The Vedas are suffering the same fate as the Brahma Sutras: people celebrate them, continually refer to them, fall down in prostration before them - but no one reads them.
Guilty as charged! This is a quote from the book(Vedanta - Heart of Hinduism) that I am currently reading.
Personally, Hinduism is more a way of living than a religion. The very reason why I sought to Philosophy was, the way most of the times the articles/books/scripts asked questions rather than providing answers. I personally sought to a habit of coming up with an answer for a common question and revisiting it every time I read something parallel to the question.
Initially, I sought to translations of various slokas and religiously took to chanting a few. Few days into the exercise, I saw myself in a path that was full of questions and no clear answers. Maybe I am too naive for such slokas. One big takeaway from that approach was, I should learn Sanskrit/Samaskritam.Another obvious learning was, almost all seers had a poetic way of presenting their thoughts.
As much as I appreciate their poetic sense, I wish I understood the inner meaning of those verses. I cannot buy the idea of chanting slokas can give benefits.
At times, I tend to think that a concept of God was created to instill fear into Human mind. The concept was merely a way to preach a way of living. Quoting from my husband:
Kadavul peru sonna than bayam varum. Bayam vantha than kariyam nadakum.
Eventually, we end up running behind God and the rituals, and we forgot the very essence of our religion. We never bothered to look through the self-realization path.
Though Friedrich’s statements are aggressive, they really induce a good thought process. Our Upanishads were also on similar lines - open ended and let the reader arrive at an answer.
Unfortunately, this led to the need of translations and interpretations which gradually diverged from the real essence.
The journey has begun with a bunch of questions and inferences which led to questions:
Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed.Does this mean, Atma(Soul) is analogous to energy?!
I know that I know nothing.I would prefer a Socratic debate than to agree and follow.
Is Hinduism atheistic?Hinduism provides a diverse range of philosophies and one of them (Samkhya) is(close to) an atheistic philosophy. Samkhya shows a way to attain self-realization without focusing on God.
It is an Open Source Faith. You can choose the flavor of Hinduism that suits your taste.Refering to my favourite Quora discussion, the religion by itself has a lot of flavours and is generally open ended.
The journey has just begun. Hope to have some quality debates.
In my process of learning/interpreting these ideologies, I might revisit my claims in this post, but that to me is a perfectly sensible spiritual/philosophical path to take than to blindly believe in reciting certain slokas and wait for the awakening.