Thursday, December 25, 2008

The 'Touch of God'


I deem it necessary to start off with a disclaimer that this post of mine is not based on any religious experience. Nor have I suddenly `realized' anything after turning one year older; on the contrary, I have not had any experience that might have prompted a write up of this sort; it's just that this material has been simmering in my head for a while and here it is. As always, mere musings but on a topic that many might consider me profoundly unqualified to write about.

Having said all that, here goes.

I have often been asked about my theist leanings. Primarily so from the more openly religious members of my (extended) family, quite often with an assessment that I must be atheist or agnostic because I show no signs of inclination towards any form of religion.

One of the principal reasons for the aforementioned is the fact that I make no secret my belief that religion does not explain nature. There are several people who believe in the religious lessons, parables, other mythical tales, only too literally and deeply believe in things like Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus rising up from the dead, God creating Adam and Eve, and so on. Closer home, the Ram janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue comes strongly to one's mind; many people strongly held onto the belief that the disputed piece of land was the actual birthplace of Rama.

The perspective that most atheists hold argues against the `need for God' to explain these phenomena. The argument goes thus: Primitive cultures invented God to explain everything they couldn't do otherwise. With time, God became another (probably the most powerful) tool to control large groups of people and in fact continues to do so today. As scientific explanations of the many natural phenomena became increasingly well understood, the `need for God' started to diminish and slowly vanish.

Since Christianity (in particular) has been (and unfortunately in many pockets, continues to be) so openly antithetic of most things scientific (there is quite a bit of documentation of many things the Vatican did to suppress scientific thought), the argument offered by the rationalists is quite strong and well substantiated.

In this regard, Hinduism (and more so, the eastern religions) seems rather different since it really doesn't seek to explain nature through the entity called God. There is of course a category of people who believe that Hinduism explains evolution too but that group of pseudo-scientists is a small proportion. To the majority, God and Faith are more or less synonymous terms. Indeed, the notion of faith is paramount when one wishes to understand the underpinnings of any religion. But Hinduism propounds that the notion of faith is something more abstract than it seems, i.e., you could very well believe in the theory of evolution and there is no contradiction with your religious beliefs.

The level of abstraction in the notion of complete faith (as espoused in Hindu philosophies) is something that comes across as a mix between something ideal and impractical. The kind of unflinching faith I'm talking about here is the kind that is often glorified in many a parable - the story of Prahalad's devotion towards Narayan, the story of Kannappan, and also more modern ones like the life of saint Thyagaraja, Meera,... - the list is really endless here.

But there seems to be a form of faith that people readily believe; few people would dismiss as ludicrous the notion of love, despite the fact that this has as little rational basis. What exactly is love? Most people of course do experience liking, fondness, infatuation, obsession, lust and extreme desire, respect etc. Are these emotions what we might call love? Most people here would seem to agree that love is `beyond all this' (though I am not sure they understand what they might mean by it). But very few people are skeptical to the notion of love.

Hinduism does at several points emphasize that God is Love. Thus if you believe in the notion of love, you are already a theist. And love possesses a fundamental element of irrationality to it, almost by definition. Love, as defined in the `ideal sense' is described as something that only `increases' towards the object of love. It logically follows that love has no material basis (or in fact, any rational basis) since the decrement of the material variable (if there were one) would contradict the assumption that the love cannot decrease. This also explains (in a rational manner), the quotation, ` Love is Blind'.

Thus the Hindu perception of God becomes a purely emotional expression. But what does it mean to say you believe in God? It sounds tautological to say you have `belief in belief'. In real terms, it means that one believes that absolute faith in this notion of absolute faith/trust/love can offer a glimpse of an emotional response that cannot be simulated by earthly means. In other words, if you do believe in God then you believe that the 'God experience' is real, i.e., not something artificially simulated.

The definition of the 'God experience' is again a very vague one - in fact, it seems to have no definition at all. This is a heuristic explanation of the saying `God is omnipresent' - you can experience the God feeling in the most mundane of places.

