We don’t need no examination
We don’t need no pass control
No silly smile in the testroom
Kids leave those marks alone
Hey! Kids! Leave those marks alone!
All in all it’s just another trick in the hall
All in all you’re just another trick in the hall.

Hinduism For Beginners
Here is a series of articles that I once wrote for children in the age group 5 - 10 years.

(E) What is an 'Avatara'?

Today we shall talk about God and some of the ways in which God is present in the world. When Hindu thinkers speak about the ways in which God is related to us, they use a number of ideas and one of the most central of these is that of Avatara. Perhaps you have come across this word on yahoo messenger which allows you to make up your personal avatara. There you choose an icon (a boy, a girl, a teddy and so on) and dress it up nicely in a manner that you think expresses ‘who you are’. The yahoo avatara is, in other words, like your signature or your stamp: this is the way you want others to see you, this is the way you present yourself to the world around you. We shall soon see that in Hinduism the term Avatara means something very similar: through an Avatara, God expresses to us what God is like and what God’s plans for us are.

Now all the major texts of Hinduism, including the Upanisads which were composed many thousands of years ago, teach that God is omni-present, that is, God is present everywhere. If God is every-where, why does God need to express Himself through an Avatara? The short answer to this question is that we cannot see God with our human eyes. To understand why, think of the light of the sun. If you stare at the sun for more than a few minutes, what would happen? Your eyes will be blinded, right? You cannot possibly withstand the full glory of the sun’s light. But if you allow a thin ray of sunlight to enter your room through a window and guide the ray through a prism, you will see many beautiful colours on the opposite wall. In other words, the sun cannot be seen with the eye (not for too long in any case!), but its light can be filtered through a prism.

In a similar way, God’s light is so much more powerful than the light of a thousand suns combined together that this light cannot be seen by our eyes. What we need is an earthly form which, in the manner of a prism, will filter this light, and this earthly form is what we call an Avatara. That is, God wants to approach us, to be with us and to live with us, but God knows that we cannot see God in His ‘true form’. So God comes down to our human level and provides us with an earthly form through which we can know more about God. That is why this earthly form is called an Ava-tara, which is a Sanskrit word which means ‘descent’ or ‘coming down’.

Here is another way to think of this matter. We human beings are finite creatures. What do we mean by ‘finite’? We are small in size (not as big as, say, a dinosaur), we contain very little knowledge (unlike, say, a huge encyclopedia) and we are not immortal (unlike, say, an angel). But God is infinite --- God is all-powerful, all-knowing and the source of all the good things you can think of. Now how can something that is finite understand what the infinite is like? Just as an ant cannot understand what it is like to be a human being (and your baby sister cannot understand what it is like to be a teenager), we cannot know what God is really like, unless God comes down to our side by providing us with a bridge. This bridge is, once again, the Avatara of God.

So what exactly are these earthly forms or these bridges that we have called Avataras? Hinduism believes in ten major Avataras of God. Some of these are the Matsya (Fish), the Kurma (Tortoise), Gautama Buddha, Rama and Krishna . We shall have separate sections in this series for Gautama Buddha (the founder of Buddhism), Rama and Krishna ; but what about the Fish and the Tortoise Avataras? Does God really come down to us in the form of an animal? When we say that Hinduism believes that God is present everywhere and in everything, we must take this statement seriously: God is indeed everywhere and in everything, including trees, plants and animals. God has descended to our midst many times, sometimes as an animal and at other times as a human being.

Before we conclude, let us note one more reason why Hinduism uses the image of the Avatara to speak about the presence of God in our midst. In the scripture called the Bhagavad-Gita (which means ‘the Song of the Lord Krishna’), Krishna tells his disciple Arjuna that he comes down to the world both to rescue the devotees of God from the hands of the bad people and to show everyone the good path that leads back to God. Once again, we see that an Avatara is like a ‘connecting point’ between the infinite, supreme God and finite, mortal human beings.

As you think more about the Avataras of God, here is an exercise which you might find like to do in your spare time. Think of all the beautiful things that you see around you. Perhaps you find the trees in your garden beautiful, and also the blue skies in spring, the elm trees down your avenue and the white snow in winter. And then one summer vacation your uncle takes you to Yellowstone National Park where you stand on a hilltop and watch the sun going down in the horizon. You feel that you have never seen such a beautiful sunset, that the scene has made you see for the first time what ‘true beauty’ is like. Likewise, though God is present within everything and everyone around us, the Avataras of God make us see, more clearly than otherwise, what God is really like. They are like a window that God opens for us; we have to look through that window and grow more and more close to God.

Hinduism For Beginners
Here is a series of articles that I once wrote for children in the age group 5 - 10 years.

(D) What does Hinduism say about the creation of the world?

On a dark moonless night, standing in the middle of an open field, have you ever looked at the stars shining in the sky high above you? What thoughts have crossed your mind on such occasions? Perhaps you have wondered where all these stars have emerged from, who put them there and how they came to be scattered all over the sky? Well, thinkers all over the world, from ancient times to modern, have been fascinated by such questions and have put forward many interesting answers to them. Some of them have said that our world is 'created' by God, and today we shall look at some of the views of some Hindu thinkers regarding 'creation'.

Before we proceed, however, let us look at some everyday activities that look like 'creation'. How do workmen build a house? They start by gathering from different places small bits and pieces like bricks, rods of steel and beams of wood. Then they lay them on top of one another, and arrange the layers in a nice and coordinated manner till they have a beautifully formed structure in front of them. Throughout the process, they work under the guidance of an engineer who has a detailed map or a sketch of each room in the building. The engineer ensures that the finished building is just the way the map says it should look like. Another example: a sculptor stands in front of a solid block of shapeless marble. He is ready to chip away with his hammer and chisel. Somewhere inside his head he has an idea or an image of what the completed statue would look like. Over a period of time, he carves the lump carefully and patiently into a figure with a head, eyes, ears and limbs.

