SEARCH FOR TRUTH
Religion remains the only place where the answers to questions about Truth can be discovered.
Almost everyone who has come into this world asks himself: “Who am I?” This question is present in the mind of almost every person, whether consciously or otherwise. Across the globe, for centuries, great minds have been searching for an answer to this fundamental existential question.
The history of human thought is, directly or indirectly, another name for the search for the answer to this question. In some way or the other, every person seeks to know the answer to this question and other fundamental questions, such as: What is man? How did man come into being? What is the purpose of human life? What is truth, and what is falsehood? Where does a man go after death?
Existential questions like these are called ‘the search for truth’. Moreover, the search for truth has been the biggest concern for man for centuries. Among those who sought answers to these questions was a class of people known as the philosophers. However, despite thousands of years of effort, the philosophers could not arrive at any satisfactory answer to these questions. As a result, philosophy became a discipline of only intellectual debates, dissensions, and conflicts.
Likewise, in the field of spirituality, people tried to reflect on these fundamental questions of life. However, they, too, met the same fate as that of philosophers. The primary reason for this was that the spiritualists sought truth through meditation in ‘the world of the heart’. However, they could obtain no success in this regard. The simple reason behind this is that the heart is just an organ for pumping blood. Therefore, the realisation or consciousness of truth was absent in the heart. If this is the case, how could those searching for it find it there?
The same thing happened with science and its votaries. Knowledge of science acquired great importance with the advent of ‘modernity’. In the beginning, people believed that science would finally succeed in answering the questions raised in the search for truth. However, science quickly narrowed down the scope of its investigation. In their research, scientists found that obtaining answers to existential questions of life was as impossible for them as it had proved to be for philosophers. Thus, they set aside these questions and confined themselves only to researching physical or material things. In this way, it became clear that finding the answers to existential questions through science was impossible.
In this regard, the final domain was that of religion. The task of religion is to help man become aware of the truth and to clarify man’s position in the universe. Religions came precisely to give man the proper guidance on these matters. However, if we look at the present state of religions, we will realise that they fell prey to distortion later. Hence, there is an urgent need to re-study religions. Beliefs must be rediscovered in their original form.
Philosophy, Science, and Heart-Based Spirituality have failed to find the correct answers to existential questions in the search for Truth. After this, religion remains the only place where the answers to questions about truth can be discovered. In this matter, those who do not believe in religion and those who do are both standing on the same platform. For both, it is necessary to rediscover truth through religion. The only difference is that this would be a discovery for deniers of religion, while it would be a rediscovery for believers.
‘Religion’, here, is not used in its conventional meaning, which is a significantly reduced version. The present versions of religion developed in later generations when ‘religious’ people became victims of degeneration. These days, when a person is ‘born into’ a particular religious community, he knows only this reduced form of religion. He becomes familiar with this reduced form of religion to a prejudicial extent. To know the original version of religion, people must come out of the veils of their prejudices. Going beyond the degenerated forms of religion, we need to discover the true form and face of religion. It can be called the ‘Rediscovery of Religion’. Without this ‘rediscovery’, understanding religion’s true importance and meaning will be impossible.
