How Sacred are the Cows?

Is God a delusion as Dawkins claims? I don't think so. God is a sacred cow, an illusion, a metaphor and a myth created by human need; not a fantasy or delusion.

?Human beings created God in their image to reflect what they would like to be. They were sound in mind and body when they did.

?Humans created religions; Religions created Gods,

Humans Religions and Gods together fragmented the earth and minds,

While Gods die on the streets, devil laughs,

While humans die on the streets, religion laughs

Vayalar Ramaverma, Malayalam Poet

?God is a belief system humans need to anchor themselves in, as a belief and faith, to alleviate our fear of death, just the way love can be anchored through poetry, dance and other art forms to enjoy living. I am not an atheist. I believe in the Source, the Energy Source, that creates us all and where we return. I believe God to be a manifestation of that Source, and yet not the Source. I need God as an anchor, a faith, a metaphor, perhaps an illusion, and certainly as a North Star I can rise to. I don’t believe in organised religion.

?Vedic Brahman Vs Buddha’s Void

?Upanishad are the endpoints of the Vedic wisdom. They are the essence of Veda, as Vedanta. They speak of no god. They speak of a Source, the Energy, which they called Brahman, derived from the word ‘brh’ for expansion. Upanishad articulated this word to mean the first principle of creation as the sound ‘aum’. This energy, they said, was ever present, ever expanding, one that cannot be sensed, understood and experienced by the mind and body. It was the Eternal Truth of a Source that would forever be asymptotic.?

?Upanishad texts also repeatedly said that the Brahman, energy behind creation, was present in each of its created creatures as the Atman.?Brahman is a hologram beyond the Universe. Atman is its holographic fragment embedded in each of us. Both are energy.

?Vedanta and Shankara’s later day Advaita affirmed that matter and energy, humans and divine, Atman and Brahman are non-dual. It’s the illusion of our minds, maya, that creates doubts in our minds about our divine origin and potential. We are gods.

?Where then does a superior and sacred God come in??

?This was the question Buddha raised. If there was a God, who created him? If a God was created by the human mind, then that God is inferior to humans. If that God was created by the Source, which we know nothing about, that God may be superior, but not above the Source. To Buddha that Source was unknown. It was the Void, sunya. Shankara, in line with Veda, spoke of the Source as eternal and infinite, purna.

?Quantum Science of the energy wave and the material particle may eventually integrate the void with the infinite. How we view that God, lies with us. It’s not for a religion to dictate, or worse still, for a preacher to tell us. It is better that we think wrongly and be accountable, than follow organised religions, and be enslaved.?

?As Zen so beautifully says, ‘the finger pointing to the moon is just the finger, not the moon.’ So is God. She or he, truly both, lives within us in spirit. When we see the finger as God out of context, outside of us, we end in conflict and dystopian destruction.?

?The Sacred Cows

?In the Hindutva version of the Vedic philosophy practised today, verses and words of Veda have been misinterpreted to align with societal norms of conduct. The word ‘Hindu’ never existed in the Veda. It was ‘Sindhu’. Sanatana dharma is not a Vedic term. It was created in the Manu Smriti, several millennia later, along with many other non-Vedic codes of conduct. All people, including brahmins, ate cows in Vedic times. Cows and all other animals, were also honoured as givers of food, as well as food, and were consumed as needed, after offering them to their gods. Vedic people also drank wine. An entire Rig Veda chapter was devoted to Soma, the god of wine.

?After seeing the documentary Cowspiracy, I had this epiphany about why somewhere along the years practitioners of the Vedic philosophy mandated the cow to be sacred. They probably knew that millennia down the ages, indiscriminate breeding, slaughtering and consuming meat and other domesticated animals would mean the end of the world causing harm to the climate and environment. The harm caused to the earth and oceans by ‘animal agriculture’ as Cowspiracy calls it, has not been understood, or allowed to be understood by the meat and dairy industries. Ironically, generally vegetarian land of India has been affected just as badly as the countries who have defiled nature and climate, including those who profess to protect them.