What is common to all these activities is that they are a combination of two things: 'matter' and 'image'. Since these are slightly complicated terms, let us spend some time understanding what they mean. Matter is the thing or the 'stuff' that you work on: whether it is the bricks and mortar, the cardboard pieces, the block of marble and the chisel. But what is it that these people are trying to do when they are working on this matter? How they do they know that they are actually getting closer to their final goal instead of wasting their time and effort? They are trying to build something new, something that did not exist earlier, by looking at a certain plan of what the finished product should look like. This plan --- whether it is the map of the architect or the idea of the sculptor --- is what we mean by the image.

If you still find this somewhat difficult, here is one more example for you. Suppose your teacher asks you to write a story about what you did during the summer holidays. What would you do? First, you would get some paper and a pen. This is your matter. Then, you might like to spend a few moments trying to think of what you will put into your story. Who are the people you will talk about and what are the activities you will describe? This mental plan that you start with it is your image. When you actually create the story, you build on this image and give it a concrete shape by using the pen and paper. So, to repeat, the types of creation that we see in our everyday life are activities in which you work on some matter, and your work is guided by the image that you have of the completed product.

You might be wondering why we are spending so much time talking about human beings creating buildings and statues when we are supposed to be discussing how God has created the world. The reason is that nobody has actually seen God creating the world. But the ways in which a sculptor carves a block of marble is similar --- in some ways --- to the way in which God creates the world. In other words, trying to understand what we human beings mean by creation can help us to understand how God created the world ---- but only up to a point. Why do we say 'but only up to a point'? Think of the differences between God and a human sculptor. The sculptor has many limitations. First, he is not all-powerful, he cannot produce just whatever he wills, and he cannot also produce the most beautiful statue ever. Second, he is dependent on the quality of the marble. If the marble is good, he is lucky, but if the marble cracks in the process, he will have to start all over again with a new block.

Now Hindu thinkers clearly state that the all-powerful and all-knowing God cannot have such limitations. So they say that when God created the world God did so out of Himself. What is the meaning of that curious phrase 'out of Himself'? Let us go back to our sculptor again. He is standing in front of a block of marble. Now this block is outside him. That's just stating the obvious, right? But in the case of God, there cannot be anything outside of God, because God is present everywhere and everything is included or contained inside God. So God does not have to work on something outside of God (like a brick or a block of marble). God simply produces the whole world out of what is already and always inside God.

All this might sound somewhat strange, but thankfully the sacred texts called the Upanishads have given us some hints to understand the meaning of 'out of Himself'. They say that the way in which God creates the world is like the way in which a spider spins its web. How does a spider do this? It sends out fine threads from its body and then draws them back into itself. It does not go around looking for thread, does it? The thread comes from inside its body. It is already and always contained there. Likewise, when God creates the world, God does not go hunting for things with which to create it, all the things that God needs are already and always inside God.

We can now understand more clearly one final difference between God and the human sculptor. In the case of the sculptor, the matter --- the block of marble ---- is standing outside him, but the form ---- his idea --- is sitting inside him, in his head. But in the case of God, both the matter and the image are inside God. God works on things that are contained inside God, and this is God's matter. God does this according to a plan that God has for the world and for us human beings, and this is the image that is once again inside God. When God's matter and God's image come together, this is the moment of creation. This is when the world that we see around us emerges.

Here is an activity that may help you to understand what it means to speak about God creating the world. What do you do when you solve a jigsaw puzzle? On the floor lie lots of pieces of cardboard paper. Initially, it looks like a total mess. But you struggle with them and try to fit them together till a beautiful picture emerges. If this is the first time you have fitted the pieces together, you are amazed with how beautiful the completed picture looks like. Now if you could think of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzles as somehow inside you and also think of yourself knowing the completed picture even before you started the puzzle, you would have some idea of what God's creation is like. Because if you could do this, you would also have some idea of what it feels like to be God!

Hinduism For Beginners

Here is a series of articles that I once wrote for children in the age group 5 - 10 years.

(C) Are human beings born into the world many times?

Let me ask you a question: when was the last time you watched a cowboy western in which the baddies won the final battle? Hold on, let me guess what you would say: 'Never!' It seems Hollywood does not make movies where in the final scene the good guys lie dead and defeated and the bad fellows ride into the sun with a victorious smile on their faces. Do you think this is because if Hollywood indeed made such movies, people won't like them? And if your answer to the last question is 'yes', let me ask you just one more question for now: why do you think viewers won't in fact like such movies?

Today we shall look at the answer that Hindu thinkers have given to this question, and the answer, briefly put, is this. They believe that ultimately some day in the future good will win over evil --- the good people will obtain good rewards and the bad people will suffer some misfortune. All your actions, whether good or bad, have certain consequences, and you will have to face these consequences some day. Now if you are a good person and do good things, say you help your friends when they are in trouble, some day in the future you will gain happiness.

This response is based on the belief that the world is a moral order. Let us spend some time unpacking that big-sounding phrase 'moral order'. Suppose you release a ball which you are holding in your hand, and instead of falling to the ground it simply shoots up into the air. You would be astonished, because that is not how balls are expected to behave. Balls fall to the ground because there is a law, a rule, or an order, which tells you that objects which are not supported ultimately move downwards. Hindu thinkers argue that there is likewise another law, or order, which tells you that people who are truthful, who do good to others, who do not harm other people, and so on, are happy. Or at least that is what we would like to see around us, right? Would you really like to see a person who loves his friends and is helpful to them suffer from one misfortune after another?

Unfortunately, quite often this is precisely what we see happening in the world around us: the bad people seem to prosper while the good fellows seem to be continually getting into all kinds of trouble. Think of an honest farmer, John, who spends his whole life trying to earn just enough to keep his family from starving to death, and also a rich banker in the city, David, who defrauds millions of people to live in a luxurious palace with a fleet of ten cars. We feel that this cannot be the way the world is really supposed to be, that there must be something very unjust about all this. In response, Hindu thinkers state that there is a hidden rule which will ensure that good people will receive good things in life, and that the bad will some day come to grief. Now let us pick on two words that we have mentioned just now: first 'hidden' and then 'some day'.