I'll quote a few instances of what I think could count as the 'God experience' or the 'Touch of God' (ToG) ranging from popular fiction to some real accounts. I am also not going to get into the accounts/narratives from well known sources in Hindu philosophy/mythology/biographies of saints and so forth. These narratives are in fact far from dramatic, and to me, the lack of drama here actually emphasizes my point.

My mom once narrated to me one very interesting incident. She often visits a temple close to our house in Hyderabad. She has also often indulged in vows of various sorts like fasting over certain periods of time, abstaining from one of her favorite foods, and so on - as a sign of resoluteness - when she feels troubled by something, and when she has a strong conviction that her steadfastness in maintaining her vow would solve the problem she was confronting. On this occasion, she debated mentally if she should give up eating the banana fruit, a fruit she has always liked. But her personal liking for the fruit made it that much harder to make that vow, so she decided to `leave that decision to God'.
What this meant was the following: The temple usually offers a small offering or prasadam - usually some kind of food, pieces of fruit, nuts and so on, usually a fistful - every day after the evening prayers. My mom decided that if the prasadam included a piece of banana, she would take this as a sign from God that she would not have to give up on her favorite fruit, and conversely no banana meant she ought to go ahead with this vow.
It seemed like she approached the prasadam counter with extreme trepidation and it turned out, the prasadam that day did not have any bananas in it. As she prepared to leave the temple some stranger came up to her and placed a banana in her hand and left.

The second instance I quote refers to one of the interviewees in the documentary 'Religulous' by Bill Maher. This man walked into a bar keen on spreading the word or God and whatnot, and soon seemed to have gotten on the barman's nerves who asked him to leave. When he finally said he only wanted a drink, he was apparently asked to go out and `ask God' for it. And just as the man walked out, it apparently started raining.

The third reference is an incident from a piece of fiction and I am sure quite a few would be surprised that I have decided to narrate a piece off this popular film. The situation involves two hit men, Jules and Vincent, who while on one of their 'missions' come face to face with another man with a gun who empties it at them at point blank range. Somehow not one bullet hits either hit man.

Do any of these qualify as events that exhibit the ToG? The point here - and this is the crux of my argument - is that it does not matter what you or I think about it. What matters is only what the person who experienced it, felt.

As far as I know, my mother was in a state of tizzy for a while and it took her quite a while to get back to 'feeling normal'. She had experienced happiness, joy, thrill, excitement and a whole gamut of other emotions in her life but this seemed like something that seemed to defy categorization. To me, that sounds as much a ToG as any other.

As for the other two sources I quote, the man in the bar seemed to be positively thrilled that God had come to his rescue and had upheld his faith. He went a little speechless while recounting this incident.

The narrative from the movie of course makes it easier for us to classify since one of the hit men claims he was touched by God and decides to give up on his profession of being a hit man starting that very moment. It is irrelevant whether he stood by it or not but that moment made him reconsider everything.

The reason I have picked these narratives among the countless many here is that there are bound to be others who don't think these are miracles by any stretch of imagination. The fictitious Vincent is convinced that all that happened was a freak accident and that his partner had suddenly decided to `be a bum'. Bill Maher could not resist commenting that this chap's threshold for miracles was pretty low and that he might have been more impressed had it rained beer. Regarding my mother's experience, there may be some here who might consider that a very interesting incident but no `miracle'.

As to the question of believing the ones who felt they had the ToG, I personally think I believe that these incidents did provide the recipients an experience of a wholly different nature because the reactions from them are not characteristic of them. The man in the church couldn't stop talking throughout the interview but at the point he described the rain....he just went speechless for a few minutes. As my mom narrated this incident to me over the phone she seemed calm and ready to hear me dismiss it as just an interesting incident. Normally she gets very defensive of her beliefs when I try to play it down and tries to present an argument that would put her experience in new perspective but this time, she just didn't; she didn't want to , she didn't need to. Anything I said would not have mattered because she had that experience and that was enough.

2 comments:

Neeraj said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Neeraj said...

Beautiful! Like an act of God unto itself. Well done bro:)