What is Religion and who needs it? 2 of 4

being in anything? There must be a meaning in this search, this endeavour to understand life, to explain being. It is not meaningless and vain. It is our ceaseless endeavour to become free. The knowledge which we now call science has been struggling for thousands of years in its attempt to gain freedom, and people ask for freedom. Yet there is no freedom in nature. It is all law. Still, the struggle goes on.

The whole of nature from the very sun to the atoms is under law, and even for man there is no freedom. But we cannot believe it. We have been studying laws from the beginning, yet we cannot, will not believe, that man is under law. The soul cries ever, "Freedom, O Freedom!" With the conception of God as a perfectly free Being, humankind cannot rest eternally in this bondage.

Higher we must go, and unless the struggle was for ourselves, we would think it too severe. We may says to ourselves, "We are born slaves, we are bound; nevertheless, there is a Being who is not bound by nature. He is free and a Master of nature."

The conception of God, therefore, is as essential and as fundamental a part of the mind as is the idea of bondage. Both are the outcome of the idea of freedom. There cannot be life, even in the plant, without the idea of freedom. In the plant or in the worm, life has to rise to the individual concept. It is there, unconsciously working, the plant living its life to preserve the variety, principle, or form, not nature. The idea of nature controlling every step onward overrules the idea of freedom.

 Onward goes the idea of the material world; onward moves the idea of freedom. Still the fight goes on. We are hearing about all the quarrels of creeds and sects, yet creeds and sects are just and proper, they must be there. The chain is lengthening and naturally the struggle increases, but there need be no quarrels if we only knew that we are all striving to reach the same goal.

The embodiment of freedom, the Master of nature, is what we call God. We cannot deny Him, because we cannot move or live without the idea of freedom. Would we come here if we did not believe we were free? It is quite possible that the biologist can and will give some explanation of this perpetual effort to be free. Take all that for granted, still the idea of freedom is there. It is a fact, as much so as the other fact that we apparently get over, the fact of being under nature.

Bondage and liberty, light and shadow, good and evil must be there, but the very fact of the bondage shows also this freedom hidden there. If one is a fact, the other is equally a fact. There must be this idea of freedom.

While now we cannot see this idea of bondage, yet the idea of freedom is there. The bondage of sin and impurity in the uncultivated savage is to his consciousness very small, for his nature is only a little higher than the animal's. What he struggles against is the bondage of physical nature; the lack of physical gratification, but out of this lower consciousness grows and broadens the higher conception of a mental or moral bondage and a longing for spiritual freedom.

Here we see the divine dimly shining through the veil of ignorance. The veil is very dense at first and the light may be almost obscured, but it is there, ever pure and undimmed, the radiant fire of freedom and perfection. Mankind personifies this as the Ruler of the Universe, the One Free Being. He does not yet know that the universe is all one that the difference is only in degree, in the concept.

The whole of nature is worship of God. Wherever there is life, there is this search for freedom and that freedom is the same as God. Necessarily this freedom gives us mastery over all nature and is impossible without knowledge. The more knowing we are, the more we are becoming masters of nature. Mastery alone is making us strong and if there is some being entirely free and master of nature, that being must have a perfect knowledge of nature, must be omnipresent and omniscient. Freedom must go hand in hand with these, and that being alone who has acquired these will be beyond nature.

Blessedness, eternal peace, arising from perfect freedom, is the highest concept of religion underlying all the ideas of God, absolutely free Existence, not bound by anything, no change, no nature, nothing that can produce a change in Him. This same freedom is in us and is the only real freedom.

God is still, established upon His own majestic changeless Self. We try to be one with Him, but plant ourselves upon nature, upon the trifles of daily life, on money, on fame, on human love, and all these changing forms in nature which make for bondage. When nature shines on anything what depends on light, it actually depends upon God and not upon the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars. Wherever anything shines, whether it is the light in the sun or in our own consciousness, it is He. He is shining in all and all shines after Him as a reflection.

Now we have seen that this God is self-evident, impersonal, omniscient, the Knower and Master of nature, the Lord of all. He is behind all worship and it is being done according to Him, whether we know it or not. Let’s go one step further, that at which all marvel, that which we call evil, it is His too. There cannot be any life or any impulse unless that freedom is behind it.