Letting Go of Habitual Affirmations: Is It Key to Spiritual Growth?

Acharya Prashant

23 min
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Letting Go of Habitual Affirmations: Is It Key to Spiritual Growth?
The purpose of all instruments of religion, methods of religion is to unblock. The truth is here, there, inside, outside, everywhere. But there is a blockage. That blockage is called the ego. The ego prevents the truth from coming to itself. So, religion is a device, a tool so that Truth can flow to the ego. The ego wants to defend itself against the truth because once the truth flows in, it dissolves the ego. This summary has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation

Questioner: Namaskar Acharya ji. I hope and pray, you're doing well and recovering. My name is Nama Khan and my question is something related to my background. So I will put forth my question along with my background journey.

My question is, “Can habitual religious affirmation, though deeply conditioned, still serve my spiritual growth and my self-realization path or is it necessary to let them go?” My journey has been from being observed to becoming the observer. Very early in my life, in my late teens, because I belong to the Muslim community, I became a student and I think that the sole reason was for proving my purpose, finding my being. I think that was the search as a seeker.

So in Bombay, I used to hunt for different groups. That's how I was getting knowledge of religion in my 20s. My 20s went in basically becoming a student of the Arabic language, learning the Quran by word in English and Udu. Then in my 30s, I came to Canada and here I began the journey of questioning. Because of certain things that happened in my life, I started questioning and then unlearning and then re-learning through Indian culture.

So, I had a lot of the famous gurus of India coming into my life. I learned a lot through them and then, you came in. By this time, I would say that most of my religious practices, even the stuff that we do, the bead reading, the supplication, all that had gone probably in my 30s. Even being very regular in namaz was nearly gone. It was mostly like you're between family or culture and eid or something like that. I do go and I do be part of it but there's still a lot of deep conditioning about some of the reflex affirmations.

I may say, “Inshallah mashallah” or doing something and saying “bismillah”, bismillah means ‘With the name of God.’ When I was doing yoga practice also, some of the chantings like om shanti, Ashtavakra says, “Sukhi bhava, Shanti bhava” like you are sukhi, you are shanti so because I'm habitual of moving my lips and saying. Yes, they do come in my mind too but because I'm habitual of reading and saying something, they also became part of my everyday chanting.

So if I am a little restless, I would go in my mind “Om shanti” and I can tell you that I would really relax. It really helps me soothe. I was somebody who has always stayed at home. I have never done a 9-to-5 job. So coming from that, being at home and then coming out and seeking my passion. I'm an artist by profession. I'm a videographer. I'm an acrylic painter now. I also learned classical singing. I did everything as you say that “the Veda starts by looking outward.”

So everything that I needed to look outward which I had held myself from. I did all of that and slowly, slowly I streamlined and filtered and came down to something that is very sublime and it is in tune to me becoming more of the observer than being the observed.

Because all my life I have been doing things thinking, ‘I'll get the appraisal of people, or even appraisal of God actually, and all of these things dropped one by one.’ But this particular thing is still there, every day in my self-realization that “Inshallah mashallah, bismillah” or even sometimes there are some duas that come out just because they're so innate and it does help.

So, I want to know whether I should continue it or they will slowly drop off or is there a way to drop them off?

Acharya Prashant: There's no need to drop these things. Please understand. The purpose of all instruments of religion, methods of religion is to unblock. The truth is here, there, inside, outside, everywhere. But there is a blockage. That blockage is called the ego. The ego prevents the truth from coming to itself.

So, religion is a device, a tool so that Truth can flow to the ego. The ego wants to defend itself against the truth because once the truth flows in, it dissolves the ego. It's a great solvent. So there are different kinds of, what I say, conveyors or pipes carriers through which the truth can flow. The problem is that they get choked, blocked. They were supposed to flow freely and bring that flow to the ego. But the vessel, the pipe itself gets choked. What does it get choked by? It gets choked by things that are not really religion but pass off in the name of religion.

Several of those things get a lot of credibility, acceptability because they are mentioned in the religious books themselves. And what we fail to understand often or refuse to understand is that the religious books contain two kinds of material, always.

One is the material that is dependent on place, time, situation, etc. And then, there is material that is timeless; timeless and of eternal value, and immeasurable value. Every religious book contains these two types of things. So, there is already the possibility of pollution and corruption present inside the fundamental religious text itself. Especially in religions of the book.

All the Abrahamic streams are heavily dependent on one particular book. And if the books themselves have a lot of stuff that is time relevant or time dependent, then there is a risk. On top of that are the practitioners of religion who have their own biases, own fears, and own practices and traditions that they want to carry on with religious sanction as if those things are mentioned in the text.

