Basic beliefs of Sanatana Dharma

1. I believe in a one, all-pervasive Supreme Being who is both immanent and transcendent, both Creator and Unmanifest reality.

 2. I believe that the universe undergoes endless cycles of creation, preservation and dissolution.

 3. I believe that all souls are evolving towards union with God and will ultimately find moksha: spiritual knowledge and liberation from cycle of rebirth. Not a single soul will be eternally deprived of this destiny.

 4. I believe in karma, the law of cause and effect by which each individual creates his own destiny by thoughts, words and deeds.

 5. I believe that the soul reincarnates, evolving through many births until all karmas have been resolved.

 6. I believe that divine beings exist in unseen worlds and that temple worship, rituals, sacraments as well as personal devotionals create a communion with these devas and God.

 7. I believe that spiritually awakened master or satguru is essential to know the transcendent Absolute, as are personal discipline, good conduct, purification, self-inquiry and meditation.

 8. I believe that all life is sacred, to be loved and revered, and therefore practice ahimsa or nonviolence.

 9. I believe that no particular religion teaches the only way to salvation above all others, but that all genuine religious paths are facets of God's pure love and light, deserving tolerance and understanding.

 

Not only have mystics been found in all ages, in all parts of the world and in all religious systems, but also mysticism has manifested itself in similar or identical forms wherever the mystical consciousness has been present. Because of this it has sometimes been called the Perennial Philosophy. Out of their experience and their reflection on it have come the following assertions:

1. This phenomenal world of matter and individual consciousness is only a partial reality and is the manifestation of a Divine Ground in which all partial realities have their being.

2. It is of the nature of man that not only can he have knowledge of this Divine Ground by inference, but also he can realize it by direct intuition, superior to discursive reason, in which the knower is in some way united with the known.

3. The nature of man is not a single but a dual one. He has not one but two selves, the phenomenal ego, of which he is chiefly conscious and which he tends to regard as his true self, and a non-phenomenal, eternal self, an inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within him, which is his true self. It is possible for a man, if he so desires and is prepared to make the necessary effort, to identify himself with his true self and so with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature.

4. It is the chief end of man's earthly existence to discover and identify himself with his true self. By doing so, he will come to an intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground and so apprehend Truth as it really is, and not as to our limited human perceptions it appears to be. Not only that, he will enter into a state of being which has been given different names, eternal life, salvation, enlightenment, etc.

Further, the Perennial Philosophy rests on two fundamental convictions:

1. Though it may be to a great extent atrophied and exist only potentially in most men, men possess an organ or faculty which is capable of discerning spiritual truth, and, in its own spheres, this faculty is as much to be relied on as are other organs of sensation in theirs.

2. In order to be able to discern spiritual truth men must in their essential nature be spiritual; in order to know That which they call God, they must be, in some way, partakers of the divine nature; potentially at least there must be some kinship between God and the human soul. Man is not a creature set over against God. He participates in the divine life; he is, in a real sense, 'united' with God in his essential nature, for, as the Flemish contemplative, the Blessed John Ruysbroeck, put it:

"This union is within us of our naked nature and were this nature to be separated from God it would fall into nothingness."

This is the faith of the mystic. It springs out of his particular experience and his reflection on that experience. It implies a particular view of the nature of the universe and of man, and it seems to conflict with other conceptions of the nature of the universe and of man which are also the result of experience and reflection in it.

There is a poem by the late Latin poet and philosopher, Boethius, which, translated, opens as follows:

This discord in the pact of things,

This endless war 'twixt truth and truth,

That singly held, yet give the lie

To him who seeks to hold them both...

In the world, constituted as it is, men are faced not with one single truth but with several 'truths,' not with one but with several pictures of reality. They are thus conscious of a 'discord in the pact of things,' whereby to hold to one 'truth' seems to be to deny another. One part of their experience draws to one, another to another. It has been the eternal quest of mankind to find the one ultimate Truth, that final synthesis in which all partial truths are resolved. It may be that the mystic has glimpsed this synthesis.