Soliloquy of Ingenito
Why this cold panic wave has been boiling down deep inside my belly and weaken my soul? Is it the panic of death, the inevitable and unavoidable conqueror of life of the beggar and emperor, saint and the sinner, child and the old aged?
Knowing well that it is unavoidable, then why my damn mind refuses to accept the reality and trembles before death? Is it because my mind is conditioned to like sweet lie called Life and reject bitter truth called Death?
Is it the wage of sin or the bitter price everyone who eats the forbidden fruit has to pay?
Blessed are those who live under the bliss of ignorance. I envy the fundamentalists – Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists etc. – who live without fear or panic about death and the pangs of uncertainty of afterlife. To them sufferings and pain in this world are but the training that moulds them to accept the everlasting after life in a physical heaven with a personal God in heaven that is populated by Jehovah, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Mother Mary, Mr. Joseph, prophets, saints and priest class for Catholics, Jehovah, Holy Spirit, Jesus and gospel preachers for protestants, Jehovah, Abraham, Moses, all Patriarchs, Prophets, and Kings without Jesus, Mary etc. for the Jews, Prophet Mohammed, Caliphs, and saints for Muslims (and son in law of the prophet), big, medium and small statured Gods for Hindus along with grandpas, grandmas, cousins, nephews, nieces of their respective families.
What a bliss!
The bliss of immortality. Why should they fret and foam about pains and sufferings? This life is not an illusion but as authentic as mountains and seas. So also the afterlife.
They never ask for the meaning in life. Let Viktor. K. Frankl fret about search for meaning in life.
To the fundamentalists the meaning of life is simple. Eat, procreate to propagate their faith, worship their respective Gods and kill, if needed people from other faith, then die to reach heaven where milk and honey flows eternally for Moslems (also abundant dates,), a peg of whisky or brandy for Christians, Palestine wine and cake for Jews, milk, honey, nectar and all types of food for Hindus and so on.
Why this bliss?
Have they not eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge like me?
What have I gained by eating the forbidden fruit? I became the emperor of my Kingdom of Mind.
Now age has overtaken my dreams, withered my ambitions and existential questions about the vanity of human life, uncertainty of after life, imminent death awaiting my door steps are slowly but steadily eroding the foundations of my rational kingdom.
I crashed through the iron gates of life, bleeding from the torn fleshes and bruises. My heart is aching and a drowsy numbness is paining my senses as if I am drinking the poison of life. My persistent search to find answer to the fundamental problems of existence is still eluding me as I find myself like a child stranded in a festival ground divorced from its mother. I am crying like the child in agony, whimpering in loneliness with nobody to console my cry and comfort my sufferings.
I am walking along the dark valley of death with the cold but ruthless shadows of the wings of the angel of death constantly enveloping my being. My tormented soul is willing to cry “Eloi, Eloi Lamma Sabathkani”- the cry of Jesus on the cross before his death. But my agnostic mind, though bruised and battered, oscillates between doubt and seeming faith or “to believe that it believes”
What a spiritual dilemma and torment! Does it not the agony that Dr. Faust experienced after his contract with Mephistopheles (Devil) was over and death knocked his doors?
What is God, what are the qualities and attributes of the God? Does God exist at all?
What is the meaning of the solacing words of Jesus” I am in the God and the God is in me. Hence if you are deeply rooted in me then my father will be in you”
How dare he called the God his Father? Is the God of Jesus merely a concern for mankind called Love or an abstract concept? How then can he called him Father? Is it not an authentic reality? If so, is it a personal being?
His prayer starts with “Our Father thou art in Heaven”
He never claimed “My Father thou art in Heaven” Does it not mean that His Father is my Father also? His God is my God also.
My rational mind failed me before God and the perennial existential questions tormenting mankind ever since mind came into being. Why the damn mind came into being? What a bliss life was, is and will be had human beings also lived, live and will live without mind!
