Why do we associate religion with spirituality – are communists really anti-God?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So Why should we associate spirituality With religion And are people who are communists necessarily Antagonistic There are two different things But I will try to bring them together First of all, the word religion today Has a negative connotation Which was not there even 50 years ago Einstein Has used the word religion And religious sense profoundly Quite often, he said This is a profoundly religious experience for me The art, the sciences And religions, they are all Fruits of the same tree Of human knowledge So the word religion itself Today has a negative connotation But it is not intrinsically negative Basically, if you consider Spirituality to be A state of consciousness or a level of consciousness Consider a mountain The top of the mountain is spiritual consciousness The bottom of the mountain Is material consciousness And you want to go up to the top So There can be different paths Which can take us up And the path That takes us The path that takes us from material consciousness To spiritual consciousness That is religion Now many people who practice religion May not practice it for that purpose They may practice it because of It is our tradition, our culture They may practice it for Gaining political power So many other reasons So then that is They are not really taking the path Up the mountain But if we want to go from material consciousness To spiritual consciousness, there has to be a path for that We have to follow something, it is not automatically I become spiritual So the path that we follow for going to spiritual consciousness That is our religion Now religions become fanatical When somebody has claimed this is the only Path up the mountain And some people instead of climbing Up the mountain, they keep going down at the bottom And fooling everybody else down from the other paths That is stupid So religions can become sectarian They can become violent But now When people say I want to be spiritual but not religious What they essentially are saying is Spiritual means I am open minded I want to explore my side dimensions But religion they associate with Ritualism, dogma And blind superstitions and stuff like that And I don’t want to have anything to do with that That sentiment is good But to say that I want to be spiritual Without being religious It can also be like saying I want to be healthy Without taking any medicine Well To want to be healthy is good But if you are sick right now, you will take some medication to get healthy And so similarly Whatever practices that we do So essentially If the word religion sounds An alarm in your mind Essentially what we are talking about is You have to have some practices To rise to the spiritual level So philosophy Provides the map Which is the path up the mountain Philosophy provides the map And religion provides the process If you don’t want to use the word religion That’s fine You can use the word process Whatever you want to use In the west nowadays people use the word Tradition rather than religion In my tradition or my faith tradition People use that word Which is fine Some Some words In India there was a caste system, there was untouchability But now the untouchability Is being applied to religion That religion has become an untouchable word It doesn’t have to be like that Religion can be abused But it is not that religion Is necessarily a bad thing Religion can be referred to the path And it helps us to rise to higher consciousness Now as far as communists are concerned Communism Started with A spiritual promise Spiritual promise is basically The idea that we all can be equal We all can be free Nobody has to be dominated by anyone Nobody needs to be poor So our aspirations For a good life Communism promised to fulfill that The history however Has been devastated We often talk about the first world war Nowadays we talk about Religious extremism But All religious Violence Plus first world war Plus second world war Plus all the wars of the 20th century Did not kill as many people As communist ideology did Communism in Russia and China Killed over 100 million people The first world war And second world war combined Killed 55 million people All the religious violence combined Another 10 to 15 million So what went wrong? That’s a complex Subject But what happened was Communism promised That we will make life Better for everyone And that is good There are people who exploit And there are people who are exploited And exploited people need to be supported And exploiting people Need to be put aside Need to be subordinated Or need to be adjusted But the problem is Communism over emphasized The Social side Social engineering as they call it Redistribute wealth Redistribute the means of production But what it didn’t consider Was the spiritual side Spiritual side is the inner side Inner side means that See People are not intrinsically Equal in every way I’ll talk about it in two ways First is Like this was an experiment That was tried out also In communist countries Let’s say In a class some students get more marks Some students get less marks Why this discrimination? Why this inequality? So they decided that All the students can give exams And whatever marks they get All the students will make the average And that average will be what everybody will get Now Can you guess what happened by that? Sorry The average drop Students who were not good in any way They said Even if without studying I’ll get good marks They stopped studying And students who were good They said even if I study I’m not going to get really good marks So why bother to study? So everything went down Another point is So the idea You cannot artificially impose equality We try to do that So now it could be that Some people who are wealthy they are exploiters But it can also be That people who are wealthy Are people who are more intelligent People who are more hardworking People who are more creative And that’s how we evolved It’s not always They can be exploitative But it’s not always that they are exploitative And not always that people who are poor Are people who have been exploited It could also be That people are poor because they made bad choices Because they made bad choices So So Social engineering has had quite disastrous Consequences in America I talked about sexual revolution earlier So what happened was that One unfortunate aspect of Sexual revolution is That When there was no need For marriage I can have sex without marriage So the result was The family structure started crumbling Family structure started crumbling And then Either parents Don’t have children People don’t get married so they don’t have children Sorry Children don’t have parents that’s tragic also But what has Especially happened is That in the west today If a woman Is a single mother Rather than a married mother The single mother Will get much more support From the state A single mother We will sponsor your child’s education We will provide you We will provide a job to you And then you can work for a few hours And you can take care of the children But if somebody is a married mother Then She has to take care of her family Take care of her job And the government gives no support So what has happened is Unwittingly Now If somehow it has happened that some Women have children without marriage They need to be supported Otherwise who will take care of the children Women can’t do that But that intention backfired And today for women It is more economically viable To have a child without being married And then Now children need both parents So then society is Society is getting more and more fragmented So there are many examples of How social engineering Has backfired So the point I am making is That we also We can’t just create a better world By changing society We also need to change people Internally And that internal change happens to spirituality So spiritual growth Is what happens When people commit And practice something And they do that Then they grow by that So the last point I will conclude is One of the basic principles of Communism is that All people should be equal But The longing for equality Is essentially a spiritual Longing It has no basis In materialism Because if you consider Materialism By no Material parameter Are people equal Any metric you take Of course height Skin color, weight Obviously they are not equal But you can take IQ, people are not equal You take EQ, people are not equal You take any personality Assessment parameter People are not equal So materially people are not equal So if communism As it longs for, people should be equal It’s a good longing But what is the basis for that If you reject God, if you reject religion If you reject spirituality Materialism uses no basis for that So we need to consider That ultimately It is Raising the consciousness of people That is important Of course changing society is also important But if you focus only on changing society Basically what happened in communism The government became God The government became God Essentially You reject God, the government will decide It happened in Ukraine Disaster system Man made famine All farmers, everything that they produce It is your own farm But you have no right to produce The government will take the produce And the government will give your quota to you But in the process Of centralizing everything They would take the crops They would take it to the central place and they would allot it The crops would get spoiled And people died, millions of people died If you look up the history of the Ukrainian famine So we reject God And if we say Government becomes God, it doesn’t work It is absolutism and it is disastrous So yes, social change is required But more important than social change Is spiritual change People’s values have to grow And for that It is not just a thought You have to have processes for doing that And those processes are what we call as religion If you are unpleasant with that usage, that’s fine But we need processes for transformation