If you missed this Tuesday's (July 7's) gathering at the Bear River, here is a little of what you missed. Toby's talk tied together one of the central tenets of Hinduism with Christianity's notion of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Check it out and leave a comment! Get in the conversation and come next Tuesday where our What If series will continue!
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking and reading about Hinduism and studying the Bhagavad Gita with my World Religions students at North Central Michigan College where I teach. For Hindus, the essence of life, our ultimate purpose, is to unite with the Infinite. Our life is a journey to reconnect with God, with what Hindu’s call Brahman.
There are all kinds of things I like about Hinduism and Hindu thought, but perhaps my favorite is their contention that what we humans most want and need is union with God. For Hindus, the Godhead is known as Brahman – that’s God with a capital G, the big guy. But in this ancient and wonderful faith there is also the Atman - the notion of a divine spark, a piece of God that resides in all people and even in all living beings. The Hindu path is all about reconnecting, reuniting the Atman with the Brahman.
If you think of having a bit of the living God inside you, at the core of your being, it’s not hard to imagine that life can conspire to cover it up, squelch it. Your little spark or burning coal can get gradually covered up with ash, the detritus of a busy, noisy, unfocused, technology saturated life. So a faithful Hindu spends his or her life seeking to clear away the clutter, sweep out the ash, rekindle the divine flame within. Our Hindu brothers and sisters want union with Brahman, unfettered, unimpeded, day-to-day union with the Godhead, and so all of their spiritual disciplines – from yoga, to silent meditation, to Puja are all about unity, union with God. Pretty cool, huh?
But an even cooler tenet of Hinduism is their contention that we all already have that which we most want. Huston Smith calls this “the most starting claim of Hindu anthropology.” “That which we most truly want, we can actually have…because we already have it.” (The World’s Religions, Harper One, 1991)
What do you and I already have…? We already have the living presence of God inside us. The Atman already resides in the human soul – in every human soul – not just a Hindu’s soul…not just in a Buddhist’s soul…not just in a Christian or a Jewish soul – but in EVERY soul, even among the animal and plant kingdom. For Hindus, God is already fully and permanently present in each and every one of us! I hate to break it to your folks but the same is true in Christian theology, isn’t it? When did Jesus promise he would be with us…? ALL the time! Where did he tell us God’s living, holy spirit would dwell…? Inside us…in the depths of our soul.
This is why I think “Namaste” the traditional Hindi greeting should also be the way Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists greet each other. Namaste is spoken with a slight bow and hands pressed together, palms touching and fingers pointing upwards, thumbs close to the chest. This gesture and the accompanying word means, "I bow to the divine in you.” Some translate Namaste as “the God in me greets and acknowledges the God in you.” How cool is that??? The God in me greets the God in you! Remember Gandhi’s quote from last week…the essence of Hinduism is to learn to see God in every living creature and then act accordingly.” What a way to live? What a way to love!!!
Check out these passages from the Hindu scriptures and see if they don’t resonate with your soul…
“I am ever present to those who have learned to recognize me in every creature. When you learn to see everything - all of life - as a manifestation of me, then you are never separated from me. These enlightened ones worship me in the hearts of all, and all their actions proceed from me. Wherever they live, they abide in me.” (That’s from the 6th chapter of the Gita, verses 30-31) Doesn’t that sound like John 15 from the Christian New Testament…Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches. If you abide in the vine you can do all things…”
How about this one, also from chapter 6 of the Gita… “When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union.” I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds an awful lot like 1 Corinthians 12:25 “There should be no division in the body, but the members should have the same care for one another. So that if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it.
So underneath all its teaching, Hinduism is all about unity – unity with God and unity with all other sentient beings. Yoga – the central Hindu discipline and spiritual practice MEANS “unity.” I don’t think it is an accident that the practice of yoga is literally sweeping the nation. It is the fastest growing form of both exercise and meditation in the US. People here are so hungry for unity, particularly as the religious landscape around us becomes more and more divisive. Did you know that there are over 2000 Christian denominations in the US alone? Talk about division!!
People are hungry – even starving – for unity. The ancient Hindu practice of Yoga is all about seeking unity and through unity, achieving peace…
Let’s hear from one of our group who just completed her instructor’s certification in Yoga. She is also teaching mindfulness in the public school system in Hailey, Idaho. LJ – come on up here and tell us a little about what you’ve been up to and what you’ve been learning and practicing lately. (Here we interviewed LJ Greer on Yoga as a spiritual practice and she led us in a mindfulness exercise!)
So the essential teachings and practices of the Hindu faith are all aimed at getting us back in touch with the God within and getting us back in touch with one another – unity with God…unity with all others.
But what is so vital to understand – and this is the good news from Hinduism’s perspective – is that the Atman, the real presence of God, never goes away. It is always there in all of us, all the time. We can think of it as a coal, a burning ember that is buried under the cumulative ash in our souls. But it is still lit! Our job is to uncover it, to clear away the ash, and to fan that ever-burning flame, that living presence of God in us.
This powerful, compelling Hindu concept, as I mentioned before, should not be foreign to Christians. What our Hindu brothers and sisters call Atman, Christians call the Holy Spirit. To Christian’s this Atman is God’s living presence within us, a strikingly similar notion. Shortly before his death, Jesus told his disciples that it was to their benefit that he leave, so that a “counselor” could come, one that would live within them forever. In fact, Jesus’s final words prior to his ascension, “And remember I am with you always.”
Imagine…what if…what if we took seriously these last words of Jesus? What if we took to heart this central Hindu teaching, that the living God lives and dwells in each and every one of us? How would we treat each other if we REALLY believed that? How would we treat strangers if we REALLY embraced and believed in Namaste – the God in me greeting and bowing before the God in you? What if….Can you imagine it?
But no matter what we do, no matter what spiritual discipline or practice we use to fan the flames of God’s spirit within, what is most important is realizing and remembering that God’s Spirit, the Atman, is always there. God’s real presence, God’s spirit is eternally there, or, perhaps more accurately, here! No matter where we are, no matter what we have done or left undone, no matter how far we have fallen or how abandoned we may feel, that Atman is still here, deep within us. That counselor, that slice of the Spirit, that God presence is still right here, abiding within us, as close as our very next breath. We cannot extinguish that flame. We cannot snuff out that coal. Cover it up? Perhaps. Lose sight of it in the clutter of our soul’s closet? Maybe. But we cannot ever extinguish it. We cannot separate ourselves from the loving, in-dwelling presence of God. Find it in yourself…Fan it in yourself. Believe and trust that it is in every person you will ever encounter
The writer of the epistles of John put it this way: “See what great love the Father has for us, that we should be called Children of God. And that is what we are.” That is what we are. And there is nothing we can do to change or lose that.
You remember from last week that Mahatma Gandhi once summarized the essence of Hinduism as “learning to see God in every creature and then acting accordingly.” I’m not sure the message of Jesus is all that different.
And so may we – each and every one of us – know that the Atman does, indeed, reside in us. May we also know and always remember that a very real slice of the Living God abides within everybody else as well, all other living creatures. It always has and it always will. And in that light, doesn’t “Namaste” living make an awful lot of sense? What if each of us – at least all of us who are here tonight – could learn to see God in ourselves and in every living creature…and then act accordingly. What if…What if? Amen.
One by U2…Melissa & Toby
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