The animals do not have religion, God and panic of death and after life. They never consult a psychiatrist to get sedatives and tranquilizers to calm down the tormented mind to rest.
Why? They have no mind and hence they are blessed with no religion and God. To them birth, life in the earth and death are experiences, not bothered about after life and immortality.
Evolution of God is an attempt to find out what is Truth or God. Truth is not confined to the corridors of religion or philosophy alone. As the author of Genesis exclaims; “God is revealed in nature, history, space and time”
Hence an integrated approach is required. It is time to synthesize religion, philosophy, science, and history to find out the Truth.
Various attempts have been made by great enlightened minds all over the civilized world in the past to find out what Truth is; Dammam in Taoism, Torah in Judaism, Logos in Greek philosophy and western philosophy, Prakirithi and Purush in Indian philosophy are such examples.
Evolution of God encompasses everything under the sky to find out Truth.
I do not know whether this approach is right or wrong. I do not claim that I have found out the Truth. This is only a search.
Science and Technology has been progressing in leap and bounds. It even dares to challenge God and the Creation theory. Two such important discoveries are shaking the very foundation of religion from its foundations. One is the discovery of the so called God’s particle or Higgs Boson particle. The second one is Book of Life that catalogues the gene sequence of all living beings. Coordinator of the research team of Book of Life, Dr. Warren Bret has openly challenged God that there is no need for God to create life as he himself shall be able to create life through genes.
Scientists now proclaim that they have discovered the mystery behind creation in the Cern laboratory. Stephen Hawkins even went to the extent of declaring that the Universe has everything in it and that there is no need for God to create life.
This emerging trend in Science and Technology heralds the impending spiritual catastrophe looming large along the horizon of the human civilization. I have a fear that Science and Technology seems to vindicate the declaration of Frederick Nietzsche that God is dead. That God is dead, if taken seriously, will breed nihilism in man as he narrows down the distance to his grave yard in his old age.
Is it true that the kingdom of mind or reason is ultimate and God is but a projection of mind, not a reality?
We seek Truth in fragments not in its totality. Knowledge is compartmentalized and dismembered in text books. We get a lot of information in educational institutions. Do we get a glance of Truth in the educational institutions? Then where shall we find Truth? Shall we wait with faith that Life will unlock its lips and enlighten our hearts with Truth through our experience?
Or shall we unite all the branches of knowledge into a single system of thought and search the Truth there?
Am I qualified enough to claim that I have found God through the highway of the Kingdom of Reason. Shall Reason have a glimpse of a faint ray of God?
Is God an experience experienced in the stillness of mind which is the true prayer? Jesus claimed “I am in my Father and the Father is in me” Again He claims that “Nobody knows the Father except the Son.” He made this claim after His sojourn in the wilderness for forty days of stillness of the mind. After that He was enlightened and had the experience of the God in himself. Do I have that experience, certainly not? Then how shall I dare to tread the path of wisdom where angels walk.
Let me muster my courage and honestly question the role of social, cultural and political institutions that are still believed to protect the individuals and families against social, economic and political injustices. Let me point out my accusing finger against three institutions that are quite insensitive to the fall of human beings into the bottomless bottom of the burning boilers of hell. It is not a physical hell with tongues of flame scorching the flesh but the vast spiritual emptiness that drives a cold chilling panic down through the spines of the sinners.
Who, then is a sinner?
Am I then a sinner? Yes! I am.
Anybody who is divorced of his essence is a sinner. What, then is the essence of a human being? Love is the essence of the very first human being, say the first allegorical representative of humanity, Mr. Adam. He was filled with love like a child before his fall. The depth of his love was such that he was not even conscious of his nakedness. The moment he was conscious of his nakedness, he felt guilty of his nakedness.
Why this happened? He ate the forbidden fruit. The fruit of knowledge. In other words, mind came into being. With mind, the embryo of reason was born. He distinguished between good and evil. The child has no good and no evil. Everything it does is no longer an act of sin. The child is full of love.
