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Why Are There So Many Hindu Rituals?
Hindus worship everything, Gods and Goddesses, people, plants, animals, and different places in
Nature. They may even perform ritual worship to inanimate objects
like books, automobiles or computers. While this may appear as a
superstition to those of us who are enlightened materialists, there
is an important and universal meaning behind it.
To worship something in the
Hindu sense is to recognize the Divine presence within it and to
seek its grace. We need the grace, favor, communication and
understanding of all that we are connected with in life, and nothing
is really without consciousness or apart from the Divine.
Hindu ritual-worship (puja) is both an art
and science for accomplishing this. We need to honor the Divine in
everything, particularly in the most simple and intimate things of
our lives.
If we only honor God in the
distance, we are ignorant of his all-pervasive being, and our own
ordinary actions will be ungodly. To have a strong and yet diverse
culture of ritual aids to both the development of the human spirit
and its proper interaction with the universe. While it may be
difficult to understand for us today, it should not be devalued.
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