Beliefs and Believers

                                      *Saumitra Mohan

            It is generally becoming quite fashionable for human beings to denigrate and deprecate God and religion as people go through the rigmarole of day-to-day life. This trait is noticed more when people grow up and have got through the mundane battles of their lives to make both ends meet. It also depends on the kind of formal or informal education, surroundings and circumstances that the particular human being has been through otherwise an ordinary individual is usually quite God-fearing and remains seeped in religion and the cognate rituals which seemingly have no values.

            The increasingly mechanical life devoid of interpersonal relationships and human emotions in the overpowering presence of machines, tools, instruments, gadgets and technology is also pushing humans and their society to alienation where an individual often ends up attacking and inveighing against the God who is never in a mood to defend Himself, has never expressly desired to be worshipped or followed through an organised religion. But the fact remains that both God and religion are important and this is more so in a time when alienated human beings through their garbled understanding of the ‘Supreme Being’ are wreaking havoc all across the world.

            The same is reflected as variously as in the rise of the rightwing forces, retreat of the liberal state, rise of illiberal and authoritarian regimes, and rise of intolerant theocratic forces all around us. Examples include mindless acts of terror in the name of religion, extremist and militant violence, shooting and killing of individuals for their liberal values and thoughts as seen in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere and imposition of majoritarian, monolithic and homogeneous ‘one-size-fits-all’ standards on all members of the society, something which is against the very innate nature of a creative human society. All the developments that we see today have happened because of the allowances made to the contrary beliefs and thoughts.

            Against all these incursions on religion and God, there are certain things which need to be understood metaphysically, spiritually and philosophically otherwise we would see no meaning in the mindless pursuit and protection of repetitive but fleeting life activities. The first thing that we need to notice is the transient and ephemeral nature of things around us including a human life. After all, what is the immanent purpose of human existence on this earth if nothing here lasts forever? Why are we living, surviving and struggling when we all have to die or get destroyed at the end of the day?

            In fact, most of us die live as if we would never die. But most of us actually die as if we never lived. We keep chasing amorphous chimaeras of life without realising the import behind the same. Have we not done the same mundane things like ‘eating-defecating-procreating-dying’ day in and day out all across the world and through the ages which keep us bogged in diurnal ontological struggles without most of us even getting a whiff of the same?  If we don’t comprehend the nuances behind the same, we would continue hurtling through our life like zombies without grasping the meaningfulness of a human life.

            One feels that all the individuals have come to this earth for a definite purpose and until we find and understand that purpose, we shall continue feeling alienated and disaffected against the order of human life on this earth. After all, as they say, if the world was good the way it was when we were born, we should not have been born at all because our existence would be completely irrelevant and asynchronous with the extant realities. So, we must find that purpose that most of us have so far failed to discover and that purpose is to strive for our ultimate spiritual development.

            We are all born and struggle through our lives to aspire, achieve and hoard the different goodies for a comfortable human life, often way beyond the requirements, only to realise at the fag end as to how we have frittered away the precious time on this earth. All the wealth and fame that we chase through our life suddenly appear to have no meaning as they were never ours and are finally left behind. What is truly ours are the precious and happy moments spent learning different aspects of life’s nuances and our relationships. Enrichment of our mind and consciousness in this life is carried forward to the next life. Hence, the intellectual difference shown by different individuals since their birth despite being born to same circumstances.

            Unfortunately, stuck as we are in the quagmire of religion, caste, nationalism, regionalism, linguistic jingoism, competitive one-upmanship and hedonist pursuits, we have mostly missed the wood for the trees. So, instead of savouring the magnificence of divine creations and helping ourselves spiritually, we have ended up messing our lives. At the end of the day, this world remains a ‘Maya’ or a Divine Drama which we are supposed to play out towards our gradual spiritual evolution for ultimate union with the ‘Supreme Being’. We continue taking birth and rebirth on this earth till we attain the elusive ‘Moksha’ or become perfect to merge with the Divine. YouTube, Google and literature are replete with the rebirth stories to prove that the same human being keeps coming to this earth over and over again. Past life regression therapies, Tantric wisdom or increasingly popular ‘Yoga’ tell us the same thing.

            The popular Hindu belief of our rebirth being pegged to our ‘Karma’ is actually a spin-off of our consciousness at the time of our death. Spiritual studies suggest that instead of the Divine assigning a particular birth for us, it is the humans themselves who decide their birth given the kind of lessons they still have to learn and the same is predicated upon their own consciousness. Otherwise, how come two individuals born to same parents and same circumstances show diametrically opposite traits and talents? It has got to do with their differently evolved consciousness in their previous births. So, a seeker of wealth when he dies again looks for a womb or parents where s/he can pursue the Mammon while a dying saint would look for parents who would facilitate his better spiritual upliftment.

            Viewed thus, the earth is nothing but a school where we keep coming to learn our lessons till we have evolved to understand the real truth of life to merge with the Supreme. As we remember all our past lives in the astral world, our spiritual growth is very slow because of the mechanically self-controlled behaviour. That is why, the human life on earth is preferred by souls because of the possible faster spiritual growth than is possible in the astral world but more often than not, we end up messing the same. The irony is that the Hindus who believe in ‘rebirth’ the most and accept the possibility of them being born as a person of other religion, faith, creed  or a woman still spoil their Karmic consciousness by indulging in such nefarious activities as actually keep him or her from further spiritual evolution and deliverance.