?The oft-quoted verses in the Purusha Suktam of Rig Veda in support of the caste system are misinterpreted. The four parts of the Purusha are compared to the limbs of this being representing formless energy, as being equal to one another. There is no mention of the word varna denoting caste in these verses or elsewhere in the Veda or Upanishad. The concept arose much later through the epics and myths. Krishna’s reference to the varna system in the Bhagavad Gita at a much later date, as part of the Mahabharata ithihasa epic, has been misinterpreted. The craft and aptitude based guild system Krishna spoke about morphed into greed based genetically entitled class system, later corrupted into one based on skin colour.?

?Some scholars attribute the caste system to the Purusha Suktam in the Veda. Most renowned scholars of Veda see Purusha Suktam as a later day inclusion, as is Narayana Suktam, both in some alignment with Krishna’s ‘Viswarupa Darshana’ verses in the Bhagavad Gita. Veda never sanctioned the caste system. Veda did not differentiate between religions. It was inclusive and tolerant of diversity.?

?The caste system was never a birth entitlement. The guru in the gurukul tradition taught his learners based on aptitude, using jyotish sastra, astrology, as a psychometric tool rather than a predictive one. The brahmin were cognitive, kshatriya physical, vaisya business minded, and shudra skilled in crafts. A brahmin’s son could have been a shudra, and the other way around. The ‘chatur varna’ was a guild system and an efficient one, corrupted into a birth right over time by greed.?

?Women were always held equal to men, whether married or widowed. Purusha Prakriti, Shiva Shakti, the latter day Maheshwara/Maheshwari, are androgynous sources of creation. The active element is feminine. The passive supportive energy is masculine. Women and widows were demeaned by misogynist priests, who wished to preserve their power, not by Vedic verses. Nothing in the Vedic sruti suggests that women are inferior to men. Sanskrit words for ‘she’ and 'he’ are the same, and it’s only based on context one differentiates in gender through verbs and adjectives. For the most part, it’s the Western English translators who used?‘he’ to give all Vedic verses a masculine flavour, even when not intended.

?Over time, sruti, sacred scriptures of the Veda, were relegated to give more importance to man-made smriti of the purana, itihasa, and others such as Manu Smriti, which followed thousands of years later. In the beginning, proficiency in the Veda into which one was born, and mastering another or more, became essential for a person to be qualified as a brahmin. It was not possible to be brahmin by being born to another brahmin.?The brahmin surnames ‘Dwivedi’, Trivedi’ and Chaturvedi’ etc., denote that the person is a master or 2, 3 or 4 Veda, followed based on this qualification to be a brahmin. Today, many people bearing these names, entitling themselves as brahmins, do not even know a fraction of one Veda, let alone 2 or more. We all abound in godmen, as Shankara foretold in Bhaja Govindam over 1500 years ago, as frauds who mislead people to fill their bellies. What started as a noble tradition of scholarship has been corrupted into a hereditary prerogative to fulfil human greed.?

?These sacred cows of today’s version of the Vedic religion were created by those who wished to control others. What we should eat and drink and what we shouldn’t, who we should marry and shouldn’t, who is more equal than another, what we can do and cannot, what caste we are born into and how it empowers or disempowers us were never part of the Vedic philosophical structure. It’s time we destroyed these limiting belief systems that defile our humaneness.

?Reflect

·?????What are the religious beliefs you were brought up on such as eating, drinking, respecting others, and mixing with others?

·?????How do they serve you now? How do they support you in serving others?

·?????How can you reframe these beliefs if you believe you are energy as others are??

Please do write in, resonant or dissonant. Let’s have a conversation.

?Ram is co-founder and mentor at Coacharya?https://coacharya.com. Ram's focus is integration of Eastern wisdom with modern science, spiritually, systemically and sustainably.