“May the Gods bless you!”
Turning the ‘One-God’ Abrahamic greeting into a deeply Hindu one
“May the Gods bless you, sir”, said a friend and co-dharmic (a term we activist Hindus use for people working towards rebuilding India’s civilisation).
His greeting/prayer was a result of me sharing with him about my next big project, my ‘sankalpa’ (vow), to create a “1000 Cr Hindu Fund” to solve for funding problems such activist Hindus face everyday in India.
The greeting was so profound that for days it circled my head until this moment when i decided to finally pen it down.
The ‘One-True-God’ and ‘Creator’ mindset of Muslims & Christians
Orthodox Christians and Muslims around the world, have an unmatched zelaousness to prove to the atheist or the kaffir/infidel that there really is ‘One’ God who created the entire universe.
YouTube is flooded with videos such as this one above, by Muslims and Christians, referring to the ‘Book of Genesis’ and the ‘Quran’, arguing passionately for the case that the ‘Big Bang Theory’ proves that the Universe certainly had a beginning, and that if it does have a beginning then there must be a Creator who began it all.
A funny take on the conundrum of the ‘One-God zealots’ interacting with the ‘many-Gods religionists’ around the world
Before the arrival of Judaic religions, civilizations around the world had their religious ideas based on elements of nature. The Americas, Egypt, Greece, Mongolia, Germany, Russia, China and ofcourse India —all of them had civilizations that worshipped different Gods for different purposes.
The Christian and Islamic ‘colonisers’ could never, and still are unable, to comprehend, how anyone can imagine more than ‘ONE Creator’. Both of their respective religious texts have gone ahead and asked for the conversion or killing (or at the very least subduing) of these peoples and civilizations who engage in such blasphemy.
Here is Trevor Noah explaining an interaction of the ‘One-God British’ colonising the ‘many-Gods Indians’. Enjoy!
The ‘many Gods’ of the Hindus
For the Hindus creation is cyclical. There have been many Universes before this one and there will be many after this one.
While there IS a ‘Creator’ in the Hindu cosmology, He is accompanied by two other equally important primodial ‘Beings’ (or Gods), namely, Vishnu and Shiva. In this cosmological worldview, ‘Brahma’ is the ‘Creator’, Vishnu is the ‘Preserver’ while Shiva is the ‘Destroyer’. The three of them work in tandem for the Universe to exist.
The Muslim and Christian in their zealousness to convert the infidel argue — “Aha, but who created Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva? That creator is Allah and He alone is worthy of worship”.
To the Hindu, the idea that there is only one god worthy of worship is bizarre (and even mindless and foolish). To the Hindu, every part and aspect of this manifest Universe is Divine, and therefore ‘worthy of worship’. This is why Hindus revere everything from the Dog to the Cow, from the River to the Ocean, from the Tree to the Mountain.
This reverence of the Universe comes from the central idea of the existence of primordial ‘Consciousness’ called ‘Brhman’ (pronounced ‘Bruh-mun’). Different sects of Hindus, refer to this ‘Consciousness’ as ‘Devi’ or ‘Shiva’ or ‘Krishna’ according to their own versions of cosmology.
But they all agree on the idea that the entire manifest Universe is powered by this Consciousness — which is present in everything that is visible and that is not. Creation of the visible Universe is a cyclical process of this existence, and therefore the Universe is both infinite and ever-existent.
Here is Osho explaining ‘why existence needs ‘no creator’ for it to exist’.
And in this cyclical process of Universe coming into existence and disappearing there are many Creators, Preservers and Destroyers who come into Being and disappear out of Being. And there are many layers or categories of these Divine Beings or Gods. Hindus call them ‘Devatas’. These Devatas hold different functions for the purpose of enhancing human life. Hindus worship them to please them so that the life here on the Earth of man may be plesant and without suffering.
The Hindu religion is therefore ‘human-centric’ as opposed to being ‘god-centric’.
Hope this has been a useful introduction to the Hindu and pantheistic worldview. May the Gods bless you! :-)
Reference reading:
- Life does not need an outside agency, such as God, for it to exist! : https://medium.com/doing-the-right-things/life-does-not-need-an-outside-agency-such-as-god-for-it-to-exist-785eea9c7e67
- There is no benevolent God: https://medium.com/doing-the-right-things/there-is-no-benevolent-god-5490ee485a97
