Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals :Ch-4. Part - 12.
Chapter-4. Swami Sri Adi Sankaracharya - The Genius ( Sankara Jayanti ) : Part-12. He was a reformer in the sense that he put a check to the further growth of this externalising tendency of ritualised devotion to an imagined set of multiple of gods. But for him, it would have landed people in a catastrophe. We do not know what would have happened. This tendency was checked by the psychological philosophy of Buddha, and the divinities were completely ignored. Now, the divinity, if at all there is one, is the thinking principle in the human being himself. The world is made by the mind; it is purely psychological. It is a projection of ideas. You say, the gods are protecting you; I say, they do not exist at all and it is your mind that works. So, from the spiritual realisation and mystical experience of the sages of the Veda Samhitas, we came down to a worship and inner adoration of the multiplicity of gods. Then we came still further down to the time when