Vimoh's Blog

Once upon a time, on a world not very different from this one, there lived a race of people with very short memory spans. They remembered nothing of yesterday, and only very little of what had happened a few hours ago. Their view of the world therefore, was mostly limited to what was happening now.

One popular debate that raged among the people was about the existence of the sun and the stars. During the day, one group sang praises of the sun and laughed at those who spoke of the night sky and the stars. They said that all that needs to be seen can be seen quite clearly in the light of the sun. Anyone who, in spite of the sun’s very real presence, insisted on believing in fairy tales about a so-called star-studded night sky, was clearly delusional.

After sunset, the other group praised the stars while singing and dancing under the beautiful night sky. They ridiculed the sun people and asked them where their sun was, now that the glorious stars had appeared to prove them wrong. Revelling under the starry sky, they denied the importance, and even the existence, of the sun. They declared that the stars were all anyone should ever need and that no sun could ever stand against the sheer awesomeness of the night sky.

There was a third group on this world, a relatively small minority of people. This was composed of those who knew of dawns and twilights. They knew that while it was true that the sun lit everything up when it was out, it also blinded people to the beauty of the stars. They also knew that even though the night sky was beautiful to behold and brought them much joy, it wasn’t really much of a light source, especially when compared to the sun.

They did their best to point this out to the day people and the night people, but nobody much listened to them. And thus, the quarrels went on as surely and as frequently as the sun rose and set.

One point about the world that is often brought into the debate about whether God exists or not is suffering. What sort of God would watch as his creation rips itself apart with violence? What kind of God would let his followers die of pain?

The people who ask this question are often the ones that take the metaphorical version of religion – mythology – to be all there is. They imagine God to be some kind of “guy” (a big huge, all-pervading guy, but a guy nevertheless) sitting somewhere up in heaven passing judgment on all that exists in this world. They ask what he could be thinking when he unleashes terrible trauma upon them. Some imagine him taking joy in it all. As someone recently said to me on Twitter, “God, if he exists, is a sadist bastard.”

The error in this is obvious. Human beings have a bloated idea of their own importance. And our imagination assigns human characteristics to everything. So a storm becomes cruel, an earthquake becomes murderous, a wild animal is seen as a devious monster. This is mythology — a subjective way of looking at the universe. So God, according to this view, becomes something with human proportions, human attitudes, human tendencies, and even a human appearance.

More importantly though, I think what makes people complain about suffering is the belief that they are somehow the centre of the universe. It is the same belief that people had back when they thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around them. It is the same belief that caused Socrates to drink poison and the findings of Galileo to be challenged. They chose to look at the big picture. But people simply refuse to come to terms with the fact that they are only a small piece of a puzzle that is far greater than them.

Look around and you will find that everything suffers. The breakfast you had this morning caused some life form – either vegetable or animal – to die. Millions of germs die every time you sneeze. You hurt grass every time you walk on it. Animals either kill and eat each other, or they die of starvation. It is suffering both ways. Life progresses by feeding on itself — science calls it the food chain. That is the way the world works. You are not only suffering, you are also causing an equal amount of “suffering” to the world around you.

In fact, if you pay it even a little thought, you may conclude that this is the only way the world can work. If we use a machine metaphor for the world, we find that suffering is merely our subjective view of friction. No machine can work without friction. Things need to rub against each other, corrode each other, in order for any machine to work. Without friction, there would be no machine.

People who ask, “Why can’t all the suffering just go away? Why can’t we all just live in peace?” are wishful thinkers. They don’t realise that in order for the world to even exist, someone or the other must suffer. What we call suffering is subjective. We only get sentimental about it because it happens to us, or to creatures we include in our idea of “us”.

Oddly enough, on the human level suffering serves to enhance the imagination. It makes man aware of his smallness and helplessness. It teaches him that he doesn’t matter as much as he thought he did. It makes him humble. It seems to say, “You are no different from that baby deer in the forest who was mauled to death by ravenous lions yesterday on National Geographic. It happens to everyone and everything. Get used to it!”

