I have observed this tendency in many youngsters to reject Gods and Temples with nonchalance. It seems to them almost demeaning or embarrassing to even talk of it. They believe that life is totally in their hands and it requires nobody’s intervention. On one hand this self confidence is highly appreciated but on the other hand they have completely missed the relevance and significance of religious culture. It is true that the way religion is abused in our society leaves one with nothing but skepticism about the whole idea, but that should not take anything away from the fact that the spiritual culture we have inherited had a profound base and its tenets had a much larger meaning than what we have assigned to it in contemporary society.

For some time let us forget the various names given to religions (Hinduism, Islam etc) and their various subsets and look at the origins of this reverence to the unknown – which we call as religion. Primitive Man was hapless in front of the awesome forces of nature. His daily existence was determined by these forces and he thought by appeasing the wind or the rain in some way, his life would be more controlled and secured. And thus began the saga of rituals. Over the ages these wild incantations developed into a rigid system of “worship” with its own power hierarchies. The notable feature in this development is the fact no matter how refined and purified the prayers became the element of unpredictability and insecurity in Man’s life never left him totally. A fatalistic belief in fate began to rule the mind of man. A giving up of one’s life into unknown hands took the shape of God’s and Goddesses whose task it was to guard the world of uncertainties. Festivals and other days of worship became coded into the calendars of culture and it became the bounden duty of every person to attend places of worship and offer prayers mainly to propitiate the wild and virulent natural forces symbolized by these Gods. But the underlying urge behind these acts is the knowledge that our lives are never in our control. In every religion, we find there is parallel path of thought where a few men rejected the vain idolatry of their times. They were not atheists. They acknowledged the impersonal hold on their lives but they did not seek the reasons for it in the outer world, but dug deep within themselves to seeking out an answer. This line of thought came to be known as mysticism, and invariably in every society the mystics were looked upon with fear. The reason was clear. The mystics looked upon the Gods not as truths by themselves but as symbol of cosmic laws which none had the power to understand or change. A temple to them was not a place for appeasement but a sanctum sanctorum where one comes face to face with his own reality. The reality that life is lived through us and not by us and we have to accept whatever life has to give with a deep inner resignation. That is the true meaning of visiting temple-To prostrate before the cosmos, Understanding truly that every one of us has a role to play in this divine drama and that our personal will is only a myth. In a way we are led by destiny.

So visiting a temple is not to venerate an idol, but look beyond it and look through the inner meaning. If you want to show somebody where the moon is you have to point a finger towards it. Once the person has seen the direction of the pointed finger, he has to look beyond to actually see the moon. Similarly, the temples are pointers to the unknown. Do not get caught with pointer – See where it points too.