"We Are All Hindus Now" # 5

"The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."

Lisa Miller

We Are All Hindus Now
By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 15, 2009

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."

Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life"—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves "spiritual, not religious," according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for "the divine-deli-cafeteria religion" as "very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You're not picking and choosing from different religions, because they're all the same," he says. "It isn't about orthodoxy. It's about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that's great, too."

Then there's the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally believe that bodies and souls are sacred, that together they comprise the "self," and that at the end of time they will be reunited in the Resurrection. You need both, in other words, and you need them forever. Hindus believe no such thing. At death, the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where identity resides—escapes. In reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves come back to earth again and again in different bodies. So here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we're burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. "I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection," agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard. So let us all say "om."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155

"According to the Hindu view, the entrance of God into the strife of the universe is not a unique astounding entrance of the transcendental essence into the welter of mundane affairs (as Christianity, where the Incarnation is regarded as a singular and supreme sacrifice, never to be repeated), but a rhythmical event, conforming to the beat of the world ages. The savior descends as a counterweight to the forces of evil during the course of every cyclic decline of mundane affairs, and his work is accomplished in a spirit of imperturbable indifference. The periodic incarnation of the Holy Power is a sort of solemn leitmotiv in the interminable opera of the cosmic process, resounding from time to time like a majestic flourish of celestial trumpets, to silence the disharmonies and to state again the triumphant themes of the moral order...

The descent is represented in Indian mythology as the sending forth of a minute particle (amsa) of the infinite supramundane essence of Godhead — that essence itself suffering thereby no diminution; for the putting forth of a savior, the putting forth even of the mirage of the universe, no more diminishes the plenitude of the transcendent and finally unmanifested Brahman than the putting forth of a dream diminishes the substance of our own unconsciousness.”

Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India

" "The later patriarchal religions and mythologies," wrote Erich Neumann in a richly documented study, The Great Mother, "have accustomed us to look upon the male god as a creator . . . But the original, overlaid stratum knows of a female creative being." Neumann assumes for the whole region of the Mediterranean a universally adopted religion of the Great Mother goddess around 4000 B.C.E., which was revived around 2000 B.C.E. and spread through the whole of the then known world. In this religion the Great Goddess was worshipped as creator, as Lady of men, beasts, and plants, as liberator and as as symbol of transcendent spiritual transformation.

The Indus civilization also belongs to that tradition in which the cult of the Great Goddess was prominent. Numerous terracotta figurines have been found: images of the Mother Goddess of the same kind that are still worshipped in Indian villages today...

The connections between Saktism, Mohenjo-Daro civilization, and Mediterranean fertility cults seem to be preserved even in the name of the Great Mother: "Uma for her peculiar name, her association with a mountain and her mount, a lion, seems to be originally the same as the Babylonian Ummu or Umma, the Arcadian Ummi, the Dravidian Umma, and the Skythian Ommo, which are all mother goddesses." The name Durga seems to be traceable to Truqas, a diety mentioned in the Lydian inscriptions of Asia Minor. There is a common mythology of this Great Mother: she was the first being in existence, a Virgin. Spontaneously she conceived a son, who became her consort in divinity. With her son-consort she became mother of the gods and all life. Therefore we find the Goddess being worshipped both as Virgin and Mother.”

K. K. Klostermaier, Hinduism: A Short History,
Oneworld Pub., 2000, p. 188-9

"In the beginning was the Mother.

As far back as 30,000 years ago, the people of the earth worshipped a female deity. In cultures around the world, the Goddess has been revered in myriad forms, in temple and grove, cathedral and cave. She has been celebrated and venerated through ritual, myth, and art. These pages serve as introduction to some of the 10,000 names of the Goddess, and offer links to other web pages and resources where you can find more information about Goddess spirituality and mythology.

The path of Goddess is not defined or laid down in dogma. It is a living, daily connection with sacredness. There is literally no end to the ways in which you can find and honor Goddess. The Goddess is Gaia, the earth … Ix Chel, the moon … Arianrhod, the stars. She is Oya, who brings the storms, and she is Mary, who calms them. She is Nut, who births creation, and Kali, who destroys it. She is maiden, mother, queen and crone. She is lover and spinster, warrior and sibyl, nurturer and judge.