A child that hates school but is made to go anyway suffers. A guy who has to put up with a sour boss in office suffers. Someone on a deathbed waiting to die of a painful cancer suffers. It is all the same thing. Some suffer more, some less. The difference is of degree, not of kind.

Interestingly, man is the only animal that can work through suffering. While a crippling disease will truly “cripple” an animal, history is full of examples of human beings who made the world a better place in spite of their own personal suffering.

The scientist Stephen Hawking is paralysed from head to toe. The great Helen Keller was deaf, mute AND blind (my imagination fails when I try to put myself in her shoes). Beethoven was deaf (and he was a musician). These people not only did things, they actually did them better than others.

Reason? They didn’t allow their suffering to drag them into selfishness. They didn’t fall into the trap of thinking that someone up there is exclusively targeting them with misfortunes. They looked beyond themselves, into the world around them and decided to contribute to the betterment of the people around them.

Their suffering taught them a lesson, and they were intelligent enough to learn it.

When looking for answers, we tend to settle for definitive ones. It has always got to be either this or that, either here or there, either right or wrong. But the absolute truth is a perfect soup, isn’t it?

The problem with absolute truths is that the moment an exception shows up, they cease to be absolute. And exceptions always show up. And because that is an absolute truth, there must be an exception to that too. And an exception to the statement that exceptions always show up can only be that somewhere out there, there is an absolute truth that has no exceptions. And then again, there would be an exception to that too.

See what I mean?

That God exists is an absolute truth. That there is no God is an absolute truth too. The answer, in my opinion, is somewhere in the middle. God is complicated, like the world is.

Many religions say that what fuels us is something indestructible and, for all practical purposes, invisible – the soul. Hinduism believes that all living creatures — from the tiniest of germs to largest of the redwood trees — have a spirit energy fuelling them. This invisible field of energy does not end when the body is destroyed. It merely leaves the body, to return later on in another one.

Without going into the dynamics of reincarnation, karma, and the whole train of concepts that lie in that general direction (perhaps I will go there some other time), I would like to propose an argument in defense of the spirit/soul idea.

The scientific view of an organism is that it is a machine. A very complicated and highly developed machine, but a machine nevertheless. Science believes that all that is to be understood about an animal is in plain sight. All that we need are powerful enough instruments. Oddly enough, it is this very machine view that trumps science’s dismissal of the soul.

To me, proof of the soul’s existence lies in the difference between a living creature and a dead body. If organisms were simply a superior variety of machines, they would end in as straightforward a manner as machines do. But they don’t — there is a crucial difference.

Think about it. What differentiates a living being from a corpse? What really happens when we die? Machines stop working when a crucial function ends or when they run out of fuel. In case of humans, crucial functions end all the time. Accidents destroy vital organs, disease eats up parts of the body, various illnesses happen. But these are not the causes of death. If they were, we could (in theory at least) find cures to them and prevent death. What about the inevitable kind of death? What is it that causes a man to die of old age? What leaves him that does not come back?

We are told the body’s chemical composition changes, turning it from a life-supporting structure to something that is no longer suitable for the purpose. But truth be told, it is all guesswork. We don’t really know how chemical composition changes, or even if it does change. If we did, we would be able to change it back. If nutrition is what the body lacks, we would be able to give it nutrients and bring it back to life. If specific conditions are what caused someone to die, then we would be able to change those conditions and bring them back to life.

But we can’t do any of those things. What differentiates an organism from a machine is that beyond a point, it cannot be repaired.

None of the above “scientific” reasons are that crucial deciding factor between life and death. Science simply does not know what causes people to die. Conditions, failures, old age, accidents and diseases are mere circumstances. They do not cause death. Death happens when life leaves, whatever the reason. We can go ahead and make a list of things people die of and then proceed to find a cure for every single of those conditions, but people will still die. Science can’t “cure” death for the simple reason that science does not know what causes it.

