A pure heart needs no trappings or manacles of strict religiosity or ritualistic autocracy. It’s beyond all scriptural hegemony and ritualistic dictatorship.
By Nazarul Islam
Lost in the ‘alleys of faith’, man could never find the spirit of spirituality.
So true! Here, the ‘alleys of faith’ are the rituals that are so integral to all faiths and that have impeded our spiritual growth. There’s a famous English adage missing the wood for the trees.
The same has happened to humankind in terms of spiritual upliftment. We’ve lost ourselves in the welter of mindless rituals and mistaken them for self-realization.
We must weed out the rituals to pare our faith down to the simplest form. If at all god exists, they are not concerned whether you fasted or offered your prayers five times a day, or whether you ate non-veg on Tuesdays or had something sour on Fridays!
That is insignificant for someone you believe to be the regulator of the universe. What matters is the purity of your intent and the purpose of your essentially spiritual existence on earth.
There’s a beautiful parable in Islamic mysticism. The great Sufi, Bayazid Bastami, never fasted even during the month of Ramzan. Neither did he urge any of his disciples to observe the ritualistic strictness in the holy month of the Islamic calendar. Someone asked him whether he was not blasphemous by behaving in such an ‘unholy’ manner during Ramzan?
Bayazid told him, ‘for a poor person, who can’t even make both the ends meet, the whole year is Ramzan because he has to fast perforce all the time. I’m like him, a mendicant who subsists on food and alms given by others.
So, why should I make it all the more difficult for myself by further torturing and tormenting my body during the month of fasts?’ The point is, rituals serve no purpose. They make you a slave to religion and a fictional god. Rituals are the debris of a crashed aircraft. Remove them to get to the black box of self-realization.
Let us not neglect rituals. They can be the watchdogs for the survival of our mental health, warning us when a well-oiled functioning of our life story is about to disrupt. Rituals can be safeguards hindering us from stumbling into the abyss of nothingness. Rituals can be anchor points providing guidance on our potholed path for the future.
Don’t let rituals get the upper hand and dictate terms to you. Only when you feel spiritually emancipated from within can you evolve further and reach the state of blissful enlightenment. A pure heart needs no trappings or manacles of strict religiosity or ritualistic autocracy. It’s beyond all scriptural hegemony and ritualistic dictatorship.
If you have strength of character, you can use that as fuel to not only be a survivor but to transcend simply being a survivor, use an internal alchemy to turn something rotten and horrible into gold.
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About the Author
The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.
