Choose Wisely
Ever since you began to read, books have been a great source for your learning, right? Especially, when you had to learn about the core subjects in school, like Biology, Math, Geography, you’ve referred to text books to verify a fact.
In this era of technology and internet, you’ve learned to cautiously sift through myriads of information thrown at you each time you work on a school project. You’re trained by your teacher to identify and rely on authentic sources only.
In this era of technology and internet, you’ve learned to cautiously sift through myriads of information thrown at you each time you work on a school project. You’re trained by your teacher to identify and rely on authentic sources only.
Where can we learn about God?
But what happens when you want to learn about God? What if you want to know His nature? And where do you turn when you’ve to figure out how you can love Him and connect with Him? On top of that, you may have wondered how to act right in life’s many trying situations?
You usually build up your belief system from all the information you’re handed down from your family elders, the community, and society in general. Whatever resonates with you, you hold on to it and live by it.
That’s when things begin to get a little muddled with confusing, and often conflicting, information. You begin to question and wonder. And you begin to resemble a wild, atheistic maverick. Or someone gives you a holy book which you can barely make meaning of when you read all by yourself. You often wish you had some authentic help there – to know God, to make some meaning out of your life.
You usually build up your belief system from all the information you’re handed down from your family elders, the community, and society in general. Whatever resonates with you, you hold on to it and live by it.
That’s when things begin to get a little muddled with confusing, and often conflicting, information. You begin to question and wonder. And you begin to resemble a wild, atheistic maverick. Or someone gives you a holy book which you can barely make meaning of when you read all by yourself. You often wish you had some authentic help there – to know God, to make some meaning out of your life.
The Holy Books
There are authentic religious books that we broadly call scriptures. All religions of the world have scriptures – usually one great book for each religion from which their followers seek guidance. For Christians, it is the New Testament of the Bible. Similarly, for Muslims, it is the Quran. And for the Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib.
For the Hindus, apparently, there’s a plethora of spiritual scriptures, a wide array of holy texts. To a casual inquirer, it can seem to be quite overwhelming. Most people keep referring to the Gita, some quote from the Upanishads and Bhagavatam. However, the core source of all these Hindu holy texts is the Vedas. The Vedas contain all that is there to know about God, His qualities, and how one can build a connection with Him. All spiritual texts – the Upanishads, the Darshan Shastras, the puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (that includes the Gita) that have evolved in Hinduism conform to the Vedas. That’s how they get validated.
For the Hindus, apparently, there’s a plethora of spiritual scriptures, a wide array of holy texts. To a casual inquirer, it can seem to be quite overwhelming. Most people keep referring to the Gita, some quote from the Upanishads and Bhagavatam. However, the core source of all these Hindu holy texts is the Vedas. The Vedas contain all that is there to know about God, His qualities, and how one can build a connection with Him. All spiritual texts – the Upanishads, the Darshan Shastras, the puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (that includes the Gita) that have evolved in Hinduism conform to the Vedas. That’s how they get validated.
Be cautious to choose books on divine subjects
When you walk into a bookstore or a library, haven’t you noticed books on God? You bet. Some of these books are so popular, even celebrities are lapping them up from cover to cover. The media is full of their raving reviews and your friends are picking them up too. You don’t want to be the one missing out on the discussions and debates.
Your “me too” feeling whets up the FOMO mindset, and there you go! You begin to guzzle up on those popular books on faith. The authors become famous personalities as more and more people begin to follow them. But these books totally misguide you because the authors are NOT God-realized souls, hence not worthy and knowledgeable enough to write on this subject.
Instead of knowing about God, reading these books leaves you more confused and conflicted than ever before at the crossroads of life.
Before you’ve goofed up any more, here’s a word of caution – STOP.
Pause before you pick up another book on God. It’s time to know the basics about holy books. When it comes of learning about the divine in our modern society, there are information reaching you from three main sources in the form of books – two of which are completely reliable, and one clearly not.
Books, called ‘granth’ in Sanskrit, can be authentic or otherwise. Fancy books get written by any intellectual with a prowess at crafting words. While smart, intelligent, educated people are capable of writing authentic books on worldly knowledge that can be observed or proven in a lab, they are completely unworthy of writing on God without any direct experience of Him. Their books on divine matters are often a mishmash of conjectural thoughts presented in fancy arguments and ideologies. Reading and pondering over these ideas can do more harm than good. It would be just as good as a well-advertised physics text book written by a baker, or a book on astronomy written by a seamstress.
Such books are categorized as Krit Granth – books created by worldly people who are not yet God-realized. The directive of our scriptures is to entirely avoid reading such materials. Do not fall under the pressure from your peers and family to read them.
If you were to learn how to cook well, where would you begin? Would you buy a big, fat book in the market with fancy pictures and recipes compiled by a writer who has never touched a spatula? Or would you rather learn by observing and asking you grandma who you know is a phenomenal cook, deftly turning out delectable dishes with her nimble fingers?
If you had to learn flying a plane, would you rather learn from a pilot with thousands of hours of flying, or would you trust your fate to a man who read up several books on flying and wrote an impressive rehashed manual on it? It’s a no-brainer that you’d choose the pilot as your teacher. You get the point.
Can you apply the same logic in the area of learning about God?
Your “me too” feeling whets up the FOMO mindset, and there you go! You begin to guzzle up on those popular books on faith. The authors become famous personalities as more and more people begin to follow them. But these books totally misguide you because the authors are NOT God-realized souls, hence not worthy and knowledgeable enough to write on this subject.
Instead of knowing about God, reading these books leaves you more confused and conflicted than ever before at the crossroads of life.
Before you’ve goofed up any more, here’s a word of caution – STOP.
