How can the light of religion help a world in conflict?

Podcast:

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

Summary

In a world plagued by division, ancient wisdom offers a fresh psychological lens for understanding and resolving conflict. By looking beyond rigid ideologies, we can discover a path toward lasting peace.

• Psychological Roots of Conflict: The Bhagavad Gita analyzes human conflict not just through theological or political lenses, but through psychology, categorizing behavior into three fundamental modes: goodness (sattva), passion (rajas), and ignorance (tamas).

• The Danger of Dogmatism: Individuals influenced by darker modes (tamas or rajas) often exhibit absolute certainty, weaponizing their religion, ideology, or political views to claim exclusive righteousness and spark division.

• Violence Beyond Religion: History proves that intolerance is not exclusive to religion; non-religious and anti-religious regimes have also caused massive casualties driven by the exact same dangerous conviction of absolute certainty.

• The Illusion of Win-Lose Thinking: Lower modes of consciousness trap people in rigid right-versus-wrong binaries, preventing them from recognizing the nuance, complexity, and shared humanity in everyday disagreements.

• Illumination Through Goodness: The mode of goodness (sattva) brings prakash (illumination), enabling individuals to see past superficial boundaries and recognize our shared spiritual core.

• The Power of the “Three S’s”: Achieving global peace relies on embracing Shared spirituality, rising into Sattva (goodness), and fostering Solidarity among moderates across various traditions.

Full Transcription

What is the role of religion, light of religion for a world in conflict? Broadly, we talk about this in the light of the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita.
It talks about seeing the shared spirituality that unites all of us. The Bhagavad Gita analyzes human action in terms of three broad modes of functioning, which can be called as compared to gears in which our psychophysical machine functions, the body, mind, machine, which we have functions. And these in Sanskrit are called sattva, rajas, tamas, which can be translated as goodness, passion, ignorance or even luminosity, hyperactivity, lethargy.
So, rather than analyzing conflict solely in theological or political or ideological terms, the Bhagavad Gita analyzes it in terms of psychological terms. And then it states that based on the kind of psychology each one of us has, we will function accordingly. And thus, a person who is influenced by the darker modes of tamas, they will find from within their religion things that will justify their self-righteousness, that will justify their claim that they alone are right.
And not only is their religion alone right, but their interpretation of their own religion, and not just religion, but even their particular ideology, their particular worldview, their particular opinion, that alone is right. And while some people tend to blame religion for conflicts across the world, we see that the non-religious and even the anti-religious parts of the world, such as the communist regimes in Russia, US’s former USSR, and China, they led to a toll of 100 million corpses, more than First World War and Second World War combined together. So, they were also driven by this dangerous conviction, the utter certainty of their particular way of governing and living and arranging the world, or rearranging the world.
So, when we are in the lower mode of either passion or ignorance, we tend to see conflicts in psychological terms as simply win-lose bargains. So, either we have to win or we have to lose. And either we are right or we are wrong.
That the idea that reality may be more complex than simple categories of right or wrong or victory or defeat. That same people may be right about one thing and wrong about other things. And just because they are wrong about one thing doesn’t mean they are wrong about everything.
And just because we are right about one thing doesn’t make us right about everything. That capacity to see the subtlety and the complexity of reality comes from the mode of goodness, which is characterized by Prakash, illumination. So, ultimately, the illumination to see that at the core of all of our beings, we are all essentially similar, we are spiritual beings.
And what covers us externally is not necessarily something waging the kind of conflicts that we often give in to based on our opinions of things. That vision, try to see commonality and resolve amicability. That vision can be the guide of religion.
The Bhagavad Gita offers resources for raising one’s consciousness towards the light of goodness, the clarity and illumination that comes with sattva. And thereby help us resolve conflicts. Thus, we could say that moderates who are comfortable staying in the middle, even when it is involving some uncertainty, they are who can see beyond religious, ideological and ethnic categorization and differentiation and see the commonality of everyone.
And thus it is that moderates of various religious traditions within particular religions and across particular various religions, if they can unite, then we can indeed unitedly bring greater clarity, greater illumination into the world and thus help everyone move towards peace and spiritual prosperity, flourishing. So shared spirituality, sattva, second S and third S is solidarity among moderates. This three S, so we say, I mean, all the world is saying no, no, no, we can’t agree.
We focus on three S and then you can help us move towards peace.