You know, you can have your own local tradition that you start calling as religion. Now, that tradition is nowhere near the core of religion. But yet, because you are practicing it, you give it a respectable name. You say this is a religious practice. It's not just a traditional thing. It's a religious practice. So, all these things choke the pipe. Now tell me please if the pipe can be cleared and if all that blocks it can be removed? Does the color of the pipe matter? Let the pipe remain. And pipes come in different colors, shapes, sizes. Materials also, as long as they are hollow, everything is all right. The purpose of the pipe is to be hollow.

If a pipe is coming from China, it will be made of a certain material, which is fine. You understand material, right? Language, the way the whole environment is set up. Sometimes, one'll talk of God. Sometimes, one will talk of the farishta. Sometimes, one will simply talk of dhyaan. Somebody will talk of something else. Somebody will talk of nature worship. All these things, they are just the material of the pipe.

If the thing that corrupts religion can be removed, the color of the pipe does not matter. The material of the pipe does not matter. What has been etched on the pipe or a certain calligraphy, even these things do not matter. A lot of things can be there. It will all be the same. You can have a duct of one particular color and one particular material and you can have a duct of another color and another material. They will bring in the same thing. But the stuff that chokes is what makes the pipes different from each other and that is what leads to conflict.

Somebody says, ‘God’, somebody says, ‘Allah’, somebody says, ‘Ram’. If they are coming from a point of inner vacuum, inner void- inner clarity that is. You know, internally what they mean, all three of them are exactly the same thing. But if they are not coming from a point of inner clarity, these three mean three different things and then they will quarrel.

The problem is the self-appointed meaning. The problem is the refusal to see that several parts of religious texts are irrelevant to this age and must be respectfully consigned to museums. That's the problem. Very respectfully, we are not being offensive here. And if you look at the core of all religious texts, first of all, the core is not voluminous. It is, therefore, something that even the lay man can come to without being afraid of the mass.

Otherwise, you put a book of 20,000 pages in front of the fellow, he anyway does not read it. These are the two reasons, you know, why the layman does not go to the religious scripture and that's why the hegemony of the priest, the maulavi, the pundit. One: ‘language’, two: ‘volume’. Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, you have all kinds of languages that the common man does not know. And secondly, the volume. The Quranic literature, for example, contains five lakh verses. Rig Ved alone is 10,000 mantras. And the common man, all that he reads is WhatsApp.

(Everybody smiles. )

And anything beyond two sentences is an essay for him. Why will he ever go and read 10,000 verses from the Rig Ved and we are talking of only one Ved here and then Sanskrit. So the priest becomes the intermediary. He says, you know, ‘I will tell you,’ and then all kinds of distortions get amplified, further amplified.

The core message is very brief, precise, there is nothing much in it. Today is the day of Gurunanakdev. So precisely, for example, he said, "Ek Onkar". Everything is contained in it. You don't have to go to any priest. Full stop. Full stop.

One has to get rid of the nonsense associated with religion. One does not have to get rid of religiousness. Religiousness or essential spirituality is what keeps us alive as human beings. Otherwise, we will just be animals with intellect. We are obviously not talking of religious morality here. We are talking of the essential spiritual value of self exploration. That's what the essence of all religion is.

And that self exploration, it can happen in any name. The name does not matter. So, if you say inshallah or bismillah, please do continue. That's wonderful. It happens to me. Very involuntarily, I don't even know, and those who remain around me, they notice it very frequently. I just keep saying, ‘Hey Ram’, for no reason. I'm tired, I'll say, ‘Hey Ram’. Happy, ‘Hey Ram’, about to sleep, ‘Hey Ram’, wake up, ‘Hey Ram’.

Questioner: Yeah. It becomes a part of you and it's fine as long as it lets you flow in the truth.

Acharya Prashant: Yes. As long as it reminds me of that one nameless truth. If a particular word or sound or name reminds you of the nameless one, it's wonderful. Irrespective of what that word sound or name in itself is, what matters is that it is pointing towards the nameless one.

As we said, the color of the pipe does not matter.

Questioner: Oh yeah.

Acharya Prashant: And there will be pipes.

Yes. Yes.

Questioner: Exactly. Some are pipes and then some are pipes that did not have any connection but they are connected like the Chinese whispers, like you have the Quran and we have the Hadith. Oh my god, they have done damage like irreparable damage because people don't want to go to the core script anymore now and they are just satisfied with what they have in the stories and fantasies, as you say, and now that I see this and I observe this because I question this a lot wherever I can on social media.