What stands to logic however, is that something vital does leave the body at the time of death. Call it the immortal spirit, the pristine soul, life force, the aatma. Heck! Call it life if the other names sound fancy and magical – it doesn’t matter.

To be fair, it is entirely possible that one day there will be a scientific way to “see” this vital differentiator between life and death. But in order for that to happen, science has to start looking for it. Blunt denial of the soul’s existence will not get the job done.

If you remember the last scene of The Da Vinci Code movie, you will remember that the hero Dr Robert Langdon finds himself running with barely-concealed hurry towards the place where Mary of Magdalene, he deduces, must be buried. He is a non-believer, but he is also a historian. He is someone who pursues secrets of the past with great passion.

Langdon finds the spot finally, looks around to confirm his calculations, lines up the stars in the sky, and is finally satisfied that he is standing right over what countless others have died looking for — something that has moved the minds of men since the days of Jesus Christ. He is standing over real, tangible history.

He however, doesn’t know how to react to the moment. What he does know is that he can’t not react. The presence of history is too great for him to ignore. His passion for history and the invisible past is as great (if not more) as someone else’s might be for God and religion.

Perhaps because Langdon feels nothing else would aptly express what he feels, he kneels.

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik said at TED India this year, “Culture is a reaction to nature. And this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation to generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals.”

Kneeling or bowing down to a higher power is a ritual meant to express the feeling of humbleness. It happens more often than many of us would admit to, but we are humbled numberless times in our lives. What one man feels in front of a deity, another may feel standing in front of grand canyon, while yet another might feel the same when his life has taken a bad turn and nothing seems to be going right.

Rituals are man’s different symbolic reactions to the different aspects of the world around him. They are man-made constructs designed to express that which cannot (should not?) remain unexpressed.

The idea is not something exclusive to religion either. If you were moved by the movie 3 Idiots, you may find yourself saying, “Aal Iz well” in remembrance of the feeling that the movie evoked in you. That’s a ritual too. Same goes for gestures like “Live long and prosper” and “May the Force be with you”.

Rituals are a part of life and therefore, inevitable, just like superstition or facial hair. It does not do to declare them evil or old-fashioned. Try and see if you can understand where they came from.

In my last blog post on why religious myth relies on fantasy, I implied that superstition works better than a starkly objective view of the world. I can believe that superstition exists because it works; that it has fought for survival against a physical-only interpretation of reality and has stood its ground. It has passed the Darwinian evolution test.

But because that may not satisfy many, let me try and answer the question: Why are we superstitious?

It is easy to trace individual superstitious practices to their roots and say how they started. But that won’t really answer the question. The real question is why. Why do human beings have this need to believe in strange things? Why have people imagined incredible fantasies since the beginning of time? Why has the tangible side of existence consistently failed to satisfy mankind?

Stark atheists would say superstitions are signs of a weak mind that can’t handle reality and therefore must come up with fantastic explanations for things. I find that strange, seeing as how everyone is superstitious at one level or another.

When you yell, “Come on! Don’t do this to me!”  at a hung computer, you are being superstitious. It’s a machine, it can’t hear you, and you know it. If you feel the loss of your favourite pen, that’s superstition too. At a physical level, pens are just pens. The importance you assign to one pen over others is imaginary. The same goes for people being sentimental about their cars and motorcycles, people saying, “The damn door broke my nose,” and people cursing the weather. Nobody is utterly free from irrational behaviour (even though some might want to pretend that they are Vulcan). Human beings have this instinctive tendency of thinking up imaginary truths.

A recent scientific study by Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, points in the same direction:

The findings of Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, suggest that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force. His work is supported by other researchers who have found evidence linking religious feelings and experience to particular regions of the brain. They suggest people are programmed to receive a feeling of spirituality from electrical activity in these areas.