            Dalai Lama says, ‘if you are really selfish, help the person who can’t help you’, thereby creating an altruistic debt. However, one feels that there is none created without the capacity to help another creature or fellow human being. So, we should never run down or hurt another creature if we really wish to attain ‘Moksha’ otherwise we would remain stuck in the ‘cycle of birth and rebirth’. The ethics and values of humanity are more supreme than the ephemerals of identity or possessions which continue changing with our each birth. Religion and theory of Karma says that if you hurt or cheat someone, the divine play shall ensure that you shall also be hurt or cheated in equal measure sooner or later. It is advisable that while we live, we create a larger ‘circle of goodness and goodwill’ by touching as many lives as possible by the dint of our altruistic or selfless Karmic actions. That shall be a real enlightened selfishness than the seemingly selfish acts of running after wealth or fame.

            Also, how and why should a truly religious person act contrary to the scriptural exhortations against lust, greed, theft, anger or hate? By not heeding these religious commandments, are we not disrespecting our own religions? So, what we see today in the name of religion is nothing but a travesty and an abomination of religion which must stop. All the religions, nations, wealth or fame are nothing but means to an end and the end being our eventual spiritual evolution through attainment of ‘Moksha’. But, we all keep chasing the meaningless without realising the same. After all, money, precious metals or high positions themselves have no value. It is we who have assigned values to them and have been running after them ever since.

            Now, a question one often encounters here is the relevance and purpose behind this ‘Drama’. Made as we are in the images of God, we are said to be an extension of the Divine who is realising Himself through this Divine Drama. After all, all these things that we see around ourselves including sundry emotions, passions, objects, creatures, organisms, technologies, scientific discoveries and a complex operation of this world would have all remained mere conceptions and nothing else had God not created this world to put the same in motion to glimpse their actual working, and thereby also realise the significance of His own power. So while the Divine Drama plays itself out, many of us have fallen by the wayside which may at some level appear as a failure of the divine design but if the world is still surviving, it simply means that the balance still hangs in favour of the positive and the Divine Drama is playing out as per the larger cosmic plan.

            It is against this background that humans created religion and God, not only because they could not explain many things but also because of their own incapabilities. As some humans become liberated from the mundane struggles of making ends meet, they become alienated and atheist/agnostic because of a garbled understanding of the Divine while many have crooked conception of the same. That is why, we have a multiple understandings of God and religion. The various religions as have evolved are nothing but spatio-temporal expressions of humans trying to come to terms with their initial realities when they were in the Hobbesian ‘State of Nature’.

            Religions, ethics, mores, customs and values in the absence of means of transportation and communications developed as the primary laws during the early days of human civilisation. Even though there is no need for existence of multiplicity of these religions now, they still continue to be relevant not only because they add variety and colour to our dull and drab life but also because of their functional role in securing regulation and integration of human society. Temples and churches in themselves may not be of any value, but they become important because they bring humans together to perform certain collective tasks in a spirit of solidarity, thereby increasing social bonding and integration.

            As all the persons who visit a temple are generally carrying righteous thoughts and uplifting emotions, the positive vibrations of these religious places become very powerful and as such become very strong centres of social integration. Our seemingly meaningless customs, rituals, ethics, mores and values often play the same role. However, those becoming dysfunctional and conflicting with human existence, slowly stop being part of religion and go out of currency e.g. ‘Sati’, prohibition on widow remarriage, child marriage, human or animal sacrifice et al.

            At another level, it is really deemed an expression of human arrogance or ignorance that we have conceived God in our image. After all, if there are millions of creatures and organisms, why should God look like humans and not like a dog, a buffalo or a bacterium? Does it mean that all the creatures have their own God? In fact, it is this understanding that Hindus, heathens or pagans have millions of God as they see divine in every creation of the Almighty. Being rational animal with a consciousness, human beings have conveniently cast God in their own images who may not be like us, but there should definitely be no doubt about His very existence.

            After all, such a complex and beautiful creation cannot emerge out of a chaos. There is a defined divine plan, rather a micro plan which says that nothing which happens in this world happens without a reason. Science may explain evolution of nature and civilisation, but why a sperm and an ovum combine to form a zygote and finally evolve as a fully-grown organism of a particular species as per a definite genetic map has still not been explained. Humans have still not mastered the capability to create a new living organism as not found in nature. Why different organisms come out of similar looking seeds or eggs has not been explained?

            And there are millions and billions of such intricate planning through the nature which has been done very methodically and all of this could not have evolved out of chaos. So, there is definitely a ‘Supreme Being’ which has created us all and has been quietly chaperoning this world. But as long as we don’t understand Him and His ways, as long as we don’t understand the real purpose behind the Divine Drama, we shall continue to witness and experience the chaos and pain in our own lives as are reflected across the world.

*The views expressed here are personal and don’t reflect those of the Government.