Why do we say that this rule is 'hidden'? Think once again of the case of the ball. There is a force that drags the ball to the earth. You see the ball falling, but you do not see the force, right? That's because although the force is very real, it is not visible, it is hidden from your sight. In the same way, the rule which says that good people will receive good rewards and the bad guys will be punished is not something that you can actually see. But suppose you are still not ready to accept that everything is OK with a world where bad things continually happen to good people. Then Hinduism tells you that you have to believe that there is a hidden rule which will ensure that the good people will somehow receive good things. This rule is, of course, our moral law or order.

You might want to protest at this stage that this is easier said than done. After all, have we forgotten our own examples of poor honest John and rich swindling David? Hindu thinkers reply that the crooked guys will receive their punishment, if not right now in this life, then 'some day' in another life. That is, human beings will be re-born (or born again) into the world to receive the rewards of their actions in previous lives. So let's say when John is born into the world the next time, he is born into a richer family, where he enjoys the kind of happiness that he did not have in his previous (that is, this) life. And let's say David is re-born into the world in a very poor family where he is almost always on the verge of starvation every morning. But note that this is not the end of our story! For if in the next life, John becomes a cruel, wicked person, he will suffer some misfortune in some subsequent life. Similarly, if in the midst of his poverty, David becomes a better person, in a later life, he will be re-born with some degree of happiness that he did not enjoy earlier.

To explain this idea of 'being re-born', one image that Hindu thinkers repeatedly use is that of a seed and its plant. When you sow a seed on a field, after some time a plant grows from it. This seed is like the actions you perform, whether these are good or bad, and the plant is like the rewards that you will receive. If the seed is good, the plant will thrive, but if the seed is diseased, the plant will shrivel up. In both cases, however, you have to accept the consequences of your actions, or, as they say, you will have to reap what you have sown. Hinduism refers to these actions as karma, and so the moral law or order we have discussing is also called the 'law of karma'.

Now you might be asking yourself: but if I, the person who is listening to this broadcast right now, was someone else in another life, why is it that I have no memory of being that someone else? The answer that is usually given goes like this: when we are born, our memories of our previous lives get erased, so that we cannot recollect anymore who we had been before we were re-born into the world. I suppose you have no memories of your being a baby of two weeks, but that does not mean that you were not once upon a time a two-week old baby. Similarly, we cannot remember what our previous lives were like, but this does not mean, according to our Hindu thinkers, that we do not go through many lives in this world.

So what have we learnt today in this lesson on the law of karma and rebirth? We have learnt that human beings are born into the world several times, to reap what they have sown. In your previous life, you were someone else back then, when you sowed some seeds. You have to reap the plants that are growing or will grow from them, either in this life or some other future life.

As you try to understand Hinduism's views about re-birth, I will leave you with something to do. Suppose you are a late riser but you want to wake up at six in the morning everyday. What happens if you try to do so tomorrow? Even when the alarm rings, you may feel like switching it off and going back to sleep. Suppose, however, you somehow resist, with a lot of difficulty, the temptation to sleep for an extra hour, and do manage to drag yourself out of bed. Suppose further that you do this not just tomorrow but over a period of one or two weeks. What do you think will happen at the end of that period? You will easily be able to get up from bed at six, because you have by now formed a habit of early rising. The law of karma says that our actions are habit-forming. If you do good actions, you will form good habits, which is a kind of positive karma. Because of these good habits, you will do good actions more naturally and more easily, because of which you will be a happier person. Likewise if you form a bad habit, you will develop a kind of negative karma and unless you are able to act against it, you will find it difficult to do good actions. So you have to be careful not to develop any negative karma but to increase your positive karma for a happier life!

Hinduism For Beginners
Here is a series of articles that I once wrote for children in the age group 5 - 10 years.

(B) Why does Hinduism promote the worship of images?

Why do you think people around you --- your parents, your brothers and sisters, and of course your friends --- have names? Let’s say you have a friend who is called ‘John’. You have spent an evening playing video-games with him, but when you wake up the next morning you realize that you have forgotten his name. Now if your mother asks you, ‘Where were you yesterday evening?’ it would be pretty tough for you to answer her question. You might say, ‘Well, I was with that boy with black curly hair who wears spectacles’ but since there are so many boys who fit that description, you should not be surprised if your mother still wants to know, ‘But which boy?’ But if you reply, ‘I was with John’, you have hit the bull’s-eye, and your mother knows exactly where you were.

In today’s lesson, we shall learn a bit about what Hindu thinkers have said about naming God. We shall see that they teach that although God is everywhere, we can use some specific names (like ‘John’ in our example) when we wish to speak about God. Everything is full of God but because we cannot think of everything at one time, we think of specific objects when we think of God. These specific objects are called images of God, and they remind us that God is present everywhere.

To understand better what images are, let us go back to the name ‘John’. I hope you will agree with me that there is quite a big difference between the name ‘John’ and your friend John. The first is just a non-living collection of letters ‘-j-o-h-n-’ that you write on a piece of paper or that you speak out when you call him. The second, in contrast, is a living being with whom you can talk and play, and who in turn responds to your questions. In spite of this crucial difference (the name ‘John’ is non-living, your friend John is a living being), there is, however, an intimate connection between the two --- the moment you see or hear the name ‘John’ you think of your friend John. We therefore say that the name ‘John’ is an image of your friend John.

If you find this somewhat difficult to understand, let’s consider a slightly different example. Suppose you went to Mount Rushmore last summer, and you drew a painting of the four great Presidents staring at you. You show this painting to your friend back at home, who exclaims, ‘This painting is so clear that I feel that I am actually in front of Mount Rushmore’. Now surely, your friend is not being serious, is she? For no matter how accurate your painting is, it is obvious that your painting is one thing and Mount Rushmore is another thing, right? And yet, they are not two totally disconnected things either --- whoever looks at the painting will get to know something (but not everything!) of what Mount Rushmore is like. So once again, we say that your painting is an image of Mount Rushmore. It is like a mirror that reflects the real Mount Rushmore, just as your friend’s name ‘J-o-h-n’ is like another mirror that reflects the real human being in flesh-and-blood with whom you play video-games.

