#4 Rendezvous with God

How I found theism in a scientific experiment

After being enriched with the realisations of believing vs. blindly following, I started reading the Bhagvat - Gita - as it is by Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON). It was the most widely available Gita, the one I had read before. But this time, the experience was completely different: the things I had blindly believed before, the invisible truths which lay bare in the open had suddenly become visible. For instance, its Foreword said, 

the misguided student of Bhagavad-gita will certainly be bewildered on the path of spiritual guidance and will not be able to go back home, back to Godhead.

It went on to press for a ‘submissive spirit’ and I couldn’t help but ask aren’t the brightest students in the class the ones who ask the most curious questions? But the spiritual hell of becoming a sinner by not accepting the truth along with the ISKONite propaganda as presented by them made me wonder about the concept of God, how it’s such a powerful tool that can make a perfectly rational person defy all reason just because so and so said, “your God said so.” Osama Bin Laden used it to his interest in spreading Islamic Terrorism. Mother Teresa used it to her interest in converting people to Christianity. And Prabhupada was using it to his interest of fulfilling another personal ambition. It works every single time, this idea of God, a magician who’ll punish you if you don’t do it right and what is right? Well, here’s an old holy scripture where God said this and it meant this. These fears are very easily planted by a simple play of words but why do people believe in a God they’ve never seen or heard from? You tell a person to not eat junk food because it’s bad for his health, he would try to abide by it but fail every now and then. You attach it to God and sin and he’d never touch it again. Such is the power of this imaginary God which never fails to astonish me. 

While growing up, I saw my parents doing their morning and evening prayers without fail every single day. Naturally, they encouraged us as children to do the same. Being a sceptic, I never really got the point of it. In my superior intellectualism, I’d look down upon them for being superstitious, for not understanding that the body is equal to the sum of its parts and nothing more. 

But as I saw my father, going through the hardest times in his career, times where I personally felt I would have given up. His face always had an ethereal calm branching from his immovable faith in his God, giving him the strength to jump every hurdle that came his way. I realised that there really was something to this Godliness. But the reasoning scientist in me wasn’t caving in, I decided to do an experiment:

• Believe in the magician

• Pray every day for thirty days

• Assess the outcome

• Accept/reject theism based on the outcome

Believing was the hardest part but once I was able to surrender, I opened an enormous chasm of strength. That’s when I experienced the true power of this idea: to be able to believe in God, the most powerful creature and to believe he’s walking by your side, helping you, guiding you and being with you was a beautiful blessing. Every morning, if you reinstate that, then the tasks of the day become much easier to do. Everything in the world seems plausible if you wholeheartedly believe in it without a speck of scepticism and even five minutes of a truthful prayer can leave you recharged. I realised that the difference it can make in one’s life was enough to make it or break it. So, I chose to accept theism because it was a positive-sum game. It can bring discipline to life, give strength in the hardest of times and make you the king of your life instead of being the victim. Whoever invented this concept must have been a genius in behavioural psychology. 

But everything has a flip side, when someone can give you infinite strength, then the fear of losing that source of strength or worse the fear of being punished by the source can cause havoc in your life. Anyone who understands these granularities can easily exploit people to fulfil his personal ambition. It has happened hundreds of times before and was happening yet again by means of this unholy book, Bhagwad-Gita-as-it-is. So even though the smart attempt by the author to instil fear within me and thousands of other readers by taking advantage of our conditioned minds did form a tiny knot in my heart, but I refused to be psyched by him. I don’t know if it will be wrong to not accept what doesn’t make logical sense to me but even if it is wrong, then it will be my wrong. 

With that belief in my heart, I discarded that version and kept searching for the most neutral, unbiased translation of the Gita until I found one. 

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Next One - #5 Do we have any desires for ourselves?