Upanishads et al

I would like to share my course outline in further posts so that readers can find my writings/learnings relevant to what I have read. By far, the most interesting part of the first term in terms of course work is a subject titled 'Intelligently Interacting with others' and the worst part of it is the exam and the credit system of grading, which I think defeated its very purpose.

This course has shaken my very belief about the way that we all are brought up, to 'worship' a god, to go to a temple and to live by certain moral 'rules' that have been laid to us. The first part of the course meant reading Upanishads( their gist), karma yoga, Jnana yoga( pronounced gnanana yoga by some), Practical Vedanta, discourses of Swami Vivekananda and the kind. There is one underlying theme that comes out from all of them : The Self is Bhrahman. This opposed vishishtadhvaitha, where we worship Gods like Rama and Krishna. Our professor for this course went on to remark that it is stupid to go to temples and worship these Gods - it only makes you weak. He further went on to say that the inner strength lies inside each individual and the entire pursuit of life lies in discovering this self and realising oneness with the Bhrahman.

I felt he was treading on a thin line between atheism and theism. Like I said before, this completely jolted me as we are all taught of the greatness of Rama and Krishna and we go to temples to pray to them, to sing their praises and to seek their love and blessings.  He challenged the very basis of which our beliefs, customs, cultures are built. May be he is right, May be he is wrong. But he for sure did one thing : He made me think of this everytime I wanted to pray. He made me think of the so called higher purpose of life and the necessity for change of an individual. He made me realise that by our perceived bad actions, (just the perception leads to bad karma! ), we disturb the cosmic balance or Rtha and hence the actions of karma happen to set it right.

Karmya yoga talks about doing only the prescribed duty and expecting nothing in return.  In a course which claims to create 'Business ready managers', I do not understand how this can be integrated in to our thought processess.  We are taught that the very purpose of existence of businessess is to make profits and everything in an organization works towards that goal. So how would 'nothing in return' fit in to this stream of thought ?

This course has left me with More questions than answers, but very sadly, no time to think all this through. I am still having a feeling of having been got caught in a tornado.