But you might want to ask, ‘How is all this connected with why Hinduism encourages the worship of images?’ And the answer is two-fold.

Firstly, God is omni-present, there is no place where you can go to where God is not present. God surrounds the whole universe in just the way a garment envelopes a human body, and also God is also present inside everything. What does that imply? It implies that anything that you can see you around you is full of God. God has, so to speak, left His footprints on everything in this world that He has created. The sky, the oceans, the trees, the prairies, the wild animals, the rivers, the lakes, the food you eat, your parents, your friends, our planet Earth itself --- you name it! --- everything reflects the glory of God. Therefore, all these things --- which reflect God, their creator --- can be images of God. If someday you travel to rural India, you might come across a small shrine, with a few lamps burning brightly, underneath a big banyan tree. The Hindus who gather around that tree believe that it is also one of the many images of God.

Secondly, you cannot see God in the most direct way that you can see an object in front of you. However, the different images of God tell you something about what God is really like. If you have never been to Mount Rushmore, you will find out something about it by looking at a photograph (or what we have called an image) of that place. But here is an important warning that Hindu thinkers have repeatedly issued. Just as you must not confuse this photograph for the ‘real thing’, or the name ‘J-o-h-n’ with your friend John, you must also be careful not to confuse the images of God with what God really is like. No human being can truly and perfectly describe God, only God Himself can do this! So the Hindus who gather around the banyan tree do not actually think that the tree is God. Certainly the all-present and all-powerful God cannot be squeezed into a small tree, right? But they believe that the tree is one of the many, many different images that reflect something of the infinite glory of God.

Let us summarize our discussion so far. We have seen today what images are and why Hinduism believes that we can approach God through image. An image, to repeat, is a name, a picture, a painting or an object which points the way towards something which is more valuable than itself. The name ‘J-o-h-n’ reminds you of your friend, and he is more valuable to you than the four letters ‘j’, ‘o’, ‘h’ and ‘n’. The painting takes you back to the true grandeur of Mount Rushmore which it cannot fully capture. Finally, the banyan tree reflects God, who is infinitely superior to it as its creator. The images that Hindus worship are therefore like mirrors in which they can see the partial reflections of the supreme light of the unseen God.

So the next time you step into the road on a bright spring morning, look at the things around you that remind you of God! You might like to stare for a while at the huge sky spread out over you, and its hugeness might tell you something about how God is truly infinite. Or the birds chirping around you, are not these beautiful small creatures full of life, the life that comes from our common creator? What about the wind that gently blows through the trees, their leaves and branches, does it not tell you something about how an invisible thing can be present everywhere? And if you hear some children playing in the backyard, do their merry cries not remind you of the God who is supreme joy and who is the source of all earthly joys?

Hinduism For Beginners
Here is a series of articles that I once wrote for children in the age group 5 - 10 years.

(A) Why are there so many gods in Hinduism?
Have you ever heard people refer to actors like Brad Pitt as a ‘god’ and actresses like Marilyn Monroe as a ‘goddess’? Or has a friend of yours referred to her father in these terms, ‘My dad is a god’? Now what do they have in mind when they use the terms ‘god’ and ‘goddess’ in these contexts? Surely they don’t mean to say that they go to a temple or a church and bow down before an image or a statue of Brad Pitt, Marilyn Monroe or their father? Possibly what they want to say is that the most ideal, perfect or excellent person they know or can think of is Brad Pitt, Marilyn Monroe or their father.

In today’s lesson we shall learn that in a somewhat similar fashion Hinduism believes that there are many different gods and goddesses. It emphasizes that though there is only one supreme God (which we spell with the capital letter ‘g’), this highest, most perfect and most excellent God is worshipped by people in different forms which are called ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ (which we spell with a small ‘g’). We will now try to understand what these various forms are and what the distinction is between the one supreme God and the diverse forms.

Let us now ask this question: why does Hinduism believe that there are many different gods/goddesses? The answer to this question is two-fold: first, because there are indeed many types of gods/goddesses and second, because there are indeed many types of human beings. And when you add these two parts of the answer, you get a somewhat exciting conclusion: in Hinduism, you actually get to choose the god/goddess (note the small letter ‘g’ though) whom you want to worship!

First, what do we mean when we say that according to Hinduism there are indeed many types of gods/goddesses? A point which has often been made in the other lessons in this series, and one which we reiterate here, is that Hinduism emphasizes that God is present every-where. There is no place you could go to, east or west, the north pole or the south pole, or even the farthest reaches of this galaxy, and find a spot where you could say, ‘This is where God is not present’. That is, God is omni-present: God is present in the skies above, the bright sunset, the green meadows, the leafy trees, your caring parents, your loving friends, the beautiful planet Earth itself, and so on. This implies, in turn, that all these objects or individuals reflect something (but not everything!) of the light of God, the supreme Creator of everything. And because there is something of God in all these things that you see around you, they can become for you reminders of the presence of God. Whatever re-minds you of someone or something is a re-minder. Just as a photograph of your friend brings her to your mind, the sky, the earth or the oceans --- among other things --- can bring to your mind the supreme power that has created them. These things that re-mind you of God, because they reflect something of God’s light, are called ‘gods’ or ‘goddesses’. Thus we have a god of the sky, a goddess of the earth and a god of the waters (and many other gods/goddesses besides these).

Second, we move on to the other half of our response which, to repeat, is ‘because there are indeed many types of human beings’. Let us go back for a while to the Hollywood examples we started with. Your friend may think that Brad Pitt is a ‘god’, but you may sharply disagree with her, for you believe that Edward Norton is a far better actor than Brad. It is Ed, you believe, who truly deserves the title of a ‘god’.

What do you think is the source of this disagreement? If we were to go to a Hindu sage and ask him to kindly resolve this dispute, this is possibly what he would say. There is one set of skills or talents that you believe that an actor should possess before he can be called a ‘god’, but your friend has a somewhat rather different set. So while both of you agree that Brad and Ed are Actors, you disagree over which one of these two you find more appealing. While Brad may have all sorts of on-screen talents, these do not quite appeal to you, and so you don’t quite see him as a ‘god’ (and, of course, vice versa for your friend). You have one group of criteria for what makes a person the most perfect or excellent actor (that is, a ‘god’), and your friend has another group.

