Vimoh's Blog

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.

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.

Keval drew his breath in and aimed the arrow at the target. He switched to a version of reality where nothing except his target existed. Even his self melted away until he was nothing but a viewpoint.

When he felt sure that he couldn’t hit anything other than his target, Keval let the arrow go. He missed.

Disappointed, but incapable of not analysing his way of doing things, Keval had finished running all the calculations inside his head before his master’s cane hit the back of his head.

“Do your math boy,” came his master’s favourite phrase. “You are not doing your bloody math!”

“My math was correct, I checked,” Keval defended himself. “There was nothing wrong with my calculations.”

“Well it didn’t work,” said master. “And if it didn’t work, it can’t have been correct, can it?”

“It was the wind,” Keval said, pointing at the invisibility around them. “The wind blew my arrow off-course.”

The master kept looking at Keval in silence.

“My math was correct,” Keval repeated.

The master walked to the target and pulled the arrow out of the stump of wood it had lodged itself into. He examined the arrowhead carefully and looked back at Keval. Then he walked back towards his young student and handed him the arrow.

“The wind is doing its job young archer,” he said. “It is blowing as it always blows. That is its nature. Perhaps you would like it to hold still while you shoot your arrows, but that is not going to happen.”

Keval bowed his head in acknowledgment of his master’s words.

“It is you who must make allowance for the wind’s blowing when you take aim,” the master continued. “If you can’t do that, go and practice somewhere the wind does not blow.”

“There is no such place,” said Keval.

“Wise words,” said his master with a smile. “Everything has its place in the universe — the wind, your arrow, me, this ashram, the trees, birds — everything. None of it can be wished away, just like I can’t wish you away even though you interrupt my afternoons with your foolish dreams of being a great archer.”

Keval smiled a little. His master smiled wider.

“Do not blame the wind,” said the master. “Instead, learn from it. Keep moving, no matter what. Don’t stop to complain about your circumstances. Find a way around them.”

Keval took the lesson in and smiled until his master’s cane stang his elbow like a bolt of lightning.

“Don’t stand around. Take aim,” barked the master. Keval breathed in and raised his bow.

Ever noticed we all have this need to feel small? It manifests itself differently in different people, but it is there in all of us. Some of us bow to gods, some to elders, some to forces of nature. In olden days, people bowed down to the will of a king or an emperor.

Why is this so?

I think it is because we ARE small. I think human beings were never meant to be the largest, or the biggest, or the most powerful. Even the proudest man is smaller than at least one thing (often of his own choosing). Be it his country, his mission, his cause or his mother. Sometimes, people do step into that hallowed space meant for the ultimate big, but we have all heard about pride and the fall, haven’t we?

Our world is designed in a way so as to appear unfair. It disappoints us, angers us, makes us believe we are alone and small and insignificant. I think that is correct. But I also think that the subtle question this unfair world poses in front of us is, "Yes. You are small and weak and insignificant. What are you going to do about it?"

It sounds rude, and a lot of us grow even smaller under its shadow. But in truth it is just a simple question. And those of us who manage to answer this question through their pain and their utter helplessness… the world listens to them.

I believe we feel small so we may look up into things bigger than us and aspire, so we may learn to be bigger than we are.

One common question I often hear (implied, if not asked) from people is that being spiritual is fine, but where is the need for God in our daily lives, in our practical routines, in the “real world”?

There is no one simple answer to this of course. Especially since needs vary. Mine are different from yours and someone else’s might be different from ours. So the scope of this question goes beyond need, and into want.

Do you want God?

There is no right answer. It can be a yes or no, depending on your nature. You can even answer, “I don’t care.” That’s okay too.

Having said that, I would like to use a metaphor to paint a picture of this need that many of us do feel.

Think of an ant at work. It heads out in search of food everyday of its life and works for the survival of all its fellows. Together with its friends, it raids sugar supplies, rips up dead or dying animals, and does its best to make sure the ant hill never faces scarcity.

But all this while, the ant is unaware of the greater role it plays in the world. It doesn’t know that it is helping keep the ecological balance. It doesn’t know that the needs of the ant hill are helping keep order in a greater world. Thanks to the ant, dead animals do not lie around unattended and carcasses do not rot on the roadside. But the ant goes on about its daily business, unaware of any of this.

In humans, the urge to seek God stems from the need to find their place in the universe. To see how our lives fit in the great order of things. We do know a number of things about our world, but the number of things we do not know is a far larger one.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." — Albert Einstein

A miracle, by definition, is something that happened. It may be something extremely unlikely, but it happened. Miracles aren’t impossible. The impossible doesn’t happen, miracles do.

I also believe that a manifest miracle is a matter of perspective. If you look for a miracle, one is not hard to find. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find something that is not a miracle.

I think it is a miracle I woke up this morning. It is a miracle millions survive road traffic everyday and get to their workplaces unharmed. It is a miracle that a million sperm cells take off for the egg and only one manages to successfully impregnate it. These things happen all the time, all around us.

Of course, it is equally possible to look at all this and say that there is nothing miraculous about them. That they are just things that happen. But where’s the fun in that?