While this prima facie point of view of religion may be regarded as the immediately available answer of the traditional religion to the matter-of-fact, or rather secular, objection raised against the entire religious attitude, as cited above, it is necessary to conduct a deeper investigation into the validity of these off-hand replies which the organised religious approach to life may trot out as its main defense. The defect of the traditional religion, which is perhaps the only religion we find active in the world today, is that it is susceptible to making an unwarranted distinction between the temporal and the eternal values of life. What is usually known as the attitude of renunciation, austerity, sense-control, a hermit life or a sequestration in monastic atmosphere is, on the very face of it, pregnant with a possibility of laying an undue emphasis on the evanescence and sorrow of life on earth and the entertaining of a nebulous hope for a future joy in eternal life, implying thereby that the eternal is ‘external to’ or ‘outside’ the temporal and bears no vital relation to temporal life. If a large section of mankind is today inclined to look upon with obloquy the church-goer, the religious man, the renunciate or the monk, the cause thereof has to be attributed to the natural reaction which the neglected temporal values set up against the camouflage of eternal values which masquerade in the form of hibernating religious sentiments which have proudly erected the decorated edifices of the so-called religions of the world. It is strange that the traditional religions forget to learn the lesson that the eternal would cease to be eternal the moment it is ‘isolated’ or cut off from any other existent value, notwithstanding the fact that this value might be tentative or temporal. The spiritual culture of India, at least, unmistakably stresses the important truth that Reality is also immanent in the Universe, and not merely transcendent. The unnecessary and erroneous obsession for the transcendent alone, which consequently denies any reality or value to the universe of temporal events, is the untenable side-tracked attitude of the popular religion of the masses, which has unfortunately been dubbed as the only meaning of religion even by the elite or the intelligentsia of modern human society. The true religious spirit, no doubt, regards moksha or salvation from relativistic bondage as the ultimate aim of life, but it is at the same time cautious to take note of and, give due credit to artha or the material and economic value as well as to kama or the vital and aesthetic value involved in temporal life, not as a morbid concession to or a disease characteristic of all life but a transitional necessity relevant to the growth of the individual to the Universal Reality, by the gradual inclusive transcendence of the lower in the higher. The connecting link between moksha on the one hand and artha and kama on the other, or, rather, the force that blends these three aspects, into an organic completeness, is known as dharma, or the law of life.

It will, thus, be seen that there cannot be a gulf between the cloister and the hearth, the monk in the monastery and the public in the street, the sannyasin and the grihastha, if the organic relationship that exists between the temporal and the eternal is always borne in mind. It is wrong to think that religion is otherworldly, ignoring entirely the significances and the suggestive implications of temporal life. The other-worldliness ostensible in many of the popular religions is really unfortunate, and it is this wrong notion and incorrect attitude that must be regarded as responsible for the several reactionary movements in human society so menacingly rampant in the present day. A line has to be drawn between the necessary and unnecessary values of life at any given stage of the evolution of the individual to the Higher Life, and no value can be regarded as a false value meant to be rejected or abandoned as long as it is felt to be an indispensable necessity at that particular level of the evolution of the individual. That a particular value is likely to be subject to transcendence in a higher stage of evolution does not justify the abrogation of the former at that stage with which it is inextricably connected. The philosophy of the Vedanta rightly recognises the value of vyavaharika-satta or empirical reality at the stage where it is experienced as an inviolable reality, though it might be that it is going to be subsumed, absorbed or transcended in the paramarthik-satta or absolute reality. The philosophy of a particular religious technique known as tantra-sadhana is tirelessly insistent on the necessity of conceding and including, rather than denying and excluding, the visible values of life in an alchemic transmutation of the total organism of life’s extensive structure for the purpose of the realisation of the Absolute.

From the above observations it can be concluded that any association of sadism, masochism or mortification of the flesh with religion is wholly unjustified and is based on a woeful ignorance of the purpose and meaning of religion. Religion, as the supreme science and art of the integration of social values, individual values, natural values and spiritual values, all at once, is the gravitating movement of the whole universe to the Absolute which is its real Self—at once the Self of all beings, in a magnificent comprehensiveness with which the human mind at present is not acquainted and which it, therefore, cannot, at present, either understand or appreciate. Religion does not set aside the value of actions or works in the life of the world; else, what can be the point in proclaiming so loudly the gospel of divine action, known as Karma-Yoga, which is the central theme of those eternal teachings embodied in the Bhagavadgita? If there has been occasionally an over-emphasis on the monastic phase of religion, with a wrong interpretation of its suggestiveness that it implies a contempt for work or action of every kind, this, again, has to be regarded as an unfortunate outcome of a misunderstanding of religion. No great saint or sage has committed or would ever commit such a blunder as what this miscalculated view of religion would implicate.

Simultaneously we should urgently point out that the secularist disregard of religion in its entirety is an unfounded and unjustifiable kink in human attitude, for the religious demand for self-transcendence in the progressive evolution of the individual to the Absolute, though it includes by sublimation and absorption the lower relative values, thus, at the same time, has its justification in the rather incomprehensible nature of the Ultimate Reality which overcomes relationships as well as contradictions characteristic of all types of empirical consciousness, a truth, again, which anyone wholly caught up in the web of empirical relativity will not be able to understand. The requirement of religion to renounce the pleasures of life is somewhat akin to the advice of the science of hygiene and medicine that an aspiration for health implies also an effort to eradicate the disease present in the system of the body, for, after all, what are the pleasures of life if not a mitigation of the irritation of the senses and the itching of the ego by means of pampering which cannot in any way be regarded as a cure to their sickly restlessness caused by factors far removed from those which are usually considered as instrumental in satisfying the cravings of the senses and the clamourings of the ego? Spiritual practice, which is a synthesis of service to others, devotion to God, and meditation on the Absolute, is an all-round panacea for every form taken by the ills of life, and a healthy educational procedure of not only guarding oneself from unwarily being involved in the defects and torturous errors inseparable from all relative life but also infusing into life the toning power which rises into potent action by a comprehending and living of the true and ultimate significance of all existence.