Likewise, while there are many different reminders of God’s presence in this world, not everybody will find exactly the same reminder appealing. For some, it may be the huge oceans that most directly and immediately remind them of God, and they will worship the oceans as a god (note the small letter). This god is called Varuna. Some again may reflect on how we depend on the Earth in various ways, and see in the Earth itself a reminder of God, the source of all life. They will worship the Earth as a goddess. Yet others, especially the ones who are early risers, may feel awed by the beauty of the dawn, and see in the dawn a reminder of God’s light that reaches the farthest corners of the planet. This is the goddess Usha. And so on.

Now we can understand why we said earlier that according to Hinduism you can choose the god/goddess that appeals the most to you. This world is full of many lovely things and beautiful objects but not everyone will find exactly the same thing the loveliest or the most beautiful. You will choose that particular thing which you believe is the highest kind of loveliness or beauty, and this thing you will worship as a god/goddess. This is referred to in Sanskrit as ista-devata, which means the ‘god that you choose’.

So how many gods/goddesses are there? There are many; in fact, they are innumerably many. But all these gods/goddesses are different forms of the one supreme creator God who is the source of all life, goodness and beauty. Just as many people have the same email server http://www.mail.yahoo.com/, but they ‘personalize’ their email in a way that appeals to them, so although ultimately everybody worships the same God who is the source of everything, they worship this God in the many different ‘personalized’ forms of gods/goddesses.

It is now time to summarize our discussion. The supreme God is something like a shining diamond with a billion faces. Different human beings approach this God with the help of the light that is reflected by a different face. Each face reflects a slightly different color or hue of light. People choose the particular hue that most appeals to them, and follow this light on their journey back to the source from which emerge these countless rays of light. And, to repeat, these faces are what we refer to as a god or a goddess, who are re-minders of the absolute God who is present everywhere.

Do you still find this talk of one supreme God and many different gods/goddesses rather perplexing? Well, then, here is something I would like you to do. Try to think of the many different roles or forms that you have. How many can you think of? To your parents, you are a child; your teacher sees you as a student; for your friends, you are a playmate, and so on. Now if I ask you, ‘But who are you really? Will the real you please stand up?’, what would you say? Perhaps you would reply, ‘I am truly a child to some people, a student to some people and a playmate to some people, and yet I am more than just a child, just a student or just a playmate’. And if you could somehow speak to the supreme God, our Hindu thinkers assure you that God too would give you a somewhat similar reply, ‘I am truly Varuna to some people, Prithvi to some people, Usha to some people … and yet I am more than any of these’.

Light Thoughts Over A Dark Matter

Most words that we use refer to some discernible object, phenomenon, event or process, but there are some which do not do so in a straightforward manner. Take the sentence, ‘I did not go to office’. The word ‘office’ refers to a building which I can indicate with my forefinger, but what does the word ‘not’ refer to? For another instance of how some words fail to pick out objects in an unproblematic manner, consider antonyms such as light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. It is clear that the first term in each pair stands for something ‘objective’, but what about the second term? If asked for the meaning of the word ‘light’, we may direct the interlocutor’s attention to the sun, a torch, a candle, and other sources of light; but in response to a request for the meaning of ‘darkness’, what do we point out?

This, in turn, raises another question: do we define darkness as the absence of light or do we explicate the meaning of light as the antonym of darkness? That is, should we hold that light is the primary or original ‘thing’, and darkness is whatever is lacking in it, or that darkness is the fundamental substance whose absence we call light? Now we can take our enquirer to a dark field under a pitch-black moonless sky, and say, ‘All of this is darkness’. But the disanalogy now becomes clearer: in the case of light, we can indicate an active source, but with darkness, we are compelled to talk in terms of an absence, a deficit, an inadequacy. To the question, ‘What is causing this light?’ we can respond, ‘the sun’; but the parallel question, ‘What is causing this darkness?’ does not elicit such a reply. We can at best say, ‘the lack of sunlight’.

Consider how we teach numbers to children in school. First, we introduce them to the so-called natural numbers 1, 2, 3 and so on. After some weeks or months, we tell them about negative numbers which are formed by adding a negative sign to the former. So from the series 1, 2, 3 … we form the mirror-opposite one of -1, -2, -3 … In other words, to put forward a tautology, negative numbers are called so precisely because they are negative, that is, they are placed in negation to the positive numbers. However, this is not the only way to go about doing things. We can very well imagine a pedagogic system which advocates the following pattern. Children will first be taught the negative numbers -1, -2, -3 … Only when they have understood this series will the natural (or ‘positive’) numbers be introduced to them. In this alternative system of learning numbers, children are taught that it is negative numbers that are primary for here the positive numbers are defined in terms of what the negative numbers lack (and not the other way round).

The same goes for the polarity of light and darkness. Light is usually regarded as a positive entity, and darkness is understood as the absence of light; but there is nothing illogical in starting with darkness as the positive entity, and defining light as what darkness is deficient in. If we find this state of affairs somewhat hard to conceive it could, to some extent, be an accident of our evolutionary history which has been guided, among other things, by copious amounts of sunlight. But consider a planet where the sun shines for only one hour in a day, so that the remaining twenty-three hours are steeped in blinding darkness. Life-forms have evolved on this planet to survive under such conditions which we earthlings would perceive as the nonexistence of light, but they as the presence of a positive entity called darkness. It should, therefore, not be very surprising if its inhabitants follow the convention of defining (and experiencing) darkness as the basic substance, and light as a deficiency of darkness.