The mystery of life is that Adam has been falling and falling since his creation. Every child becomes a sinner once it inherits the kingdom of mind. It is appropriate to remember the words of Jesus here” unless you become a child, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of God”
Is mind then is evil and it begets a sinner? It may be so. Jesus made another observation “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”
Does it mean that mind is the flesh? It is the mind that created the religion, the ethics, the God, the heaven and hell and what not.
The child has no religion, no God, no heaven or hell. The life is its religion and the world is its kingdom of God.
Was not I also born like an angel with my heart overflowing with love? Did not my heart vibrated with the throbbing of the heart of my mother and filled her breast with milk? It was my love that transformed briefly the heart of my mother into an abode of love and not the other way round. My mother did not have a heart of a child. She was a fallen Eve before my birth but I restored her from the fall and breathed into her nostrils the fragrance of love and opened the doors of Kingdom of God to her for a while.
But soon I was ashamed of her nakedness and she was ashamed of my nakedness. Why this happened? I experienced the fall of Adam or I lost my Love the moment I gained my mind.
The eternal struggle between essence and existence started thenceforth for every human being. In the words of Jesus, the struggle between the willing spirit and the weak flesh.
Is flesh weak? If so, then why the Spirit is not able to vanquish it? The flesh is extremely strong. This is what Jesus means by weak. The human mind simply overwhelms his essence through logic, philosophies, scientific enquiries, agnostic self-doubts. The sensuous pleasures of the flesh overshadows the essence through the above tricky knowledge sectors
Yes it is in this context, I point my accusing fingers on three important socio cultural institutions.
They are; first, the family, second the religion and the third educational institutions. They are established by the mind to protect the human beings from hell and ensure his entry into heaven. Are they not?
Do they perform such roles? Are they not quite insensitive to the spiritual catastrophe tormenting the souls of every sinner? Are they not fomenting the spiritual catastrophe and condemn every sinner as an evil?
Let me reflect my life from the child hood till now.
I was born of an “orthodox” catholic family. My father was an ex seminarian who was a committed Roman Catholic. A Bible reading, church going, ethics preaching pious man. Then why did he left the holy seminary life and opted the nuptial life. The dirty guy wanted sex, alcohol and tobacco. But he did not have the moral purity and courage to accept the truth.
The fall of Adam was symbolic. It was not one single fall but a recurring and continuous event throughout the history of mankind. This happened to my unholy father. Lie and self-cheating are the tools he employed to justify his exit from seminary life. In his own words” in the seminary, they served beef every day. I developed allergy to beef as I developed sores all over my body like Job. So I had to leave with a sad heart.”
Who will believe such a lie?
As a child, I still remember, truth escaped my lips and asked him why he did not share this problem with his superiors and asked for vegetarian food. He was so furious that his falsehood was brought out naked by a small child, that too his own off spring. He was outrageous and thrashed me psychologically with these words” Devil has entered into your heart. How dare you say that I disobey my superiors? You devils do not know the seminary discipline”
I felt guilty for the first time for speaking the truth. Did I talk the truth or as my father accused that the devil in me talked?
The devil in my father entered into my innocent heart and started corrupting my soul. “Don’t talk even if it is truth or false” was my first lesson.
Jesus said somewhere in one of his Gospels “even Satan will quote the Scriptures”. Yes! He quoted Bible to justify his alcohol consumption. St. Paul was his favorite more than Jesus, because St. Paul quoted consumption of alcohol quite often, so he claimed For example “wine taken in due measure gives health and mirth”
“Do not always drink water, drink wine occasionally”. He did not stop that with himself. Like early missionaries and present day Pentecost, he brainwashed everybody who contacted him including me at the age of ten. Alcohol is no sin. What a beautiful theology for a ten year old child.
