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.

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.

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.

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.