Things are definitely better today than during the Hobbesian ‘State of Nature’ or the medieval era when there were wars and internecine conflicts among different communities for supremacy and control over vast tracts of territories.

However, as civilization advanced, superior values and understanding led to better sense among humans to lead a more harmonious life in peaceful coexistence even with people who did not share the same values, ethics, ideals, standards and principles.

With the emergence of a globalized world and faster means of communication, a better inter-personal and intercommunity relationship was expected. And yet what we are witnessing today is far from inspiring. All the Panglossian optimism of ‘End of History’ with the triumph of liberal democratic values towards the end of the last millennium seems to have been hugely compromised with Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ looming large on the horizon. The ascendancy of rightwing forces and authoritarian regimes all across the globe belie all expectations of discovering the proverbial ‘Pot of Gold’ at the end of the rainbow.

If we look at the various insidious developments around us, all the gains made through the long-drawn struggle to make our lives better and more orderly appear to have been squandered. These gains are slowly being chipped away through a revisionist relapse to the seamier phase of human history.

The parochial forces seem to be gaining sway over the liberal values by way of an ominous rolling back of the constructive gains made thus far. Brexit, Grexit, a truncated Kyoto Protocol, an emaciated European Union and other regional groupings, a toothless United Nations and mounting international discord ~ all point to the shape of things to come.

It is against this bleak backdrop that we find a sinister avatar of religion suddenly taking centre-stage for all the wrong reasons. While religion ought to have been utilised as an instrument for consolidating and integrating human society, it has actually been playing a diametrically opposite role.

Many social scientists feel that religion should be least important for the present civilization which is richly endowed with advanced education, knowledge, information and improved means of communication; it is actually exercising a more disturbing influence over our policies and policymakers today.

While many of us had imagined that religion would slowly die down with an increasingly modernizing and liberalizing world, the same is just not happening. Religion has intelligently mutated and survived. This is because after a basic level of affluence and cultural growth, humans have a natural tendency to expand.

Once the basics of survival are mastered, humans start looking to extend their limits. As an intelligent living being, humans have an unbounded capacity to keep stretching the existential frontiers of their being. But they baulk at a point when science and technology stop providing them with the much required explanations and rationalisations for unresolved mysteries of divine Creation.

And it is here that the cult of the occult and arcane comes to the fore. Since nothing authoritative is known about unknown dimensions of our infinite Cosmos or its Creator, people start groping in the dark, accepting and believing whatever comes their way. It is here that the charlatans and imposters take advantage of our gullibility by dishing out half-baked knowledge which goes against the very grain of a civilized society.

Belonging to different religions or beliefs, we are today pitched against one another without comprehending the reason or rationale for the same. Like the few blind men describing an elephant in accord with their own constricting vision, there are today different blind men dealing in diverse religious and spiritual truths while offering their own blinkered vision as the final truth, something which has brought us all to the present sorry pass and something we must all guard against.

Religion being the primeval laws and a factor that controls the mundane aspects of our quotidian life even today, it needs to be approached with care and consideration. As long as education and knowledge were the preserve of the privileged few, the same was understandable.

However, now that we have the benefit of progressive wisdom from an enlightened and advanced education relatively more accessible than ever before, shouldn’t we try to understand religion ourselves rather than through some bogus middlemen who often try to con us into believing something to advance their own selfish interests?

Instead of seeing it through the compromised prism of some vested interests, we should approach it directly. It is high time that we get out of the patronizing influence of these ‘Brokers of Religion’ to give it the importance it deserves to explore the mysteries of the Divine, to discover the divinity within ourselves through gradual movement from our sundry imperfections to divine perfection.

A garbled understanding of religion and attendant values is at the root of the existential turmoil in society today. Seekers of Truth and Divine Drama should reflect on the wisdom enshrined in various religious scriptures to get a direct insight into the same. We should not only try to understand our own religion diligently, but that of others as well. It is only then that we can actually realize and appreciate the functional and spiritual significance of religion.

Such an exploration into the inscrutable Divine has often revealed profound insights about the ageless Creation to Indian mystics. There are many spiritual dimensions of our cosmos that we don’t fathom though they have recently become scientifically amenable through the corelation between Quantum Physics and spiritualism. If we can all understand religion in its right perspective, we can easily see the basic truth and unity among them all.

Many well-read people and scholars consider it infra dig to attest to any religion or discuss spiritual issues as they find the same beyond the domain of logic and reason. We are only being capable of uplifting themselves through gradual spiritual evolution to eventually merge with the Divine. Lack of a drive for self-exploration into the realms of the Divine has led to the rise of thousands of cults and sects which promise different revelations of the Divine. Hence the popularity of various ‘Babas’ and Gurus.

The sudden proliferation of these Godmen and divine middlemen is actually a reflection of the void that human beings find in their lives after they reach a certain level of affluence and contentment like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

While most of these so-called Gurus and Godmen are phoney, some are really genuine. Through conscious judgment and discretion, we should start engaging in spiritual discourse and discussion over such matters to discover the truth and import behind this huge Creation. Otherwise, we shall remain doomed to be stuck in ‘history’ as Francis Fukuyama once declaimed.

Hinduism, as the oldest of all religions, is said to be the most federal of all religions because of a rich tradition of exploring various ways to discover the divine within. With the march of time, all religions of the world have benefited from the wisdom of the other.

Whatever be the truth, if we really wish to advance and survive as intelligent beings to move further in the evolution stepladder, it is advisable that we often start approaching and understanding religion without the instrumentality of an intermediary amongst us.

The writer is an IAS officer, presently posted as the Commissioner of School Education, West Bengal. The views are personal and not the Government‘s.