However, let us not stray too far into the realms of sci-fi, and instead remain grounded on our planet. We note that the terms ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ are not merely descriptive but also evaluative. For instance, darkness is associated with death, corruption, disease and bestiality; in India at least nobody would turn up at a wedding, unless s/he wanted to offend the hosts, dressed in black. Children (and often grown-ups too!) are routinely admonished: ‘Don’t harbour such dark thoughts! Don’t give in to negative thinking’. In contrast, light/colour is the glue that holds together an entire constellation of images of beauty, life, vivacity and vitality. Therefore, given the traditional belief (or more precisely superstition, if you will) that widows are dead to the world, Indian widows were (and still are?) not allowed to wear colourful, or shall we say lightful, dresses. These polarized images are brought together, and their evaluative distinctions clearly marked out, in an ancient hymn in which the speaker prays that he be led away from darkness to light and away from death to immortality. This invocation clearly emphasizes what we might call the priority of being (symbolized by light) over non-being (symbolized by darkness).

Let us move a step further, but in a somewhat different direction. We have noted that ‘light’ is usually regarded as the fundamental stuff, and darkness as its negation, lack, denial or contrary. However, this is not to imply that darkness is nonexistent per se. Though it may not have the absolute degree of reality that we would like to impute to light, it still exists somehow, maybe in the shadowlines of life, in the peripheries of brightness, in the penumbras of existence. Think of a hole in your wallet (literally, not metaphorically). In a certain sense, this hole is not something positive, it simply marks an absence in the texture of the wallet. In another sense, however, this lack can have real effects, as for instance when your money falls out through it. Likewise, darkness, which seems to belong to an ambiguous zone of half-reality, has very real consequences, for there is a lot that happens and gets done, as we say, because of the cover that darkness provides us.

Images Of Order

What lies at the deepest level --- order or disorder? It is possible to divide human beings into two groups: in the first are those who believe it is 'order' and the second comprises those who are convinced that it is 'disorder'. Why do we, in any case, use this vocabulary of a deeper or the deepest level? Is not the world just one homogenous uniform expanse to which these contrastive terms do not quite apply? Looking out through the window, we see the sky, the sun, trees, birds, grass, humans moving to and fro, dogs loitering around, and so on. Are they not all at the same level, and, indeed, is not the very attempt to speak of ‘levels’ misleading in this context?

One reason why we do speak in certain contexts of 'levels' (or sometimes 'degrees') of reality is our proneness to illusion, deception and error. When we discover that we had been deceived in believing in the existence of a certain object XY, we believe that somehow XY could not have been truly (or 'really') real. So, for the instance, the traveler in the desert sees a water body in the distance, though later he realizes it was a mirage. However, during the few moments when he was under the deception, the water body was indeed a real object that he perceived. Subsequent reflection leads him to assert that it was, however, not quite real, it is not really ‘out there’. Or, to move into the domain of interpersonal relations, we may arrive at the conclusion that a certain person is cruel and ruthless towards his friends. On knowing him more intimately, we may be forced to revise our perception, and led to believe instead that he is 'really' a kind-hearted person. We then use the contrastive terms 'superficial' and 'deeper': while at the superficial level he seems or appears to be brutal and pitiless, when we dig through the crust of these upper layers and arrive at the subterranean deeper levels, we realise that he is in fact compassionate and benevolent.

Extending this discussion, we may now ask what lies really beneath the world around us. Those in the first camp will reply that there is a deep order, harmony and tranquility underneath the multiplicity, plurality and chaos that strike us on and from every side in our daily lives. This order is not simply a product of our subjective fantasies; in some sense at least it is really out there. For instance, even before human beings appeared on earth, the planets in our solar system moved smoothly in accordance with Newton's law of universal gravitation. It is true that this law was discovered at a certain point in time (in fact, quite late after the emergence of homo sapiens) but the planets, so to speak, did not have to wait for their Newton. And the same applies to many other cosmological processes that would not break down if humans were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow. All these processes can be explained in terms of and subsumed under, it is hoped, some very simple laws, and it is the task of the investigator to unearth these laws. Therefore, according to these investigators, there is no randomness or arbitrariness at the ultimate or deepest level of reality: everything happens for a reason (even if that reason is not known to us, and even if it will forever remain unknown). If some event or phenomenon turns up which is apparently accidental or haphazard, it is believed that someday in the future we shall we able to explain it in terms of a yet undiscovered law. In short, there is nothing that is ab-surd; everything can be, sooner or later, be fit into our conceptual schemes or intellectual frameworks through which we explain why things happen the way they do.

Those in the other group oppose this contention that the world is ultimately explainable through theories which depict reality as an ordered system and encapsulate its structures within their ambit. They contest that the deepest level is a murky zone of the inexplicable, the meaningless, the illogical and the unsystematic. It is true, they hold, that at the superficial levels at which most of us conduct the everyday business of living, there is some degree of order and organization. After all, the building in front of which I am standing does not disappear into thin air for a moment and then reappear the next. Aeroplanes fly through the air along their normal courses; water boils when it is heated to 100°C and human beings die when they are deprived of oxygen. However, our ability to explain such macroscopic phenomena should not lead us to believe that the world is explicable all the way down. We are so habituated to the seeming order around us that we (mistakenly) transpose our images, categories and concepts of order onto the deepest levels of reality where, in fact, there is nothing but sheer flux, change, transition, instability and randomness.

It is possible to look at the concepts of order and disorder not in such oppositional terms but in more dialectical, that is, inter-related terms. In other words, it becomes possible to speak of disorder only against a background of relative order, and vice versa, we can also reflect on order as emerging from a background of relative chaos. Think for a moment of yourself as am omniscient being whose knowledge, in the form of a deep insight, can penetrate into every form and type of reality. What would you see? At the deepest level, you will see a mass of energy within which there are localized points which you might call particles. From the agglomeration of these rapidly moving particles emerges the relatively stable macroscopic objects such as chairs, tables, cars and skyscrapers. Even these entities, however, are not completely orderly or permanent, for they decay with time and pass away.

