Religion, Idolatry and Spirituality
In the modern West, anything associated with religion often appears to be treated with suspicion, some of the usual accusations concerning corrupted religious leaders, brain-washing and inspiring terrorism. A glance at the history books implies that much of this is, unfortunately, justified. Idolatry is commonly associated with ignorance and superstition. Spirituality seems to be considered relatively harmless, but of little practical use and leading to unspecific aims. In the absence of an accessible, fully developed wisdom culture, what religion, idolatry and spirituality in their pure forms are and actually try to do is generally unknown.
Philosophy
For a path to be called a religion, according to the sage Swami Vivekananda, it must contain three things; a philosophy, a mythology and ritual. Philosophy is stationed on the intellectual plane, mythology is its concretisation on the mental plane, and ritual is a further concretisation onto the physical plane. The philosophy is the theoretical base of the religion. It firstly seeks to describe Ultimate Reality, which, when known, reveals the purpose of life. That purpose is the attainment of Ultimate Truth, though descriptions of this vary as each description is subject to an interpretation by someone’s mind, and is geared to minds with different capabilities. Secondly, it teaches a method, explaining how we can attain to that Truth, and again these methods often seem rather different because different types of people need different types of method. However, all serious religions agree that Truth is attained not through the intellect, but through doing spiritual practices, thereby cleansing the mind, so whatever the philosophy may be, if you do the practices described sincerely, Truth will eventually manifest within your heart anyway.
Mythology
Secondly, a mythology is necessary. For most people, philosophy is dry, boring and confusing. The intellect has to put in a lot of effort to understand the abstract concepts that philosophy discusses. However, when these concepts are presented in simple parables, they are much easier to understand, as the intellect normally has very little to do.
Furthermore, the second goal of philosophy, namely to motivate people to do spiritual practices, is often very difficult to achieve, when we are discussing abstract concepts such as the impersonal, all-pervading Absolute Consciousness, even if they do understand the logic behind doing the practices. People generally find it much easier to generate devotion to an ideal if that ideal is personalised and depicted in everyday situations, as their own minds have been built into the frame of everyday life, simply because we have lived our whole lives in the everyday life of the world, not seeing just the impersonal Absolute Spirit from dawn till dusk.
Religions tend to maintain that their mythologies are historical, while their critics are wont to opine that they are works of fiction, therefore false, and that taking them as a serious base for the religion is foolish. Whether mythologies really happened or not is irrelevant; what they were written for was to give a positive spiritual effect. This means that they develop knowledge, morality, devotion to the ideal, and give useful models on which we may base our lives. If someone wants a correct, historical account, he should buy a history book, because that is the kind of book that is designed to give that. A mythology was not designed to give a correct historical account. In the Hindu Puranas, there is a story of a person who was half man and half lion. It is difficult to believe from an intellectual standpoint that such a person actually appeared on this planet. However, the attitude we should adopt is to take it as though it were true. If we take the attitude that such a story is impossible, then we are creating a mental distance between us and the story, thus rendering it impossible to gain the benefits that the mythology was written to give and taking away the whole point of reading it. We must jump into the story to get the benefit it is offering, not come with analytical and negative intellectual ideas in order to take it to pieces. The reason why we come across fantastical characters and deeds in mythologies is to create an atmosphere of other-worldliness to dissociate ourselves from the mundane material world by which we are limited, and suggest the potential greatness within us which we develop while following our spiritual path. What the mind needs is a suggestion; when it has it, it will readily superimpose its own imaginative ideas of divinity and great deeds, developing enthusiasm for the divine and spiritual path. The "real world" sometimes seems just too limited to depict the tremendous deeds we have the potential to perform. This is not childishness or brain-washing; it is a scientific method designed to help us mould our minds into a suitable form, open to receiving maximum benefit from spiritual activities.
The Gospels are often criticised for containing historical contradictions in texts written by different authors. This, too, is irrelevant. Knowing exactly what happened down to the finest detail will not help anyone’s path to Truth. What is relevant is what we can learn from the teachings of Jesus contained in these texts.
Ritual
For most people, ritual is also very helpful. To give ourselves the best possible chance of realising Truth, we must have our minds on Truth all the time. For most people, this is unrealistic. If you tell someone to keep his mind on the divine, twenty-four hours a day, he is unlikely to do so, even if he does understand that by doing this he will attain Absolute Bliss. What will happen in practice is that he will find it impossible, give up and never think of the divine, thus once more getting sucked into a permanent, wholly materialistic state of mind. If, on the other hand, that person is instructed to do some ritual symbolising some aspect of the divine for a minute at a certain time every day, at least that person will have the divine on his mind for some time, and his mind will go back to the subject of the divine now and again as it develops the habit of putting itself onto that subject. As the devotee develops, the mind will spend more time on the divine, thus purifying itself more, and eventually developing the capacity to indeed concentrate on spirituality for most of the day.
The point of doing physical actions instead of just thinking about the divine is that it helps concentration. If you meditate, you find that the body can be a great distraction, wanting to shift about and feeling itchy, thereby drawing the mind’s attention from its object of concentration. Generally speaking, the mind follows the body; making the body follow the mind requires a strong mind. If the whole body is involved in doing an action representing some aspect of the divine, it is not disturbing the mind, and the mind automatically follows the actions and develops the habit of dwelling on spirituality. When the mind has become more purified and disciplined, higher-level activities such as meditation become more appropriate.
It must always be remembered that philosophy is higher than mythology and ritual, and mythology and ritual are just supposed to demonstrate and support philosophical ideas. If mythology and ritual are treated as superior, and philosophy is forgotten, the religion degenerates into sentimentalism and a mass of meaningless rituals. It also becomes easily abused. Great devotion is a very useful spiritual tool, but it must be channelled in the right direction by a sensible philosophy. If it is not, it can get diverted and end up as mindless fanaticism and even terrorism.