Disaster struck me first in the form of Peter, a new occupant to our neighborhood house along with his family. He was so attached to me, may be due to my white skin. He took me to his room! Alas!!
He was a homo sexual pervert. How could I tell the Bible reading and ethics speaking father about this. Every Saturday, I went duly for confession and faithfully disclosed all my sins, say stealing jaggery, five paisa from the mustard seed container of mother, telling lies to my brother etc. etc. but this unholy relationship. So terrified was I of Jesus and the long bearded old man called Jehovah and saints. The then parish priest was also a tough guy who would ask me recite full rosary three times for stealing five paisa coin and two times for stealing jaggery – all kneeling in front of the statue of Jesus.
How could I tell this heinous sin to him?
Family and Church deserted me and condemned me into the hands of the homo sexual pervert for five long years. He taught me to masturbate and curse God in filthy languages.
The beautiful home and the Church soon crumbled into nothing to me except stone and cement structures. But fear of punishment in a burning boiler after death created conflict in me all these years. I developed an aversion towards Bible and Jesus who were out to punish me and judge me as a sinner. A small respite when I finished my school. Peter’s family left for some unknown place.
My only emotional comfort, my mother, died when I entered the College. I did have a close friend who filled the gap of my mother. He was as equally a homo sexual pervert as Peter. He introduced me into the world of drugs.
Family, Church and educational institutions lost their credibility and I lost my faith in God, home and humanity. The greatest casualty a teen ager could withstand.
I walked along the highway of sin as a recluse addicted to drugs, alcohol, and masturbation without any mission focus nor any faith in after life. Half-baked understanding of Karl Marx further complicated my life. The contribution of Karl Marx was instilling nihilism in me that destroyed any semblance of meaning in life. Neither Church, nor my home nor the college pointed out the deep love for the marginalized poor and their sufferings that inspired Marx to revolt against Capitalism and Church.
I was condemned to find a meaning for my life by myself. Hindu temples, Hindu Ashram lives further confused my fragile hold on life. How can an indiscipline life whipped by evil thoughts and negative emotions be able to grasp the positive life giving messages of any religious system?
This is the spiritual catastrophe. I was condemned to undergo all along. Jean Paul Sartre seemed to be right to me. “Man is condemned to be free”
No institutions nor any human heart taught me that man is blessed to be free.
This was the darkness of my life. I had been constantly hearing the knock of death at my door. Every knock destabilized me. I lamented that my fate would help me find refuge and get comfort under the God of my childhood days. But that God is no more in my mind. Marx, Bertrand Russell, Frederick Nietzsche had long back destroyed that God. Nihilism is slowly enveloping my being. I feel like a child divorced from the comfortable hug of its mother and thrown into the trackless vast desert in the dark.
Is it true that knowledge is sin? Have I acquired knowledge or have I corrupted knowledge through misinterpreting its essence? If not why death scares me? Why the dark shadows of the wings of the Angel of Death send chill through my spine?
Is there a God? Is the tiny lump of flesh in my head capable of scanning and understanding the vast expanse of the Universe which houses the innumerable galaxies, stars, black holes, dark energy, dark matter and the unseen and unknown cosmic force that does not play dice but keeps them in order?
Am I not a grain of sand in the vast expanse of the Thar and Gobi desert?
Emptiness and void
I do not know whether this approach is right or wrong. I do not claim that I have found out the Truth. This is only a search.
The prophecy of Noah Yuval Harare that the great pandemic of the third millennium will be suicide stands a good chance to be a reality.
Is it true that the kingdom of mind or reason is ultimate and God is but a projection of mind, not a reality? –
Let me put aside of the search for God for a moment and focus of Life. What is Life? Does life consists of eating, working, having sex, begetting children and die? Is that the meaning of life? If so, do not animals and birds do the same thing? Is there a meaning in life beyond that?
