A Shift in Consciousness: new way of looking at life

 

 We ask today, what is the destiny of the human believers? What if many drift from their faith practice? What if people do not follow their past paths? What will the future following of a particular religious path involve in? It is going to be a metanoia - a conversion of conscience - than moral or life reform.  It is about a complete shift in consciousness, a new way of looking at life. A renewed and reprogrammed ‘memory’ in the making. The pandemic lesson is gut-wrenching: denying one’s past style of life and take up a new course all together. It is a death to the past processed practices in religious terms. A new power to ‘crucify’ one’s set-ego and blind faith.  This paradigm move is going to be the foundation of the religious, or better still, a spiritual life in the future.

It is not difficult to anticipate the religious fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact of religiosity will be felt in the coming years. For the conservative believers, the fallout may well be controlled, but its impact on general religious practices will be felt. Just as the post-Covid contraction of black fungus poses a threat, there will be telling impact on the practicing believers of diverse faith. A prolonged pandemic experience over the past two years of living ‘unnatural lives’ will certainly have strong impact on the believers.  

As the pandemic persists, it is likely that dissatisfaction with ritualistic religious practices will diminish, although a stronger yearning for truth will grow about God, religion and its implication. People’s response to the post-pandemic religiosity will be different. Spiritually, the natural desire for a strong humanity and divinity (as an all-encompassing force) will grow. People’s physical participation in community rituals will change too, probably more towards a quasi-religious practices. These are still assumptions based, on past socio-religious behavior. The present challenges posed by the pandemic, threatens all presumptions and beliefs of the past practices and traditions. The future response possibly will be new patterns of spiritual behavior, more connected to the existing reality, than the past belief-systems expressed mostly through rituals.

The religious narratives has become bare and impoverished in the face of the pandemic experience. It has become arid and static. Today, it has to have a sense of an ethic and meaning that opens up new possibilities. The very Covid crisis has become a religious-ethical crisis. We are not given even the time to mourn the dead or perform the last rite. Religiosity has lost the power of memory. Covid, has proved that the religious crisis is a crisis of culture. Religion as an ideological system has lost its philosophical roots. Today, as ever, the nature is always evolving. In the present ecological age, religions cannot treat nature as a commodity. Reason and faith must be treated equally within religion, based on ‘truth-telling’. The illiteracy of reason within religion is a dangerous thing.  

 

According to Shiv Visvanathan, an academic associated with Compost Heap, a network pursuing alternative imaginations, truth in religion needs to be told in a new language, with a sense of the epic and ethics (Crisis reimagined, The Telegraph, 21.05.21). Certainty and continuity are the hallmarks of any religion based on progressive reasoning with care. Religious truth is to be told with the power of metaphors and the ‘sacramentals’. Religious narratives are a kind of storytelling, - of communicating God’s events in history in metaphors and parables, with their broader meanings. As epidemics of the past had mythic power and people naturally invoked the sacred, the Covid experience too, needs to raise a response to the sacred and the divine. A sacred sense within secularism through social service – as St. Teresa of Kolkata would do - is what is required.

 

When religious language becomes too clerical, the common people during this pandemic crisis desperately seek the power of prayer and healing. Religion that is so much social, cannot afford to lose a sense of society that is suffering. Rituals should not destroy the social reality. At this moment of creation we humans are called to adapt to it, find a new language and act of ethics (not belief system) in order to evolve as new humanity within this evolving creation.