The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : “People must be more open and widen their feelings”

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Saturday, Dec 27, 2008
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“People must be more open and widen their feelings”

Special Correspondent

Annual convention of Theosophical Society inaugurated

— Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

Inner call: Radha Burnier, international president, Theosophical Society, addressing the opening ceremony of the annual convention of the Society in Chennai on Friday.

CHENNAI: Each Theosophist should be a person showing to those who come along that one can be engaged in almost any work and yet be religious, Radha Burnier, international president, Theosophical Society, said on Friday.

Qualifying that she meant those engaged in works other than those involving slaughtering or cheating, Ms.Burnier said “the one thing that matters for everyone is the condition of the heart and mind. A Theosophist, therefore, tends to be someone different from the ordinary man or woman,” she said, delivering the presidential address at the inauguration of 133rd annual convention of the Theosophical Society (TS). [The convention will go on till Tuesday].

Stating that ‘religion’ could be more harmful than helpful if people misunderstood it, she said “it often demands that a person does what he is told to by people who seem very different. But, actually, if one does not cling to anything but seeks only to know, in a deeper way, life’s meaning, it does not matter whether one is Christian, Hindu, Zoroastrian or Muslim or any other category. The truly religious mind is a pure mind.”

A truly religious person and the real Theosophist were not different. “Often, we think that the religious consciousness depends on words and phrases but that may be completely wrong; and religion is not dependent on what a person says but on how a person lives. The person may be a weaver or a tailor dealing with clothes, but essentially pure and carrying purity with him.”

The modern society could be called materialistic as most people were concerned with material values, which was quite opposed to the religious life. “The religious person, on the other hand, applies the values he knows theosophically; he is more concerned with his heart, not with his hands.”

Calling upon people to be more open and widen their feelings, Ms.Burnier said “obstacles to understanding are many and include lust, illusion and hatred, which do not help us to understand. Hence, never add fuel to the fire.”

Later in the day, B.M. Hegde, former vice-chancellor of the Manipal University, delivering a public lecture on the science of spirituality, said science and spirituality were means to understand the world.

While the former dealt with the external, the latter focussed on the internal. Problems such as terrorism arose because there was no development of the inner world.

The public lectures will be delivered by P. Krishna, visiting professor of physics, University of Indore, on Saturday; Olande Ananda of Pagoda Meditation Centre, Sri Lanka, on Sunday; Edi Bilimoria, Director of Studies, TS in England, on Monday and Linda Oliveria, international vice-president of the TS on Tuesday.

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