I know that my days are numbered like all my brethren that are inhaling breath and exhaling it out. But I see chaos and social injustice everywhere. Brother is fighting against brother and sister is fighting against sister to possess as much material as possible from the creation of God – the earth which is as miniscule as a grain of sand against the vast unknown fathomless expanse called Universe. We know very well that possessing wealth in this world in a brief span of time, say 80 to 90 years, is like a forgotten dream while in the death bed.
The agony of leaving the wealth, the loss of pleasures in life, the permanent separation from the people whom we believed that they loved us and we loved them torment our heart as we gasp for breath in the death bed. We witnessed such a horrible scenario in the lives of our forefathers, our reasoning mind forewarns of its reenactment in our lives also. Still we fight for wealth, involve in fleeting sensual pleasures as an everlasting reality, kill our brothers and rape our sisters in the name of the dirty concept called patriotism.
But death proves again and again that they are but illusions of life. Then what is the Ultimate Reality. My pleasant and fragrant youth is gone. I am now a withered rose and the distance between my grave yard and my remaining days in this world is getting narrower and narrower with every rotation of the earth which we call day and night. What remains from the illusion of life is panic caused by uncertainty of future after death. Is there a life after death? Answer to this question is still eluding the scientists, philosophers and God men alike. They give only assumptions and dreams which my reasoning mind refuses to accept and rest in peace.
I rely more on the Kingdom of Mind and as I am walking on the Highway of Reason, I am all alone walking along the valley of spiritual death with the shadow of the Angel of Death constantly hovering over my head with panic gripping my belly. I see my graveyard yonder. Will life cease to be like a bubble and what happens to me after death? Will I dissolve in the Black Hole and get lost in the eternity without any trace or will I go to a new vast planet where honey flows with Yahweh , Jesus, Mary and other saints sitting on thrones and my father, mother and other relatives waiting for me with cheer and everlasting happiness. Oh! What a blessing was the bliss ignorance.
Is religion an invention of mind to withstand spiritual collapse caused by nihilism and existential frustration? If so well and good. But is not religion the cause for all wars and social injustices caused to mankind? I appease my God through certain rituals and get absolved of my sin. How many persons I have met whose hearts are filled with love for humanity but they do not have religion. Are they sinners? How do they withstand such existential agonies and frustrations?
Is God then is an experience experienced in the stillness of mind which is the true prayer. How to experience that? Is there any methodology or technique?. Does love require such a methodology or technique to learn and practice?
Like King Lear, I am crying “ I am more sinned against than sinning”. What caused my sin? Myself and my weak flesh? It is written “When sin abounds, grace intervenes”. Why did not Grace intervened to save me from my sins – kilos of marijuana, alcohol, tobacco, masturbation, prostitutes, fucking and what not? I feel like crying from the cross “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?
But my rational mind still refuse to accept a God that cares me like mother with flesh and bones, a God who hears my agonizing cries and saves me.
This is the spiritual collapse and the spiritual holocaust the world has been heading towards. What is happening to me is bound to happen to the children tomorrow in massive numbers. My heart trembles as another social devil has also joined the fray to annihilate the residue of spiritualism from the face of earth.
That Devil is social media – websites, face books, WhatsApp, Televisions – are polluting the soul of the children right from teen age. The three social institutions are getting more and more corrupted and becoming weaker than before to protect the future generation.
This is not a curse but a prophecy.
Is there not a way out?
Of course YES. JESUS!
It is high time to dig the grave of Jesus and bring him back alive through an interactive and participatory dialogue to involve the youth and adults who are on the verge of impending spiritual collapse.
This Dialogue on the Evolution of god is not a scholastic attempt to solve the theological or philosophical questions tormenting humanity. That is the business of scholars.
But this is a bold and honest attempt to accept TRUTH as it is in the light of Jesus. Let the heart participate and articulate in this Dialogue not the brain.
Whom shall I find solace by sharing my agonizing and turbulent heart? Innoxus, my other half, you alone shall help me to discover myself.