At the purely conceptual level, nothing much turns on the question of whether the deepest level is characterised by order or disorder: it is not the type of question over which most of us would lose our sleep (in contrast to, say, the question of whether at the deepest level my spouse really loves me or detests me). The socio-political implications, however, of viewing the ‘real world’ in one way and not the other can be significantly different. Those in the second group argue that the consequences of viewing the surface realities of the world as based on a deep underlying order are dogmatism and authoritarianism. Dogmatism, because if you believe that you have found this order, you will be likely to believe that this is the final solution to the grand mystery of existence. There can be no intellectual pilgrimage beyond this full stop. Authoritarianism follows almost immediately from the former stance, because if you hold your view dogmatically, you will perhaps be queasy about the presence of individuals who disagree with you. You may even feel that you have a sort of moral right to inveigh against your opponents whom you believe are misguided and misled, and whom you need to enlighten, even if forcefully.

One example will clarify the matter. The fact of women's oppression cannot be explained simply in terms of malevolent males and submissive females (although there is no shortage of individuals in these two categories); for even though benevolent males and active females are not so hard to come by, the realities of such oppression are still very much with us. Even as you are reading this very sentence, some woman not far from where you are is being beaten to death for not having paid her dowry. Such oppression is, in fact, grounded in some deep beliefs about how the world really is like at the fundamental level. At this level, the duties, roles and functions of men and women are clearly defined and discriminated in terms of an asymmetric power structure, in which authority can flow from men to women, but never in the reverse direction. Here, then, the opponents argue, is one instance of how the belief in ultimate orders (men over women) can have insidious effects.

In contrast, those who believe that there is indeed some primary or essential order retort that these consequences need not follow (although they may in some cases). First, it is possible to believe both that there is some such order at the deep level and that one's conceptions of it are somewhat mistaken and may require revision at some point in the future. So, for instance, one may believe that at the deepest level the world is indeed governed by a set of basic laws, but that our understanding of these laws, and in fact these laws themselves, may undergo significant modification at some point in the future. Second, the correct way to challenge ultimate beliefs, they argue, is not to jettison the entire vocabulary of an ultimate order but to constantly keep on trying to formulate new visions, images or models of order. Suppose, for instance, we claim that the view of the inherent superiority of men over women is mistaken. We may be pressed to state why we believe this is so. If we stated, ‘Oh, that is just what I like to feel’, we would probably receive the reply: ‘Well, you see, you and I are then in the same boat. You feel that men are not inherently superior to women in the sense discussed above, but I feel that they indeed are. It is simply a matter of feelings. You have not given me any reason why I should feel the way that you do on this matter. So let us keep our feelings to ourselves and go our own ways’. To block such a move on the part of this imaginary interlocutor, it is argued that we must seek some justification for our beliefs, even if such justification is not easy to come by and there are endless debates over precisely what counts as a justification. However, to give up the attempt to offer reasons through which we can persuade or attract our interlocutor towards our vision of order (men-with-women instead of men-over-women) is to plunge headlong into an ocean of mere feeling.

The Hole in the Art

The comparison of social networks to a human body is fairly old, and has a lot to be said for it. Just as a properly functioning human body requires the coordination of its different parts, harmonious social existence is predicated on the broad convergence of interests of the numerous individuals who constitute a society. Take, for instance, the human body. If we consider the legs, the arms, the stomach, the chest, and so on, none of them --- taken alone --- can be said to be the individual. Rather, it is their synchronization that makes human life possible, and the breakdown of this organization readily manifests itself in disease and ill-health. Likewise, it can be argued that harmonious social life needs the organization of its disparate elements, none of which on their own can be the social body. This line of reasoning has led some to regard the human body as a simile of the social body: there are internal lines, divisions and boundaries within both of them, but --- when they are functioning properly --- there is also an overarching unity across them in both.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which we may speak of a centre in the human body. Some would call this the heart, others the brain, yet others the mind. Roughly speaking, we may term it consciousness or self-awareness. We are not only aware of the environment external to our bodies but are also aware of our stream of internal life, that is, of our own ideas, sensations, thoughts and images. We know, and we also, at least on some occasions, know that we know. We also have an awareness of somehow presiding over the disparate constituents of our physical body. At times, when we feel dull or lethargic, we may drive our tired limbs to get on to work. In such cases, we become more aware than at other times that we exercise (or can learn to exercise) a sense of control over our limbs. Whether this establishes the dualist thesis that the mind and the body are two distinct substances is not quite the issue at present. There is a grain of truth in this thesis for there are indeed times, say during periods of lethargy or illness, when our body confronts us as almost an alien thing that we have to struggle against.

If there is such a coordinating centre in the human body, could there be likewise an organizing midpoint in the social body? One can think of the latter as a gigantic interconnected web of interpersonal relations and bonds. When one stares at the crowd in a supermarket or a metro station, one can try to imagine the bonds through which every individual is attached to many others. These links are, of course, invisible, and are not quite the chains that tie a prisoner to his cell. Nevertheless, they can be quite as strong as (if not even stronger than) the former; for some people, quite as forbidding and decapacitating, while for others liberating and enabling. Such reflections can lead one to wonder if there is a cosmic spider into which all these bonds flow into, which has spun out these gossamer ties, over-sees their intricate interconnections, and notes (whether with pain, bemusement or indifference) the occasions when they snap.

Now for a slightly different set of thoughts. One of the goals of certain types of practice has been the re-establishment of an underlying union between the inner life and the outer world. The argument is roughly the following. In their deepest essence, humans are integrally connected to the world, but because of various reasons, they have forgotten this umbilical tie, and have become dispersed, scattered, broken and fragmented. They need to recuperate, become con-centrated in themselves, and real-ise once again this fundamental bond. Hence this is not an establishment of something that did not exist earlier, but the re­­-establishment of what they always were/are. The key to this enterprise is to link the inner energies of the human body with the cosmic energies that flow through the totality of everything that exists. Just as there are deep cycles in the natural world, say of the days and the seasons, there are internal rhythms, and lasting harmony is instituted when the two are brought in tandem. In this limiting case, the human body becomes some sort of a super-body, in that it is not limited to the physical, skeletal frame, but becomes so expansive that it is able to receive the inflow/outflow of the entire universe that moves in and out through it. The human body can then be viewed as a channel or a medium for the passage of these deeper forces. It is simultaneously passive and active: passive in that it offers the path of least resistance to them, and active because it is governed by an individual mind that is conscious of this flow. This, then, is another way of looking at the analogy of the human and the social body, without going into the difficult question of whether there lies a cosmic centre that is somehow beyond both these two bodies.

