Jain Spirit 2003 10 No 16

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 57

Society Needs Faith
over territory, over authority, not over religion. Religion has always shown a tendency toward peace.
There are people working towards uniting the different faiths and denominations. But I don't think that is God's purpose. As I study God's creations, I can see that he didn't create only one kind of insect; he created more than a million kinds. As you go down through geologic history, the variety has not got less but greater. I think the same is true in religion or the study of spiritual matters.
It is part of God's purpose, too, to have his children study from every different aspect and then to love each other, talk to each other, learn from each other. I rejoice that there is a wonderfully rich variety of religions now. Surely we will not only love each other, but also learn from each other. That is a far greater blessing than if we just had a uniform concept without any progress.
We can admire what is done by everybody. There is no form of worship of God that I don't admire. I admire the ancient scripture, I am an enthusiastic Christian, and I believe that the gospel of Christ is a marvellous revelation. But at the same time, I can learn by reading the Jewish scriptures, or the Hindu scriptures, or the Buddhist scriptures. They are all approaching the question of God and God's purpose and spirituality in different ways. It adds a rich variety to my knowledge and yours if we have all these people trying to share their most beautiful insights, their most beautiful triumphs. The secret of success is to try to give it away. If your life is focused on getting, you are going to be miserable. If your life is focused on giving, you are going to be an automatic success.
It is part of God's ongoing creative process to have every human being different, to have a wide variety of religions and a wide variety of denominations and churches. He gives some talents to every human being, but not the same talents. He didn't give me the musical talents he gave you. And not the same quantity of talents, either. The parable of the talents in the Bible teaches us that whatever gifts God gave us, it is our duty to use them to the utmost: "The lord of the manor went away and gave to one servant five talents, another two, and another one. The first two servants multiplied the talents and gave them back to the lord. The one with one talent was fearful and buried his talent, and gave the lord back only what he had been given. So the lord said to the first two, 'Enter into the joy of my kingdom.' And the third man he banished from the kingdom." It is a dramatic, clear lesson: you should discover what your talents are and then use them to the utmost to do the most good in accordance with God's purposes. If you start out to gain happiness for yourself, you'll never achieve it. But if you start out to give happiness to other people, you can't help the happiness coming back to you.
Science has discovered coal, then petroleum, then nuclear energy and now the renewable types of energy. But it goes far beyond that. Science is discovering the creations of the creator. For fifteen billion years, our universe had been in the process of creation. Still, just in the last seventy years have scientists been
able to see for the first time what happened a billion or fifteen billion years ago. We never knew, until seventy years ago, if there was any galaxy outside our own little Milky Way. Now we know there are a hundred million other galaxies - surely all created by the same creator. The majesty of God, his infinity and eternity is becoming more and more apparent because we are seeking it. That is what we should be doing in religion. My efforts now, for the rest of my life, are focused on spirituality. How can people grow spiritually the way they have grown scientifically and materially?
I will give you one illustration. One of my foundations has published a book called A Bibliography of Research by Natural Scientists on Spiritual Subjects. We have collected over a hundred and fifty articles from learned, peer review journals of the highest scientific standard where scientists have been studying spiritual matters. For example, none of them doubt there is such a thing as love, and yet little has been done scientifically to study love. It is beginning, though. Prayer, worship and all the other things that are of a spiritual nature can be studied, and if they were studied it would be a marvellous thing. (The amount that is being spent worldwide on scientific research today is about a billion dollars a day).
I have established prizes for progress in religion. Let's take Sir Alister Hardy, who was one of the prize winners, as an example. When he was fifty he became world famous and was knighted by the Queen for his work in botany because he was the world expert on the varieties of planktons in the ocean and in the air. Then he stopped all of that and said he was going to do the same thing with the varieties of spiritual experience. So he spent the last thirty years of his life collecting, classifying and studying the varieties of religious experience and wrote a whole long list of books with wonderful titles like The Biology of God.
We are now thinking of having a survey to find out among the professors of hard sciences, such as chemistry, medicine and so forth, how many of them pray. We presume it is going to be a very high proportion. To be a scientist doesn't mean that you close your mind to the underlying realities. Scientists are only studying those things that are tangible and visible, but that is not the total, the underlying reality. The thing that sustains and improves the outward appearances is a spiritual matter. More and more scientists are coming to believe that the real underlying facts are religious and that science is just the study of the manifestations. Everything that we touch, see or hear is temporary, compared to the underlying reality that has created the universe.
The above article is extracted from 'A Parliament of Souls' edited by Michael Tobias, Jane Morrison and Bettina Gray and published by KQED Books, San Francisco. For more details visit www.templeton.org
September - November 2003. Jain Spirit
55