Once She has called your name,
you are Hers forever.”

www.lunaea.com/

"The question remains as to whether some kind of spiritual evolution is in progress, whether large amounts of people gradually taking up meditation and other forms of inner practice will create a critical mass of global enlightenment, or whether we will continue in what could be called the Brazilian rain forest mode. In the past, this theory goes, a small number of mystics, ascetics, monastics, wandering mendicants, and other followers of the Perennial Philosophy were capable of providing the spiritual oxygen that helped the rest of the world to breathe and that sustained the mainstream practice of religion with all its surface anomalies. These days it seems increasingly questionable whether this approach will be sufficient to redeem a crippled planet; on the whole, the evolutionary theory makes more sense. But how long will it take? The Bolivian visionary Oscar Ichazo said some years ago, "In the past eras the mystical trip was an individual matter, or at least a matter of small groups, but no longer. This is what is new in human history. Everybody can now achieve a higher degree of consciousness. . . . The vision of humanity as one enormous family, one objective tribe, may once have been utopian. Now it is a practical necessity."

Peter Occhiogrosso, The Joy of Sects

"She is not only the Power of God as the whirling wheel of life in its birth-bringing and death-bringing totality; She is also the Force of the Centre, which bestows Consciousness and Knowledge, Transformation and Illumination. Thus Brahma prays to the Great Goddess: "Thou art the pristine spirit, the nature of which is bliss; thou art the ultimate nature and the clear light of heaven, which illuminates and breaks the self-hypnotism of the terrible round of rebirth, and thou art the one that muffles the universe, for all time in thine own very darkness."

Eric Neuman, The Great Mother

"The second aspect of the Goddess is that of Mother. As previously stated among her names by which she is called are the Great Mother and Mother Nature which signifies her worshippers believe her to be the Mother, creator and life-giver to all of nature and to every thing within.

This at first may seem confusing to many within the Christian Age where the Father God is claimed to be the creator. What many are not aware of, but more are becoming so, is that the world passed through a matriarchal age before the present patriarchal one. There is amble archaeological, historical and anthropological evidence of this. The previously mentioned findings of numerous female figurines and drawings in many locations supports the fact that during such ancient times the female was very honored. The depictions self-fertilization and women giving birth states the Goddess has been very honored for motherhood...

In The Sacred Book one reads:

...(She is)...the image of the invisible, virginal, perfect spirit... She became the Mother of everything, for she existed before them all, the mother-father [matropater]...

In the Gospel to the Hebrews, Jesus speaks of "my Mother, the Spirit." Again, in the Gospel of Thomas "Jesus contrasts his earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, with his divine Father--the Father of Truth--and his divine Mother, the Holy Spirit." And, in the Gospel of Philip, "whoever becomes a Christian gains 'both father and mother' for the Spirit (rurah) is 'Mother of many.' . . .

Many men have expressed the need to return to the Goddess, indicating that this is not only a woman's search or desire. "English therapist John Rowan believes that every man in Western culture also needs this vital connection to the vital female principle in nature and urges men to turn to the Goddess. In this way men will be able to relate to human women on more equal terms, not fearful of resentful of female power. Perhaps this is how it was in prehistoric times when men and women coexisted peacefully under the hegemony of the Goddess."

To many men in Neo-paganism and witchcraft sexism seems absurd and trifling. If all men were honest they would admit that they would not be here if it were not for their biological mothers. Sexism immediately disappears when this fact is agreed to. All human beings are sexual, and sexuality propagated, although at times it would seem the Christian Church would have liked to dismiss this fact completely. But, the fact cannot be dismissed because, again, according to Jung this biological fact is also imprinted as the archetypes of anima and animus upon the human unconscious. They represent the feminine side of man and the masculine side of woman. As behavioral regulators they as most important; for with out them men and women could not coexist. When the two unconscious elements are balanced harmony exists, but when there is an unbalanced over masculinity or femininity is exerted.”

www.themystica.com/

NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity:

www.adishakti.org/
www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/  — Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/  — Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/  — Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/  — Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)

"Now, the principle of Mother is in every, every scripture - has to be there." Shri Mataji, Radio Interview 1983 Oct 01, Santa Cruz, USA