A question mark remains, however, over this attempt. How far can the boundary of the physical body stretch? In the ideal case, as we have noted above, the concord that we speak of is brought about between, on the one hand, the human body, now considered not in its physical limitations but as a sort of a ‘universal’ body, and, on the other, the hidden flows, currents and streams that pervade the universe. However, we live in worlds fractured and disrupted not only by ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, which is manifested in murder, massacre and slaughter, but also in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and hurricanes. Even if we have somehow been thankfully safeguarded from the consequences of these, we are only too aware of the millions of lives which have been marred (sometimes permanently and irreparably) by them. Can we truly attain this deep inner concord in the knowledge that such individuals exist?

One resolution could proceed this way. These disruptions are only superficial, they do not really touch the core. Therefore, the way is open even to these afflicted individuals to re-establish this mysterious harmony of the outer and the inner, and when they succeed in doing so, their earthly travails will become like the distant memories of a half-forgotten or faintly remembered nightmare. Another is somewhat more drastic: as long as I have (fortunately) not been subject to these ills, I need not worry about the existence of others who have been; they do not fall within the circle of my concern or regard; therefore, I can attain this unity at the deepest levels of my being.

Perhaps other resolutions are possible. Or perhaps these resolutions are no more than reminders of the ultimate impossibility to re-solve this matter. In the face of the suffering other who has been incapacitated by various forces from re-establishing the unity that I aspire towards, what am I to do?

The Whole in the Part

A topic that threads itself into some of our conversations is the relationship between the ‘whole’ and its constituent ‘parts’ (even if these precise words are not used). Here is a certain whole, whether it is the society, the family, the nation, or the world, on the one hand, and here are its parts, members, as we say, of the former. What sort of a relationship holds (or should hold) between the former and the latter? Shall we say that the former comes ‘before’ the parts?

A note on this question. When we say that A is ‘before’ B, the word ‘before’ can mean different things in different contexts. So if John finished ahead of David in a bicycle race, we say that John arrived ‘before’ David at the final destination. This is the temporal sense of the term. But there is another, somewhat more intriguing, logical sense. Does the number 1 come before the number 2? Well, in one sense, yes. If you mark the natural numbers on a straight line starting from the point marked zero (where you are placed), the number 1 will be closer to you and the number 2 farther away. Also, a child in primary school would usually be taught the first before the second. But we do not really imagine that before she is introduced to the latter, it does not exist. These two numbers co-exist at the same time, but the former is logically prior to the latter, in the sense that the meaning of the latter can be explicated only the basis of an understanding of the former. Here is another example. Suppose we hear someone refer to a ‘red capybara’. Though we may not know what a capybara is, we can at least presume that it is a red-coloured object. In contrast, consider the phrase ‘capybara red’: unless this is a poetic locution, we would not quite know what sense to make of it. We can explain this distinction by saying that an object is logically prior to its qualities. When we see a ‘red apple’ we see the apple and its redness simultaneously, but the apple is logically prior in that the quality of ‘redness’ cannot be a freely-floating entity haging over it. On the other hand, the apple did not have to be red, it could have green or some other colour.

In certain wholes likewise, the totality is logically prior to its parts. Consider a fully-grown tree, its branches, shoots, leaves, trunk and roots. Which came first, the former or the latter? There is no ‘whole tree’ which is distinct from these constituents and stands over and above them, the ‘whole tree’ is in the latter. If we pluck out some leaves from this totality, what we have is not really a part, because the leaves will shrivel up and cease to exist. In contrast, consider bits and pieces of finely carved wood. A carpenter shapes and moulds them into a chair. In this case, however, we can say that the whole came after its parts. Initially, you had only these parts, and these parts were fashioned into a whole which gradually emerged from them. Morever, they retain their distinctiveness in the whole. For if you were to dismantle the chair, its individual bits would not go out of existence (unlike the leaves in the previous case).

We note, then, a central distinction between these two types of totality. In one, the whole is integrally or, as we sometimes say, organically connected with its parts. So intimate is this union that we can distinguish between the whole and the parts only in thought, but never in reality. It does not make much sense to speak of a ‘leaf’ in abstraction, a leaf can only be a leaf of a tree; likewise for its roots and shoots.

In the other, the whole is mechanically built out of fragments which are the parts, so that there is a temporal gap between the former and the latter. Also, even if one of the part is detached from the whole, it retains its original qualities. The armchair broken off from a chair remains a piece of wood; it does not disintegrate into nothingness. There is a popular way of putting this distinction: the whole is ‘larger’ than the parts, in one case and the whole is ‘nothing but’ the parts, in the other.

Both these examples are drawn from the inanimate and the non-human animate worlds. What happens, however, when we seek to apply these considerations to human social existence? For example, which kind of a totality is society or the family? Is it a totality like a tree which dwells in its parts, or is it one like a chair which can be dismantled into its parts? Is there one life that flows through and pervades all its levels and strata?

Responses will vary from one individual to another; depending on various factors such as age, class, race, affluence, gender and so on. For instance, some groups may feel that they are deeply integrated into the social whole, but could fail to see that many others, who have been cast to the social periphery, experience this whole not as a benign but as a malign force. Whether it is the helots, the slaves, the proletariat or the untouchables, the story is broadly the same in its outline. It is not uncommon for the powerful to try to legitimise their sectional interests by putting forward their views as being in the best interests of all (whereas under ‘all’ they should properly include only themselves).

This is to point out that this question, ‘what type of a social formation do we aspire towards?’, is integrally connected to our understanding of a social whole. Is it one that is structured by relations of domination and oppression or is one that is truly accomodating of divergent forces, interests and opinions? At times, it is hard to discriminate between the two; which is perhaps why the question of whether social existence is a boon or a bane continues to be such a hotly debated topic.