Vimoh's Blog

Some time ago, during a debate about God as creator, I found myself running into a wall with my atheist opponent who kept refusing to acknowledge anything “magical”. Funny thing was, I wasn’t even talking about anything magical. I was only suggesting the possibility that something intelligent may have created the universe. My friend kept insisting that the idea of something magical having created the universe was preposterous.

He was making the common mistake of equating higher intelligence with magic. He probably wouldn’t have resisted my suggestion as vehemently if I had said that an intelligent alien race created the universe. It was the word God that he wasn’t comfortable with.

But this disagreement pointed me in another direction. I realised that we tend to label a lot of concepts as ‘supernatural’ without a second thought. Things that science can’t explain are labeled supernatural. Ideas that are not reflected in scientific literature of the time are labeled supernatural. The God concept, of course, gets thrown into that pile as well.

Basically anything that isn’t part of the tangible, knowable, visible universe; is classified as supernatural. But it is not a valid classification, is it? The mistake we make in making such a classification is assuming that nature is only made up of things that we know. We mistake our view of the world to be the absolute world. We confuse the subjective with the objective.

A few centuries ago, the idea of man flying across continents in minutes may have been labeled supernatural. People recovering from utterly destroying injuries was supernatural some time ago. Now, thanks to advancements in medical science, such events are seen as perfectly natural. History has repeatedly rewritten our definitions of what is natural and what is supernatural. Our view of nature keeps expanding as time passes.

Religion, sadly, has often encouraged the facile divide between natural and supernatural. God has been put on a pedestal and his images have been lined with armies of priests specialising in incredibly complex rituals. What should have been man’s direct line with God has been turned into a veritable industry with all manner of middlemen telling you how to go about finding God. God has been taken from his rightful place – that is inside man – and imprisoned in an imposing “out there” and “up there” structure.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell describes the nature of the killing idea that the modern world has come to refer to as the supernatural:

The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned the world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing that they truly wanted because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer.

I myself used to think of God as something beyond nature. But when you actually think about it, there is nothing magical or supernatural about God or the so-called miracles. They are only aspects of reality we haven’t been exposed to yet. Once you understand them, they simply melt into the natural, becoming parts of it.

The divide between what we call natural and what we consider supernatural roots from the tendency to see certain things as being “beyond this realm”. In truth, there is no realm other than this one realm. It is only our faulty and limited understanding of reality that causes such bogus divisions. At the end of the day, there is only one universe that contains it all.

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.

The line that really got to me while watching James Cameron’s Avatar was, “They killed their mother.” The hero uses it to describe the state of his home planet – Earth.

Avatar is a story as old as storytelling. It involves man realising that he is not in the world all by himself. He is part of a bigger whole. He, along with everything around him — trees, animals, the air, the seas, the birds in the sky, the tiniest germs, and the most monstrous of natural phenomena – constitutes something bigger. He is merely a part of it.

We human beings though, trap ourselves in a cage of our own creation. We imagine ourselves to be different, to be somehow higher than and sealed off from what we have come to call “nature”. To us, a trip to the zoo is about nature. Tending to a plant is about nature. Walking about on the beach is about nature. We conveniently ignore the fact that we are as much nature as a caterpillar is.

All of the world’s greatest traditions have always spoken of all things being interconnected. Modern science, when it became capable of doing so, did the same.

Avatar speaks that same ancient truth. The miracles of Pandora are not unique to that alien planet. The many beautiful sights of Pandora are right here on Earth, among us. Just because we know what makes our world go around, doesn’t make it any less magical.