Spirituality and Religion of India

India has been known as a land of snake

charmers; a country with a lot of holy cows
straying in the streets of our towns and cities;
Lately of course, the image of India has been
changing due to the bright and young people
like these; although it is understandable that the
western mind sees these sights in India as
striking and bizarre, there is something more
than what meets the eye.
The Indian philosophy and spirituality is encoded in
ancient books, written in an ancient language,
Sanskrit, and are called Vedas. The foremost book
among the Vedas is the Bhagavad Gita. Show Gita.
What some of worlds foremost scholars and thinkers
have said about Gita:
Henry David Thoreau: In the morning I bathe my
intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita, in comparison with
which our modern world and its literature seem puny
and trivial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: I owed a magnificent day to
the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books; it was as
if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy,
but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old
intelligence which in another age and climate had
pondered and thus disposed of the same questions
which exercise us.
MK Gandhi:When doubts haunt me, when
disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not
one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to BhagavadGita and find a verse to comfort me; and I
immediately begin to smile in the midst of
overwhelming sorrow. My life has been full of
external tragedies and if they have not left any
visible or invisible effect on me, I owe it to the
teaching of the Bhagavad Gita.
I wish to share some of the most profound concepts

of spirituality just to give a sample of the

philosophical thinking that is part of the Vedas and
Bhagavad Gita:
The Laws of Nature:
The dress you wear you chose.
The vehicle you drive you chose.
The house live in you chose.
The spouse you will have you chose.
The dress, the car, the house and spouse you chose
all of these. Now, did you choose the parents you
have? Which family or where you should be born? Did
you choose the color of our skin? The gender? How
intelligent we are? Now who decided these for me? Is
this a random occurrence or is there a law that
governs this?
When we dont know something, we say that is the
way they are because that is the way they are. Lot of
people saw apples falling from a tree. Practically all
of them picked up and ate them. If you were to ask,
Why did the apple fall to the ground?, you would
probably get an answer, the apples fall to the
ground, because that is the way they are! But one
person was not willing to accept that answer and it
led to the understanding of gravity.
When I was college student, once my math teachers
taught me something which struck me a lot.
Catenary.
Projectile motion.Water dropping from a tree after a
shower.
Science tells us that there are laws of nature
operating all around us. Ubiquitous.Universal. Stable.
Dependable.Unchanging.Also mathematically
precise.All of technology has become possible
because they are so. Imagine the law of gravity or
the charge of an electron is changing daily or
randomly, you could not have had airplanes and
mobile phones.
If the laws of nature are governing all things areound

us, is there a law governing our coming into this

world? Where we will be born? How much intelligence
we have? And so on?
Yes there are laws of nature and we must try to
understand them.
The Fifth Question
Another interesting observation, the Vedic literatures
make is this: all living species are engaged in four
questions (jijnasa): where shall I eat? Where shall I
rest and sleep? Where shall I mate? And where shall
be safe?
Only humans can ask the fifth question: who am I?
Where did I come from? Where do we go at the end
of our life? Only humans can find the answers to
these questions. You cannot engage in a
conversation with the dogs and cats about these
subjects. Gorilla is 99% human in terms of its
genetic makeup. But it is not 99% human. It is still a
beast. We cannot have a gorilla in this gathering to
reflect on the subjects that we are discussing.
aharanidrabhayamaitunams
ca/samanyametatpashubhihnaranam
dharmo he tesamadhikovisesho/
dharmenahinapashubhisamana
The Vedic literature urge us to ask the Fifth Question:
athato brahma jijnasa.
We are not the body; we are a spark of spirit
that lives in the body.
When we were born, we were just so small and our
mothers held us in her two palms;
Laws of Karma
The story of a farmer and potter.
How will all this help us?
Consciousness development. How will this help?