Seek God in all animate and inanimate. If you are only seeking God in a worship place, then you are nowhere near to your goal.
Visiting a temple should be only to recharge our spiritual battery and to do our religious duties. Temple should be the center of our religious life. It is for learning devotion and worship. It is for Satsang – for people to share spiritual knowledge. But often we go to temple with complaints and for desire fulfillment. Thus temples have become centers of complaint and desire registration.
Even when we are before the God in the temple, we are very conscious about our dress, our looks and bothered more about what other people are thinking about us. We are unable to concentrate, as our worldly life is following us inside the temple. This is the reason why Hindu temples have sculptures of worldly life on the outer walls. It is a border. Worldly life ends here. Once you are inside the temple, the unreal world has no meaning. If you are carrying the world inside the temple then you need to go back and drop it and come back again. Practice until you are able to perfect it.
There is no place for illusion or ignorance inside the temple. Here you are in direct communion with That Supreme Truth. You realize that you do not have an individual existence. You realize that the murti in the sanctum sanctorum is also within our body.
Many Hindu Temples have a mirror inside the temple. When you are going to pray, you pass by the mirror. It symbolically suggests that you are the temple and God is within you.
The sanctum sanctorum of the temple is our body and God is seated within all of us. Hindu temple symbolically represents this universal truth. This has a wide meaning. It means that each one of us is capable of creating miracle through hard work, dedication, and determination. It means that we all are the same and all differences that we see are superficial. The life force in each one of us is the same. So it is a level playing field. We need not carry our desires and complaints to the temple. Instead, realize the Supreme Truth in us and work hard to fulfill our desires; and develop true knowledge to overcome complaints and unwanted desires.
Good, bad, evil, desires, attachment, ego etc are layers of dirt that are blocking us from realizing the divine. All we need to do is to wash away this dirt with the help of true knowledge. In order to attain the true knowledge, we need an external inspiration. Hindu Temple provides this opportunity.
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Abhilash
www.hindu-blog.com
Abhilash