Nostra Aetate - In Our Time

72 Anyway, what I am trying to say is that when I started practising my new life I felt so liberated. I started by saying that I don’t have a religion, I am not a Brahmin, I am not a Hindu and the Hindus have no problem with that. Hindus used to worship – some still worship – any number of idols in the temples and with rituals. I not only reject that, I criticise them openly, publicly, making political statements. I say that idolatry is the bane of our country. Caste-ism has to be rejected completely as all human beings are born equal. God has not made any child higher or lower than any other child. It is we with our man- made institutions and caste system and, I am sorry to say, the religions and economic institutions of the rich and poor, that make these people either rich or poor. God doesn’t do that. God’s sun shines equally. God’s air that we breathe does not differentiate, it is the same for all. All children have same five fingers and two eyes and everything else. Give them equal opportunity and you will see the results. Give a black child opportunity equal to a white child’s and I am sure that the black child will outshine the white. Give the Dalit – the untouchable – boy or a girl equal opportunity and the Dalit, the lowest untouchable, will outshine the Brahmins. But we have institutionalised poverty in order to, sort of, worship the rich, a handful of them, one percent of our humanity. You should be aware that one percent of all our people in the world own more than 85 percent of the wealth, while the remaining 99 percent own hardly 15 percent. Does it concern any of our religions? I have been fighting this injustice for the last 48 years. I work among the carpet workers and the brick kiln workers, people who exemplify modern age slavery. For nine years I was Chairperson, in Geneva, of the United Nation’s Voluntary Trust Fund for Contemporary Forms of Slavery, and every time I read the latest statistics I would hang my head in shame because India was home to the largest numbers of slaves, including child slaves and child prostitution. But India’s population is bigger than all of Europe and Africa put together, so I am not surprised that so many problems are there. Humanity is crying for some radical shift, a para- digm shift and we are simply juggling among ourselves between this act and that act, and this ritual and that ritual. Why? Why are they so important? Somebody said something 1,400 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago – what is the religion that existed beyond 3,000 years ago? Why are we bogged down with merely these 3,000 years of history? The whole of humanity has got a long, long history. So, let’s come up with a spiritual paradigm, universal spiritual values which are the quintessence of all of our religions. I am not militating against any particular religion. I think that all of our religions have got the essence which can be learnt and taught as universal spiritual values – truth, love, compassion and justice. And according to the Vedas, truth is God – the energy of truth pervading the whole of the universe. The Vedas say that the whole of universe is being pervaded by the God-element, the God-force throughout the entire universe. ॐ ईशा वास्यम िदँ सरवं त ्कञ्च जगत्य ां जगत् । तेन त्यक्त न भुञ्जीथा मा गृधः कस्यस ्वद्धनम् ।। १ ।। – there is only one universal God and everyone should worship that very God. Mahatma Gandhi made a very profound statement about this particular mantra. He said that if all knowledge systems were to be destroyed, and if I can save this little one, I could recreate the whole knowledge system. Now, why is that? Can all of us agree – I am offering just a one-liner – that we accept the supremacy of one God and we should all worship that one God who is universal and who has no form, who is all existence, all truth, all love, all com- passion and all justice, a justice unlimited. To create a human society based on equity and unlimited justice – can we do that? Can this, our Centre, be the harbinger of this unity? Let’s take a word from Islam: “Tauheed” – the Koranic concept that there is only one God. The Koran talks about Rabbul Alameen – God of the entire uni- verse. It does not talk about Rabbul Muslameen – God of Muslims, Rabbul Hindueen – God of Hindus, Rabbul Christiaeen – God of Christians; it says Rabbul Alameen, God of the whole universe, and this is exactly what the Vedas said earlier. This is what Guru Nanak Dev said: “Ishvar Allah noor upaya qudrat de saab banday, ek noor tay sab jag upajya kaun bhale ko munday” – God created light of which all the beings were born, and from this light, the universe. So who is good and who is bad? The entire universe emanates from the blessings of our creator God and if that creator God is there in everything throughout the universe, then that creator God is inside you and me as human beings. You are BROADENING INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND COLLABORAT ION FOR OUR T IME