All Life Is Yoga: Yoga and Religion. Sri Aurobindo

      Chapter 3

      A Fundamental Error in Religion

      That is why religions are always mistaken – always – because they want to standardise the expression of an experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable truth. The experience was true, complete in itself, convincing – for the one who had it. The formulation he made of it was excellent – for himself. But to want to impose it on others is a fundamental error which has altogether disastrous consequences, always, which always leads far, very far from the Truth.

      That is why all the religions, however beautiful they may be, have always led man to the worst excesses. All the crimes, the horrors perpetrated in the name of religion are among the darkest stains on human history, and simply because of this little initial error: wanting what is true for one individual to be true for the mass or collectivity. (Silence)

      The path must be shown and the doors opened but everyone must follow the path, pass through the doors and go towards his personal realisation.

      The only help one can and should receive is that of the Grace which formulates itself in everyone according to his own need.

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      You want to know “the Truth” as a thing well defined, well classified, well established, and after that you are at rest: there is no need to seek any more! You take it up, you say: “Here, this is the Truth” and then it is fixed. This is what all the religions have done. They have established their truth as a dogma. But it is not the Truth any more.

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      ...for me these things don’t have much importance. I have no attachment for any religion, and when one has no attachment, one has no aversion either. For me religions are forms, much too human, of spiritual life. Each one expresses one aspect of the single and eternal Truth, but in expressing it exclusive of the other aspects, it deforms and diminishes it. None has the right to call itself the only true one, any more than it has the right to deny the truth contained in the others. And all of them together would not suffice to express the Supreme Truth which is beyond all expression, even whilst being present in each one.

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      The spiritual spirit is not contrary to a religious feeling of adoration, devotion and consecration. But what is wrong in the religions is the fixity of the mind clinging to one formula as an exclusive truth. One must always remember that formulas are only a mental expression of the truth and that this truth can always be expressed in many other ways.

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      Man’s right is to pursue the Truth freely and to approach it freely in his own way. But each one ought to know that his discovery is good for him alone and is not to be imposed upon others.

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      The attitude to be taken towards religions

      A benevolent goodwill towards all worshippers.

      An enlightened indifference towards all religions.

      All religions are partial approximations of the one sole Truth that is far above them.

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