Pause before you pick up another book on God. It’s time to know the basics about holy books. When it comes of learning about the divine in our modern society, there are information reaching you from three main sources in the form of books – two of which are completely reliable, and one clearly not.
Books, called ‘granth’ in Sanskrit, can be authentic or otherwise. Fancy books get written by any intellectual with a prowess at crafting words. While smart, intelligent, educated people are capable of writing authentic books on worldly knowledge that can be observed or proven in a lab, they are completely unworthy of writing on God without any direct experience of Him. Their books on divine matters are often a mishmash of conjectural thoughts presented in fancy arguments and ideologies. Reading and pondering over these ideas can do more harm than good. It would be just as good as a well-advertised physics text book written by a baker, or a book on astronomy written by a seamstress.
Such books are categorized as Krit Granth – books created by worldly people who are not yet God-realized. The directive of our scriptures is to entirely avoid reading such materials. Do not fall under the pressure from your peers and family to read them.
If you were to learn how to cook well, where would you begin? Would you buy a big, fat book in the market with fancy pictures and recipes compiled by a writer who has never touched a spatula? Or would you rather learn by observing and asking you grandma who you know is a phenomenal cook, deftly turning out delectable dishes with her nimble fingers?
If you had to learn flying a plane, would you rather learn from a pilot with thousands of hours of flying, or would you trust your fate to a man who read up several books on flying and wrote an impressive rehashed manual on it? It’s a no-brainer that you’d choose the pilot as your teacher. You get the point.
Can you apply the same logic in the area of learning about God?
Authentic Sources of Knowledge
Fortunately, there are those totally authentic sources for learning about God. There have been God-realized saints who have written the core knowledge for aspirants to learn from. Saint Tulsidas’s Ram Charitmanas, Valmiki’s Ramayana are two great examples. Even Ved Vyas Ji, who was none other than the incarnation of Shri Krishna Himself, compiled all the scriptures for us in Kali Yug and also presented us with the unparallel Bhagavat Mahapurana. All of these books, written by saints and divine avatars, are called Smrit Granth. These are created from the knowledge the saints have flawlessly preserved in their memory.
The Vedas happen to be eternal. They were never written by a saint. It is the true, unquestioned source of all knowledge revealed by God. Hence, only the Vedas are called Vinirgat Granth, the divine knowledge that emanated or ‘came out of’ from the divine.
The Vedas happen to be eternal. They were never written by a saint. It is the true, unquestioned source of all knowledge revealed by God. Hence, only the Vedas are called Vinirgat Granth, the divine knowledge that emanated or ‘came out of’ from the divine.
The Guidance for Learning
Before you get all charged up to pick up these books from a book store, here’s a word of caution again. If you wanted to be an astronaut as a first grader, would you be able to read up on astrophysics as a six-year-old by browsing through college textbooks on that subject? Regardless of how impatient you were to slip into your special astronaut suit, you’d need years and years of patient learning from different teachers of science, pumping your hard labor into your student life under the tutelage of great masters. Until you finally reach that qualifying level of entering the coterie of astronauts.
You need the right teachers until you find your final mentor who takes you to that last point of stepping onto the spaceship. You need that ultimate mentor who qualifies you for that unparallel experience. Finding that perfect mentor can make all the difference. Reading up on gazillion books of astrophysics will not take you to that point. Never ever.
Let’s imagine you’ve to interview a Hollywood star for a special behind-the-scene experiences. You surely can’t walk up to his door and ring the bell expecting him to welcome you in and be all yours for the interview. You simply cannot do it this way. You know it. He is completely out of bounds. Who would you trust to set up a meeting with this incredibly hard-to-reach celebrity? A cinematographer you happen to know who regularly works for him? Or your neighborhood pal who is an ardent fan of that star and has all the media clippings on him?
The bottom line: to know about God, you cannot do it alone by reading books. Even authentic ones. You absolutely need a guide to explain the complexities to you at your level. Just like a mother bird chews and mashes up the food for her tiny fledglings, the spiritual guide, also known as the guru, feeds us the knowledge in chewable nuggets until we are ready to become God-realized.
You need the right teachers until you find your final mentor who takes you to that last point of stepping onto the spaceship. You need that ultimate mentor who qualifies you for that unparallel experience. Finding that perfect mentor can make all the difference. Reading up on gazillion books of astrophysics will not take you to that point. Never ever.
Let’s imagine you’ve to interview a Hollywood star for a special behind-the-scene experiences. You surely can’t walk up to his door and ring the bell expecting him to welcome you in and be all yours for the interview. You simply cannot do it this way. You know it. He is completely out of bounds. Who would you trust to set up a meeting with this incredibly hard-to-reach celebrity? A cinematographer you happen to know who regularly works for him? Or your neighborhood pal who is an ardent fan of that star and has all the media clippings on him?
The bottom line: to know about God, you cannot do it alone by reading books. Even authentic ones. You absolutely need a guide to explain the complexities to you at your level. Just like a mother bird chews and mashes up the food for her tiny fledglings, the spiritual guide, also known as the guru, feeds us the knowledge in chewable nuggets until we are ready to become God-realized.
Pause Before You Pick a Book
Trying to read up the Smrit Granths and the Vinirgat Granth will leave us more confused. Most-likely we’d be drawing the wrong conclusions. Without realizing, we’re likely to get the false pride of having understood it all. It’ll lead us to our downfall – quite the opposite of what we had intended. So, pause before you pick a book.
Jagadguruttam Swami Shri Kripalu Ji Maharaj has been endorsed by an assembly of top notch scholars as the authentic source of Vedic wisdom.
Know more about our Beloved Shri Gurudev
Know more about our Beloved Shri Gurudev
