Incurable Dilemma

Padma Devkota

Incurable Dilemma

    I was reawakened to the necessity of at least seeming to solve the problem of faith in God when my younger son told me one fine morning that he regarded me as an atheist. There can be nothing bad in being an atheist, or even a theist or a deist for that matter. However, thousands of years of racial prejudice against the unbeliever had not died in me so that the label of atheist itself felt bitter in a peculiar way. I culturally transformed the meaning of atheist from its Webster's denotation into whatever my sciolism of Hindu scriptures would permit me to buy space in the territory of believers. An atheist is a non-believer in the scriptures, in heaven and hell, in religious cult and current practices. One may be a believer in God and yet be an atheist, I convinced myself. The code and cult of religions have after all been distorted by personal needs of their keepers. I need not accept the scriptures or any of their interpretations to be binding for the perfection of my individuality. If rebellion against what does not suit my mental constitution is atheism, so be it, I told myself. What do words matter when people do not have the capacity of linking words to reality. And the reality is, I confess, I am not an atheist in the sense of being a non-believer in God.
    All that I was really doing was seeking affinity with the 18th century deists. Nevertheless, such a line of reasoning led to the necessity of explaining how one could believe in God but not in Gita. For many people like me, the answer is quite obvious: Gita is an excellent fabrication of the human imagination, God is a supreme reality. The Mahabharat is an excellent epic, really the best that the world has produced up to now, and, as such, is just another epic like Paradise Lost or Iliad in the sense that all of these are long burning golden flames of human imagination. Therefore, Christ is no more a god than Krishna is as both are extraordinary samples of the human race. By claiming this truth, I have also just disclaimed the necessity of living the codes, and cults, of any religion as if life were meant just for that. Life is much larger than any scriptural mandate. Yasudha's rope is always too short for Krishna, a symbol of life at its fullest. American transcendentalists, too, understood this truth. By rejecting Christian religious practice, they stated their faith in life as it is lived in the most enjoyable manner in the natural world. They were wiser than many religious priests who never realized that they could live their life to the fullest by living it the way they wanted to, not the way that some scriptures prescribed it to them.
Yet, many atheists and defaulters of established societies are as wise as the transcendentalists when it comes to living their own life. Certain practicing theists have a big problem in this respect. Easy preys to religious prescriptions and proscriptions, they tend to miss the dawn each morning by simply laying a greater priority on ablutions and matins. One would think that the purpose of their life was to please divinity, to glorify the Glorious. But no! The only purpose of life is to live it to the fullest. A flower that blooms in the caterpillar's dining space must admit its affinity to death. The tip of the bud is black and jagged even before the petals show off their colours. Life that is charted by scriptures is born in the caterpillar's dining space. At its best, it is painted for public show only, like a piece of handicraft whose sole raison d'être is to appease the general taste of the beholder. What more is there in this than confirmation of inability to realize oneself to the fullest? Life is as it were skimmed and reduced to the white purity of conformation to established codes of religious conduct. For the boundless mind with a greater cosmic expansion than that of the religious theist's, each different possibility of human thought, action, and speech is an icon of life—life that will expand itself in all directions given its own sweet will, like the will of water that discovers the contours of mountains and plains. Each rebellion against the established, the expected, the predicted is a contribution to creation itself.
And, indeed, the Hindu mind has understood the present act of creation. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" is unknown past. The Bible itself should be rewritten thus: "And God says, Let the sap climb to the bud, let the calyx stir with warmth, let the sleeping petals feel that warmth, which will then awaken them to the glory and the radiance of the morning: and a new flower blossoms forth." For creation is an ongoing process, not a product, like a cake of soap from the factory for human use. And human intelligence has the function of helping maintain this process of creation. Wherever it falters and destroys, it counteracts the purpose of life and creation.
