If you remember the last scene of The Da Vinci Code movie, you will remember that the hero Dr Robert Langdon finds himself running with barely-concealed hurry towards the place where Mary of Magdalene, he deduces, must be buried. He is a non-believer, but he is also a historian. He is someone who pursues secrets of the past with great passion.
Langdon finds the spot finally, looks around to confirm his calculations, lines up the stars in the sky, and is finally satisfied that he is standing right over what countless others have died looking for — something that has moved the minds of men since the days of Jesus Christ. He is standing over real, tangible history.
He however, doesn’t know how to react to the moment. What he does know is that he can’t not react. The presence of history is too great for him to ignore. His passion for history and the invisible past is as great (if not more) as someone else’s might be for God and religion.
Perhaps because Langdon feels nothing else would aptly express what he feels, he kneels.
Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik said at TED India this year, “Culture is a reaction to nature. And this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation to generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals.”
Kneeling or bowing down to a higher power is a ritual meant to express the feeling of humbleness. It happens more often than many of us would admit to, but we are humbled numberless times in our lives. What one man feels in front of a deity, another may feel standing in front of grand canyon, while yet another might feel the same when his life has taken a bad turn and nothing seems to be going right.
Rituals are man’s different symbolic reactions to the different aspects of the world around him. They are man-made constructs designed to express that which cannot (should not?) remain unexpressed.
The idea is not something exclusive to religion either. If you were moved by the movie 3 Idiots, you may find yourself saying, “Aal Iz well” in remembrance of the feeling that the movie evoked in you. That’s a ritual too. Same goes for gestures like “Live long and prosper” and “May the Force be with you”.
Rituals are a part of life and therefore, inevitable, just like superstition or facial hair. It does not do to declare them evil or old-fashioned. Try and see if you can understand where they came from.
To add to your thought I will like to point out that most of the rituals and not all do have a logical background to it. In our case we either blindly believe in it or vehemently deny it.
If we try to research and find out the truth, a new understanding will come.
The greatest tragedy of religion is that most people following it have absolutely no idea about what it is.
The underlying notion that drives most of Indians to be hetero ritualistic is perhaps the beliefs & practices our ancestors held and that the traditional beliefs are deeply attributed to God multitudinous superpowers.
I am all for monotheism but since I am a Hindu and going by our surrounding factors & traditions its difficult to promote monotheism but I always try to look for a single deity in polytheism.
So i agree to what Abhishek has said “we either blindly believe in it or deny it”
The day one tries to research and find out the truth he will seek a nirvana.
Hinduism is henotheistic. That means it accepts there is one God but there is plenty of freedom to worship other gods too. This is because the Vedas say defining God is impossible. The Upanishads say that there is one God and our 33 million deities are various symbolic aspects of him/her/it.
So pantheism, monotheism, atheism, polytheism, are all parts of Hinduism.
Rituals are no different in purpose than army parades.
Rituals do have scientific meanings, and sometimes they are also associated with the climatic and regional conditions.
So, the one ritual that is benficial in one region or a timeframe, may be irrelevant or harmful in some other region or timeframe.
So, we should use our wisdom to judge their relevance, and accordingly they should be accepted/rejected.
For Example , there is a ritual, that we should not eat anything, while the eclipse is happening.This may have come in the mind of our ancestors that at that point of time the sun is hidden , and hence virus/bacterias start multiplying at a higher rate, and hence we should avoid eating anything during that time.
Now, today some of us blindly follow this, but have we ever thaught that,if that is true, then we should also not eat at night as well.But actually most of us have a heavy dinner in the night, which is actually very harmfull.And also with the invention of refrigerators, we keep things in a refrigerator to keep them fresh.So we can protect the food during the Eclipse as well.
Also, in our Pujas, we use GangaJal, to purify anything and everything.In ancient times this GangaJal was really having a power to purify anything.But today, can we say the same?If someone can drink GangaJal directly? We have made it so impure, that first it needs a purification.So, we should think over it and do somthing in that direction.
My intention is to make people aware the purpose of the rituals. So actually , we should ask “Why”, we are doing something.Not just blindly following them.