. It can consume even religion when the central purpose of
18:14religion is to defeat ignorance. That's Maya. That's Maya for you. To make things worse,
18:29you have religious scriptures that directly command their followers to slay the non-believers. Now,
18:36what do you do? If you come across a non-believer, slay him. This is in the name of religion.
18:47Even core religionists fight with each other. They keep declaring each other as enemies of
19:10religion. So, we will ostracize you or declare you apostates and do all these things. Look at
19:24what happened to the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan. There is a large section among Sunnis that do
19:37not even want to accept Shias as Muslims. And look at how the Hindus have perpetrated
19:45caste atrocities in the name of religion. Till very recently, you had trouble in Great Britain.
20:00You know of IRA? You think of that only as something political? No. There was the
20:10Protestant versus Catholic angle there. Throughout the world, note this statistic. It is very strange
20:24that the more religious people are, the less educated they are, the poorer they are and the
20:34more is the number of kids they beget. Maya ashames religion as well. This is hard data. The
20:46more religious you are, the less money will you have. The more religious you are, the less educated
20:53will you be. And the more religious you are, the more will be the number of kids you will have.
20:58And religion was supposed to be a liberating force and this is what we have done to religion.
21:07Namaskar Sir. I am Mukesh Sayal. I am 1983. Passed out from IIT Delhi. My first question
21:27is the writers are not born writers. That is my feeling. Whatever I say is my feeling. Whatever we
21:38have seen so far, a writer is a writer when it is between two communities, well-defined communities.
21:47Everybody knows. I don't want to name them. The writer is a sanyasi when the third community
21:54takes out a similar position through the same street. Do you think there is a motivating force
22:02behind those writers to make them writers selectively and make them sanyasi selectively?
22:10That is my question. I didn't get the sanyasi angle. I am sitting in my house. I find
22:24today X community. I will not name that community. I am from Y community. X community is taking out
22:35a position through a street, through the same street. Then I am throwing stones on them. I am
22:44abusing their priests or whatever you name their religious persons and doing all sorts of nonsense.
22:55So in that case, I am being motivated by somebody to become a writer. If the other Z community
23:04passing through the same street, I am sitting in my sofa and I am clapping and participating,
23:13not actively, maybe passively through my balcony and enjoying their procession. So do you mean to
23:21say or I have a feeling that that writer is being motivated by somebody to become a writer against
23:29that procession of a particular community? What you mean to say is that a lot of that is reactive,
23:37purely reactive, because there are conditions. A Hindu watches a Muslim, let's say. There is no
23:45point hiding names. You are talking of Hindus and Muslims here. That's okay. That's the fact.
23:53So what we are probably saying is that the Hindu watches the Muslim indulging in some things
23:58and as a reaction, he too becomes aggressive. That is likely. That is quite possible.
24:03It is possible.
24:06Why he is a writer or starts pelting stones on a particular religious procession,
24:14if the similar procession passes through a different community?
24:21Third community you are saying?
24:23Third community. He is enjoying that procession. He is enjoying that satsang being played there.
24:30He is enjoying the shabad peertar being played.
24:32So you are then predisposed to oppose, obviously.
24:36No, but he is not born as a writer. He is motivated as a writer.
24:40You are conditioned. You are brought up. That's the role of the ecosystem we talked of.
24:45The kind of things we consume from the TV, from the family, from society,
24:50if continuously those things are present in the environmental and cultural elements,
24:56then obviously slowly something is being built up and if you are lucky that will never explode.
25:05If you are not so lucky, it may come to a tipping point someday and then there might be active
25:10violence. Even if there is no active violence, passively you are being indoctrinated to be
25:17violent within. So we know how that is happening. Yes, that's true.
25:22See, I will come back to that. We are animals and animals are not supposed to understand.
25:34Animals live by their bodily instincts. They don't really understand. Understanding is not even needed.
25:44Correct. No animal ever sits down and wonders. There are no transcendental, philosophical,
25:53spiritual questions in their mind. They are meant to do as their body commands them to do.
26:02So we will favor those of our type. We will oppose those of the other type.
26:10The lion was never taught to hunt the deer. It comes from his body or does it not? The fish was
26:17never taught to swim. It comes from its body. Similarly, from our body violence comes. It is
26:24the body. Violence comes and that will remain till we are not properly spiritually educated.
26:35It's about rioting and it's also about our otherwise so-called peaceful looking life.
26:43Look at the relationship between the man and the woman, the husband and the wife,
26:46the father and the son. Don't you see a lot of violence there? It's just that the violence is
26:52tacit, implicit, hidden. Violence will be there. I repeat, ignorance is violence. And what is
27:02ignorance? Living without knowledge of the self is ignorance. If you don't have self-knowledge,
27:09you will be violent. If you are crude, you will hit the other in the body. If you are not so crude,
27:16then you will pollute the air and do all kinds of hidden things. But you will remain violent.