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.

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.

The storyteller put down his pen and rubbed his aching fingers. He decided that writing a story was hard work. Every once in a while, he entered other stories. Just to soak in the environment and revel in the company of the characters.

So he travelled into the story of the five blind men who were investigating the curious case of the elephant. When he got there, they hadn’t had much luck. He watched them stand near the elephant and run their hands all over it. Mrs. elephant didn’t seem to be enjoying it, but she bore the groping bravely, perhaps for the sake of the spirit of investigation.

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Find an orange. Look at it closely.

What colour is it? Do you like the colour? Does someone you know like the colour? Would it look the same if you were to look at it under a different shade of light?

Now feel it up. Is it hard or soft? Is it rough or is it smooth. Does it feel dry? Or does moisture meet your skin?

Would it feel the same if you touched it out in the hot sun? If you kept it in the freezer for an hour, would it change?

Would the orange appear as soft to a baby? Would it appear heavier or lighter?

Now think of something in your life — a condition. Something good that brings happiness to you.

Did your friend get a promotion? Are you happy for him? Do you foresee a better future for him?

But does your friend’s prime rival at work see it the same way? Do you find your happiness reflected in him?

Here’s the point I am trying to make. Nothing is what it seems. Reality isn’t objective. Everything around you looks the way it does because it is you who is looking at it.

The world isn’t out there. It is inside you.

Many people believe that Hindus worship many gods and therefore, are fundamentally opposed to the idea of there being One God. Umm… True. And false. I will try to explain.

Let us gather together a bunch of people. One loves money more than her life. Another is forgiving to the extreme. Still another lives off the anger that is within him. There is another who doesn’t want anything to do with the affairs of world and just wants to be left alone.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to imagine a scenario where these people might disagree with each other. Heck, I’ll bet some of them will come to blows as soon as we look the other way. Read the rest of this entry »

“Everywhere O Bharata, faith is in accordance with one’s nature. A person’s faith is according to his nature.” [Bhagwad Gita, Chapter 17, Verse 3]

Everyone tells me there is One God. That we are all actually worshipping that One God by different names. That it is the different names that are the cause of all the strife in our world.

I find that the thousand names we give to God come to mean very little as time passes. The names turn into pictures, and the pictures remain just that. At one place God is split into a thousand pieces and splattered all over a geographical mass, known by a thousand names and given a thousand faces. At another place, God is crushed into a singularity so unforgiving that he cannot mean anything more than what he is allowed to mean. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a suicidal ant in my loo. Almost every time I go in for a leak, I have to use a brush to sweep it out of the pot and drop it on a dry spot on the floor so that I don’t accidentally flush it to its death.

What bugs me is that it always fights back. I have probably broken more than one of its legs in attempts to keep it from its watery grave. Every time I drop it on the floor, it circles the spot in anger and confusion.

I got thinking about the things we complain about in life. The little setbacks, the accidents, the apparent tragedies. Did something higher than us just ’sweep’ us out of the path of even greater damage?