I'm also trying to, with your permission, hopefully inshallah, I am trying to the 114th chapter of the Quran- ‘Surah An-Nas’, is basically everything that the Quran needs to say. It's a very small chapter and it's the whole description of ‘Advait’ that you had done when I heard that lecture of yours, I was like this is ‘Surah An-Nas’. How come we don't even translate it this way. So for me Allah is nothing but ‘Advait’.

Now hopefully, I can do this but I'm writing it through Ashtavakra Gita and through the Advait translation that you have given. I'm rewriting the translation in my own understanding of the Quran and the way I see this now is like, ‘Oh my god, Sufis have told this long back and they still say it. Even the Sufis have been distorted a lot but most of the good Sufis, they have been saying the same thing. That language is just a tool. It's that essence. It's that it's the feeling that you can implore the greater divine within you. Right?

So for that you don't have to look outside but look within. So, the whole journey within was supposed to be Islam or your ’deen or haram’ but we made the journey outside.

Acharya Prashant: Right. Therefore, my entire approach is not to discard religion or religious terms. My approach is to bring them to their pure meaning. Even terms that are used in popular culture or popular religion in a very, very distorted way— I do not ask people to just quit or drop or refuse to accept or practice.

So if somebody will come and say, you know, ‘I'm fasting today. ’Vrat Rakha hai.’ So, I'll want to bring the real meaning of the word vrat or upwaas. Similarly, anything; ’teerth’, ‘pilgrimage’, ‘the holy dip’, ’jap-tap’ , ‘sham-dam’. These are all words that are prevalent in common religion.

The purpose is to bring everything to its hollow state. A hollow state where the thing does not become an obstruction against what it was supposed to convey. The pipe, the vehicle, the vessel is supposed to convey the truth, not obstruct the truth. There can be an entire dictionary of words. Once we started, In fact, compiling such a dictionary where we said, ‘We'll have all these spiritual or religious terms and write their real meaning so that they can never be used out of place or context. The project got shelved.

Questioner: Amazing. That would be amazing, I think.

Acharya Prashant: Yeah. But then the texts we are currently dealing with. The Bhajans of Saint Kabir, Baba Bulleh Shah. We have the two Gita, Bhagavad Gita and the Ashtavakra Gita, the Buddha Shoonyata Saptati and, of course, Lao Tzu. So they give us an ample supply of terms every session. To present the real meaning of. That we are already doing.

There are those who want to take the approach of discarding religion altogether. I find that dangerous. They say if religion has been the cause of so much strife and ignorance and superstition and exploitation, why not drop religion altogether? Many think that religion is a thing of the past. They think of it as some kind of a social thing or a thing of thought that came in a particular time and age. And as mankind progresses, religion will be altogether dropped and you know, what kind of morality will be there, they say, you know, morality of humanity.

What they do not understand is that religion is way beyond morality.

Questioner: So yeah, the same thing is with ex-Muslims also. There's a lot of rise of ex-Muslims and people first thought that I was an ex-Muslim but I said, ‘No, I'm not an atheist.’ I still am very spiritual because even when I was dropping the ideas, I was only dropping the ideas of the stories and fantasies.

I went through a lot in terms of self-reflection in Canada. I went through a lot of means. I did a lot of different things. I tried a lot of different things including psychedelics and that only led me to going more inward and when it led me to go more inward, I became cautious because what happens is when you're going inward, it also is a a place where you do a lot of psychoanalysis.

So you might think that you are going a little crazy, you know, and people around you, when you question a lot, they might think that way. So, that's why people like to stay in safer places, either become completely atheist or become completely blind believers.

It's very difficult for them to stir in the middle path of being the seeker and being the person of balancing in the non-duality. Right? So that is the test every day, every moment.

Acharya Prashant: And it's very easy to be categorized into either of the two extremes. There are the religious people and there are those who shun religion. But to be somebody who wants to bring the real essence of religion into practice, that's very difficult. And if you are that person then you will get buffeted from both sides. Both sides think of you as an outsider and the religious people say, you know, this fellow is discarding all our traditional thoughts and practices, therefore, he is not religious. Let's attack him. And the atheists, the modern ones who think that religion must belong to the waste bin, they say, you know, he is still talking the language of religion. So, he is one of the regressive ones. Let's attack him.

Questioner: Or, he's one of, like what ex-Muslims tell me is basically because I bring new translations. Now you become an ex-Muslim, like I don't know ex-Hindus also are there, but then ex-Muslims, they usually go for the translations of the extremist.

They really are not built into the language. They really try to understand where the actual core is coming from. So because they have not gone into their own core, they are bookish. So when you leave the books, when you abandon all of that and you wander into your own psyche and you question and you find different avenues, then you find avenues of really going into your own self-truth.

