Looks like Fr. Seraphim Rose was right about the Religion of the Future after all.
“Spiritual religion has been the best discovery by the human race to shape an individual’s life, and there will always be a need for it. Man cannot always think of matter, however pleasurable it may be,”
said Swami Satyamayananda, secretary of Ramakrishna Mission Ashram, Kanpur. He gave a rejuvenating speech on the concept of religion as defined by Swami Vivekananda to the audience at Nagpur University, finishing by saying that the world will soon end up following one religion. The lecture was part of the Dr RN Roy Lecture Series and delivered at the university’s Convocation Hall on Wednesday.
Satyamayananda said religion is a broad concept but the emergence of superstitions and idolizing has made it look very narrow. Going back to the origin of religion, when it had no place for institutions and was not dominated by a few, he said,
“Religion will be taken in correct sense when it is linked with spirituality, which has no boundary. It has always encouraged man to think out of the box. Traces of religion are always found in some form or the other. In some places, it was in the form of ancestral worship and at other places it was accepted as the personification of the power of nature,” he said.
However, in both cases, there is a common factor as noticed by Vivekananda. It is that man tends to reason and relate himself with the things around him and search for the truth, may it be their ancestor or nature.