Idolatry
Idols are an extremely useful tool in ritual. When people do rituals in a temple, they normally focus on an idol. If they are told to do the ritual in an empty, white-washed room and focus on the impersonal, omnipresent Absolute Spirit, they will probably not be able to concentrate on it, will not be able to generate any devotion, and will not even know in which direction to stand. The idol is the concretisation of the devotee’s highest ideal, be it Absolute Truth, Beauty, Love, Bliss, Motherhood, some saint that demonstrated how to live a perfect life or some other aspect of Brahman.
The finite mind finds it very hard to focus on something abstract and infinite like Brahman, so it firstly focuses on some aspect of it, and then concretises it into a personal form, on which every little thing represents something symbolically, so that it can symbolise quite complex philosophical ideas. India has 330,000,000 personal gods, everything in each image representing something, because every person’s mind is attracted towards a certain ideal and prefers to picture everything in a certain way. The devotee, worshipping out of knowledge, bowing down to the idol, is not bowing down to, say, Krishna as Krishna the man or Shiva as Shiva the god sitting on a cloud, but as Brahman in Krishna and Brahman in Shiva. When we are worshipping a person like Krishna or Christ, we are worshipping them not as people, but as spiritual realisations, as real-life ideals. The soul in a worm and the soul in a saint are the same; the difference lies in the amount of ignorance covering the soul and the amount of divinity that passes through these coverings of ignorance. Such people can be excellent ideals, as they demonstrate that a person can reach such a high level of divinity. If we look at images of the world’s major gods, we find that they are all human-like. People invent humanoid gods because they find it far easier to generate the necessary love and devotion for the ideal if the concretisation of the abstract is in their own form. Most of the practice we have had in developing loving relationships is in relationships with other people, so it is natural that we would choose to love a god in a person-like form. However, there is usually some suggestion of a divine difference between a normal person and the image of a god, for example Vishnu is blue and Christ is always depicted on the cross during one of his most powerful manifestations of divinity. This is to keep in mind the divine purpose of the worship. If the god looks just like a normal person or our pet dog whom we love very much, perhaps we will be able to generate some love, but the idea of divinity, and striving to attain to a higher form of life through obtaining great wisdom, would probably get forgotten.
When people do the ritual of bowing down to the deity, this, too, is symbolic. "Truth bows down to no man, man must bow down to Truth or die." To advance spiritually, the aspirant must acknowledge or mentally bow down, as it were, to Truth, which is on a higher level than he is with all his mental frailties. The deity represents Absolute Truth, so bowing down physically represents doing this mentally, and as the mind follows the body, bowing down mentally becomes easier with the practice of doing so physically. The individual ego must be renounced and the Supreme Ego, that of Brahman must be taken up, or if you are using a deity, the individual ego must be surrendered onto the feet of God. Obviously the attempt to do this must be sincere, otherwise it will only result in hypocrisy.
If these concepts are understood, then the devotee is using the idol as an excellent tool to develop love and devotion for the ideal and thereby attain a higher level of spirituality. There is nothing wrong with using idolatry with knowledge. From the highest standpoint, that of Ultimate Truth experienced by great seers in nirvikalpa samadhi, everything is the omnipresent Brahman, so if you refer to yourself as a body, using a name distinguishing yourself from someone else, you are practising idolatry. If the devotee worships through ignorance, Shiva as Shiva, then he is likely to develop foolish ideas such as his god is the only true god and everybody's else's gods are wrong, then religion loses its spirituality and degenerates into a mass of superstition, encouraging brain-washing by fanatical power-hungry priests, inter-religious wars and other forms of diabolism.
Spirituality
Spirituality is the search for Ultimate Truth, which is not found in books or the outer world, but in the depths of our own being through the performance of spiritual practices. The main obstacle to spiritual advancement is the presence of our minds, so spirituality necessarily ends up being the ultimate and practical study of mind.
We are in bondage because of our minds and we will be set free because we master our minds. Our minds have the potential to be either our greatest friends or our greatest enemies. We are not masters of our minds, our minds are masters of us. We are like dogs and our minds are like tails. The dog is supposed to wag the tail, but what happens in practice is that the tail wags the dog. The proof of this is that most of us cannot sit still for even half a minute without our minds thinking unwanted thoughts.
Religion is merely an instrument designed to develop spirituality. We put the mind onto the frame of the religion and mould it into a suitable shape. As it is only an instrument, this of course means that someone with no religion, who still does spiritual practices can also become a spiritual giant. Shankaracarya was undoubtedly one of the greatest saints that ever lived, and his systemisation of non-dualistic Vedanta is a classic example of a spiritual path with no religious influence at all, although he did encourage the worship of personal gods to those that needed them, and even started the mainstream worship of Kali, one of India’s most popular goddesses today. The paths of knowledge, spiritual works and yoga do not necessarily require any ritualism or theistic ideas such as personal gods. If following a religion is useful for you personally, it would be better to follow one. If your mind does not incline towards the idea of following a religion, better progress would be made if you did not adopt a religion, otherwise you would be trying to put a square peg into a round hole. If a religion has spirituality flowing through it, it is alive and has a positive effect. If the religion has lost its spirituality, it is dead, the rituals are meaningless, and devotees tend to get abused by corrupt priests.
Everyone’s mind is different, and there are as many potential spiritual paths as there are minds, so whatever path a spiritual aspirant adopts should be respected. What is important is not what path you follow, as long as you feel comfortable with it, but how much wisdom and love you manifest.