Like for me- ’Imaan’, this is only after I started hearing you, that for me, ’Imaan’ means the self truth, the integrity that you are with yourself only. If you're true to yourself, will you be true to Allah and will you be true to the people around you. So this is iman for me. So, every now and then, wherever I come across a difficult time or a question that I need to answer, even in terms of religion, I reflect on whatever you have said. So actually people take notice of it. You know, people are like, ‘Huh! What is this? We've never heard anything like this.’

I'm like, yeah have you ever thought about religion like this. So this is a very refreshing point. Maybe, it was there, years ago through Sufi or, you know, but now, when you put this thing forward and they're like when I tell them, ‘See, Shaitan is not somebody with horns. Shaitan is your own ego.’ So they're like, ‘What is this?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah, try to think about this.’ So, it actually leaves them with a question. They don't have anything to counter this.

Acharya Prashant: And because it is refreshing, they think of it as some kind of modern innovation. They do not understand that it is refreshing because it is as original as the source itself. So, if you bring out the real meaning of scriptures, they will say, ‘No, this is not the real meaning. This is a cultivated artificial manufactured meaning of your own.’ If it is your own meaning, then don't pass it off in the name of religion, you'll be accused of that. But that's what the real meaning really, really is. It's just that over the passage of time and due to the mechanics of the ego, the real meaning was obfuscated with all like lots of random stuff.

Questioner: Layers and layers of….

Acharya Prashant: Layers and layers have come.

Questioner: It is there somewhere. It's only about time of bringing it out. Once you show the light, then the light of Truth or Noor, then people will take notice, at least, they start questioning. At least, they start thinking somewhere like, you know, because they're seeing the state of the Muslims around and I see that they are somewhere restless to get an answer and then they find something refreshing coming and they're like, you know what, because Islamic psychology is now kicking up a lot. Like, I have a lot of friends who are psychotherapists and they are dealing with a lot of religious trauma patients.

So when this has come up, now people are realizing that you know what, maybe it was not about physical and material translations, it was something more deeper.

Acharya Prashant: See, it's a dangerous age we are living in. There are people who are turning more and more regressive as you said, very, very extreme translations and interpretations of the texts. Sometimes their beliefs have nothing to do with texts at all, but they still carry on with their beliefs. And then, there are those who want to totally drop religion. So throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Religion itself is abhorrable. Please drop religion. Please drop religion. That's the attitude.

We do have a fair number of ex-Hindus as well. It's only in Christians that the ones who drop religion come out very openly. So if you go to the developed world, you might find that 10-20, even 30-40% of people are formally declaring themselves as atheists. In Great Britain, if I correctly recall, Christians are no more a majority or they are close to being placed from the position of majority, theists are taking over. In Hindus, what happens is that you subtly become irreligious because there is a certain fear against openly declaring yourself to be an atheist. It's not that you'll be assaulted just that it's not very socially acceptable.

And also there is a section of Hindus who have been exploited in the past. So they would drop Hinduism and take to Buddhism. Their grievances are real and factual. There has been definite exploitation in the past. But because of that exploitation, they believe that religion itself is nonsense. Now, religion is not nonsense.

If you go to the core of religion, you will find everything there that nourishes life. In fact, you cannot carry on with life without being truly religious. Now when I make this statement, a lot of people get disturbed. They say, ‘We understand when you say religion has something good to offer but if you say religion is fundamental and indispensable then we don't agree with you.’

My request to them always is to not to worry about agreeing with me but to try to understand what religion really is. You don't really even have to start with religion. You have to start with yourself. Figure out who you are. Figure out where all your dissatisfaction and disquiet comes from and then you will know what religion is. And then you'll also know what should not be entertained in the name of religion. 99% of the practices and traditions and beliefs and stories, they belong either to the museum or more correctly to the waste basket.

So let them be prone to that place. Stories, myths, feelings of superiority, feelings of exclusivity, all that is not religion at all. But religion is definitely needed, definitely needed. And in the pure form, the same thing flows through all the pipes. Irrespective of the color and the form and the shape and the material of the pipe. There is just no doubt about it.

Like flutes are made of different materials. Krishna's flute is such a great symbol. You have flutes of bamboo. You also have flutes of metal. You have little flutes that you give to kids. You have large flutes that professionals play and there must be differences, variations of other kinds also but the thing is that there is music. Religion is that music and that music cannot come without the pure hollowness, pure hollowness.

Questioner: That's beautiful Acharya Ji.

Acharya Prashant: Let's see.

Questioner: Thank you.

Acharya Prashant: Welcome, most welcome.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
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