Life is continuation, death is culmination. Life is a river, death is a sea. Life needs to go on, and on, and on. If it does not, that is dissolution. The relay torch of life needs to be handed down to posterity beyond our conception of time if creation is to continue. However, for life to go on, we need to be awake and conscious of the fact that we are awake. Anything less than a full consciousness cannot supply us with the joie de vivre. The sleeper does not know this fact. Converted to an incurable faith in the reality of the dream, the sleeper will hardly understand the difference between life and death. And this is where all spiritual problems of humankind find their source. Faith in experienced reality is really rooted in ignorance. Obstinate faith in experienced reality becomes the religion of worldly people. However, its own scale of impermanence mocks our conviction of truth. Conviction, therefore, seeks the extremes. We are forced to commit the either-or fallacy by our desire to obtain heaven or to assert the self. Because we are lovers of life and refuse to admit its cessation, the self gains victory over heaven. But again, because we are lovers of life and imaginatively recreate its prolongation under different conditions, heaven lures us into its domain at the cost of a free unfurling of the self. Whichever is the truth, the only permanence we shall encounter in our whole life is the observing eye that screens and selects every detail of the vast universe with individual insight and sensibility. Yet, they tell me that this eye is itself impermanent.
With what judgment?
They see that the physically living are fewer than the physically dead. They see that earth continues revolving around the sun and reproducing seasons and seasonal varieties of warmth and cold, of forms and colours, of moods and atmosphere. They believe what they see: that the hugest bulk of clay present before their eye is more permanent than the human form. They therefore conclude that man is less true than earth! And they worship earth, and pray to her with devotional fervour. They have found their religion. For truth is eternal. The more permanent or long-lasting something is, the more worthy of worship it has to be because it is therefore closer to eternity.
They see neither that eternity lies in the present moment, nor that it lies within us rather than in what is external to our experiencing self. He who rides the present is saved. Human concerns for the immediate or distant future taxes him through routine and drudgery to a molested existence beyond repair by any civilized forces. Life itself can exist only in the present. The past is a ghost, the future is a vision. It is not by temporal duration of physical existence that eternity can be measured. It can be measured by the clarity of vision that pierces the fog of ignorance. This is what the wiser saints have told us. This is what I tend to believe in.
However, this is not what I have lived or would like to live. I live my ignorance to the call of Maya. To me, the earning of meagre bread is urgent. To me, commitment to the responsibilities I have accepted is morally binding. To me, the world is still a solid foundation on which my house is built. Flesh is all too real not to be experienced. And experienced reality is too powerful to dodge around. Maya is more like the earth's gravitational force than like the equator. Not experienced by the senses but real enough, it exists as a feeling of a particular moment, like the caress of the wind on the naked skin. Yet, ignorance is inbuilt in our system of convictions and acts as a filter of the perceived world. It creates and presents a performance, a pageant, a palpable reality that is not the ultimate reality.
The powerful immediacy of the material world is like that of a magician in action. Tricks and magic enchant us by befogging our intellect. We are passive onlookers of the show where we should have been active inquisitors of truth. And truth would have pleased us more than this magic show. For the truth is that we are ourselves the magician that has the knack of creating the fog wherein our unenlightened soul is lost. The soul is a spark of the Creator: that never understood reality that endows us with a consciousness with which we apprehend life. We need the teacher's nudge, or somebody else's for that matter, before we are capable of the fullest spiritual realization: I am Brahma, meaning, I am the creator of my illusions because Maya is my inherent property.
Once we have understood all this, arguments vaporize like morning dew. There is no more right and wrong, sin and virtue, good and evil. There is only illusion that enchants and removal of illusion that exposes the ultimate truth of all existence.
I seem to understand all this! Yet it also seems to me that I can be Brahma only to the extent that the son can be the father or the clone the original. That is why, although the reality of ignorance proves the existence of Brahma (that never understood reality), I fail to accept the equation between the father and the son to the Vedic extent. It simply does not hold. The spark and the fire are not the same in the process of burning. Only in a philosophically theorized situation can the essence of the two be reduced to the same substance. Only there the equation holds.
But—and this is a big BUT—what if the Vedic equation were another illusion I just created? What if that which I thought of as ingrained ignorance was in reality unrecognized knowledge? What if the lump of clay has actually evolved as the flower? Shall we not give credit to possibilities within contexts that yet need hairsplitting research? What if mind were a spark of matter, matter that flies through immeasurable space? Shall we not give the credit of curiosity to clay and applaud the realization of the faintest, remotest, least probable chance combination of the DNA and the RNA in some interstellar wilderness?
I was not trying to provide answers. I was trying not to reject possibilities for, by doing so, the theist and the atheist have both missed sight of one half of the universe. I have no desire to lose either half.

July 17, 2003