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Spirituality   
Reality of Revelations

God has many beautiful names – Brahman, Ahur Mazda, Yahweh, God and Allah. But why should He reveal different names to different prophets and saints? It is an important clue to the reality of Revelations.

We acquire our knowledge by four different means; instinct, senses, reasoning and intuition. Instinct is the preprogrammed knowledge essential for the survival of the organism. Imagine teaching a baby to suckle! We are familiar with sense experience and reasoning, which we share with other higher animals. Intuition is our own, special to Homo sapiens – that is us.

Western philosophy ignores the instinct and grudgingly acknowledges the intuition, maybe because it is not verifiable. We are told to accept it as something beyond science and reasoning. Revelation is, then, intuitive knowledge. This is our second clue.

The revealed Scriptures are local and temporal in their geography and history. They contain the biology and the astronomy of their time. The future of mankind is the imminent Doomsday. Full stop.

All these clues point in one direction. Revelations are intuitive and subjective. They reflect the seekers’ own knowledge and convictions. Moreover, the modes of revelations, too, varied from prophet to prophet. God Himself addressed Moses while Muhammad was assigned an angel who was invisible to others. Some saints experienced it in their dreams. Then we have a history of divinity bestowed on idols, rivers and trees by men. A book of exemplary wisdom was, therefore, easily more divine than idols.

In a nutshell the believers supply the divinity of revelations. And the crusades or holy wars were fought over the folly that our revelation is better than your revelation. It is relevant here to mention those three Indian saints in recent history Kabir and Nanak and late Sai baba of Sirdi who did not found any religion based on divine revelation. Rather they tried to uplift the believers to humanism by freeing them from their dogmas and superstitions. Hats off to them!

– A. Rishi
May 19, 2002

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