I believe that the act of storytelling roots from this tendency. As far as we know, man is the only animal that tells stories. We read books, watch plays, we pay to go sit inside movie theatres and allow ourselves to be moved to emotion with a narrative we know to be false, even if it is for a short while. This behaviour falls under the same category as the little personal superstitions I referred to in the previous paragraph.

There is something inside us that craves the imaginary. It is something inherent to human nature, something that makes us human, something that is essential to the human condition. There are those who believe that with the advent of modern science and the spread of education, the world will soon be rid of all superstition. I don’t think that will happen. Superstition is not rooted in ignorance. It stems from the same part of us that creates stories and myth.

What we call superstition is thriving in the modern world. Storytellers are some of the most prosperous and well-known people on the planet (writers, filmmakers, actors). Every year, more and more people spend their money to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds and situations. In fact, this is practically the age of imagination.

At TED India this year, mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik spoke of the difference between the absolute universe and the subjective universe — between the world as it exists and the world as we perceive it.

Pattanaik said, “The world tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. My world tells us why the sun rises… why were we born?”

This how-why divide, in my opinion, says a lot about what keeps the scientific and the religious worlds apart. The scientific mindset often undermines the why (choosing to focus on the mechanics of how things work) and the religious mindset often ignores the how (choosing to focus on why things came into being).

I, being one of the unfortunates who choose to take the middle path, believe that both views of the world are equally important. Man isn’t going to get where he is going on a bicycle with one wheel missing.

However, I will be quick to admit that the divide is a very distinct one and it is not going to get blurry any time soon (perhaps it shouldn’t). While objective observation of our surroundings don’t allow the world to be anything more than a series of phenomena, mythology goes right ahead and turns the world into something full of magic (flying people, talking animals, moving trees and all that). No wonder scientific people often balk at the sight of religion (and vice versa).

I want to try and explain the why behind this strange behaviour by mythology in a way that would make sense to the scientific mind.

Let us take the environment for example (since everyone is fresh out of the movie theatre after having watched Avatar). It is something that both religious mythology and science look upon with great amounts of interest. Both recognise the environment as important and in need of attention. Both say man’s future is inextricably linked to the way he responds to the various issues facing the environment today.

The scientific view of the environmental crisis facing us is that if deforestation continues, man himself will be in danger one day. Science tells us that destruction of forests will cause harm to animal species, which in turn will affect the food chain, which will eventually get to us one day. By then, it will be too late to do anything about it. So if we want to survive that eventuality, we better start caring for nature.

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like, “Listen! You are pissing your rich mom off. If you keep doing this, some day she will die and leave nothing to you. Then you will be out on the road with no money. If you don’t want that to happen, start showing her some love.”

Does the argument make sense? Of course it does. Does it make us feel ashamed of ourselves? If it doesn’t, it should.

Religious mythology makes things a lot more straightforward. It personifies nature, turning it into a woman. It tells man that nature is his mother. It tells him beautiful and moving stories about how she has cared for him in so many ways since the beginning of time. It makes man emotional. It means to make man act out of genuine concern for nature, as opposed to acting out of fear for his own life.

It is perhaps for this reason that forest tribes fight against deforestation with more passion and urgency than we (the urban educated and so-called scientific-minded) do. To us, nature is a system – something mechanical and clockwork-like. To those who listen to (and probably believe in) outlandish stories about talking trees, noble animals, and a benevolent spirits, nature is everything a mother is.

Joseph Campbell once said that mythology turns an it into a you. All around us in the modern world are forces that desensitise us to the world. A bomb explodes somewhere and hundreds of people die. We switch the channel with a straight face. The tally is simply a number to us. Then someone makes a movie on the event, making it into a story, bringing us closer to the people who died. We are moved. We start caring.

In the end, it probably doesn’t matter why you care for something as long as you do care. But then again, maybe it does matter.