Two summers ago when I went to Finland to visit my family for the first time after moving to the monastery, my 11-year-old cousin didn’t know what to think of me. I was different now, a stranger. After a long while she came to me, and looking suspiciously at me from under her lowered eyebrows, she asked:
Do you believe in God?
I knew her mom has similar antagonistic attitudes towards religion as my parents, so I was well aware of where she was coming from. I tried to explain how I don’t believe in some old bearded guy sitting on a cloud and how most people have a very naive understanding of God, but how much philosophy could I give to a pre-teenager? She looked at me kind of pitifully and added: I don’t believe in it. I think it’s dumb.
The word God has such a rock sack of bad connotations on its shoulders. I still feel uncomfortable saying that I believe in God. I don’t use the word when I write my blogs. It’s so loaded with all kinds of extensions, like conservative ethical and political views, stagnant and blind approach to reality and self-denying, superstitious existence, to name a few. I just can’t relate with that. “God” reminds me of some distant impersonal order-carrier and a punisher who rewards our material desires if we are nice and hales us with fire and brimstone if we sin. And when we finally enter the kingdom of God after being a good boy and suppressing our desires, then we’ll be free to enjoy heavenly pleasures without repercussions, forever. And this God guy is somewhere there in the background, providing for our happy life. Where’s the spirituality in this? Where’s the unmotivated sacrifice and surrender?
God becomes our pizza taxi.
The one thing that really caught my attention in the eastern spiritual traditions was the aspiration and realization of unity with reality. We are essentially consciousness and so is existence. But at the same time complete loss of identity and merging into reality went against my intuition of what existence is about. This dilemma of unity and individuality was perfectly harmonized when I found Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Its main philosophical principle is called ‘inconceivable simultaneous oneness and difference’. It relieved me of the simplistic and unsatisfying idea that God is separate and far from us, and at the same time it allowed an identity.
It’s such an incredible, far out idea that reality is a person. Think about it. What makes you see reality ultimately as material, and that consciousness is just a byproduct of random mixing of matter?
It’s because that’s how the everyday common sense perceives existence. But could it be that we are just blind and ignorant to what’s really going on? Why do you trust your insignificant, faulty senses so much? Because that’s all you got?
You may say that it’s a natural tendency of the human consciousness to reflect his own awareness into impersonal, dead things, and the whole concept of good is just an extension of this. The whole God concept is a perfect psychological, philosophical and political grudge for people who can’t face reality as it is. But why couldn’t it be the other way around, that we have the ability to be conscious because we are a part of the reality that is aware? If we look at personality from this angle, it’s not naive at all to think that there is an absolute identity. If that’s what you mean when you ask if I believe in God, then I do. But if you mean those simplistic fabrications of materially conditioned minds that turn reality into a grumpy, bigoted old guy, I’ll be the biggest atheist you’ll find. I think it’s dumb, too.
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