THE CASE FOR GOD

THE CASE FOR GOD
KAREN ARMSTRONG

[KAREN ARMSTRONG - to begin with was a Roman Catholic nun. She left the same to teach English in Oxford before taking up full time writing. Today she is the author of 15 bestselling titles. The ‘Case for God’ is the most prominent among them]

In the book “The Case for God” (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-099-52403-8), Karen Armstrong takes us through the Original concept of God of various cultures across the Globe, its evolution into personal Gods and the thoughts of Godlessness (atheism) and the impact of Science on God concept। The author has painstakingly gone thru thousands of documents of myriad cultures of the world to get their views. As in the beginning of the book, she ends it with the fact that the concept of God as envisaged by the ancient civilizations fits the definition (or is it the lack of it?) of God much better than the later definitions of the same by the plethora of religions and their denominations that exist today. She emphasizes that God is a transcendent mystery that could never be revealed and is an all-encompassing one that lay beyond any doctrinal formulation. She also explains the way described by various religions for us mortal being to achieve the divinity that would eventually be part of the ultimate transcendent reality - SR Nair

Excerpts from the book

ORIGINAL INDO-ARYAN VIEW:
By the tenth century BCE, when some of the Aryans had settled in the Indian subcontinent, they gave a new name to the ultimate reality; Brahman. Brahman was the unseen principle that enabled all things to grow and flourish. It was a power that that was higher, deeper, and more fundamental than the Gods. Because it transcended the limitations of personality, it would be entirely inappropriate to pray to Brahman or expect it to answer your prayers. Brahman was that sacred energy that held the disparate elements of the world together and prevented it from falling apart. Brahman had an infinitely greater degree of reality than mortal creatures, whose lives were limited by ignorance, sickness, pain and death. One could never define Brahman because language refers to only the individual and Brahman was ‘the all’; it was everything that existed as well as the inner meaning of all existence.
Even though human beings could not think about the Brahman, they had intimations of it in the hymns of the Rig veda, the most important of the Aryan scriptures. The Aryans do not seem to have thought of Brahman readily in images. One of their chief symbols of the divine was sound, whose power and intangible quality seemed a particularly apt embodiment of the all-pervasive Brahman. When the priest chanted the Vedic hymns, the music filled the air and entered the consciousness of the congregation, so that they felt surrounded by and infused with divinity. These hymns, revealed to ancient seers, did not speak of doctrines that the faithful were obliged to believe, but referred to the old myths in an allusive, riddling fashion because the truth they were trying to convey could not be contained in a neatly logical presentation. Their beauty shocked the audience into a state of awe, wonder, fear and delight.
During the tenth century BCE, the Brahmin priests developed the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic religious discourse. The contestants began by making a retreat in the forest, where they performed spiritual exercises, such as fasting and breathe control, that concentrated their minds and induced a different type of consciousness. Then the contest could begin. Its goal was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, in the process pushing language as far as it could go, until it finally broke down and people became vividly aware of the ineffable, the other. The challenger asked an enigmatic question and his opponent had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced his opponents to silence – and in that moment of silence, when language revealed its inadequacy, the Brahman was present; it became manifest only in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech.

The ultimate reality was not a personalized god, therefore, but a transcendent mystery that could never be revealed.

As life became more settled, people had the leisure to develop a more interior spirituality. The Indian Aryans, always in the vanguard of religious change, pioneered this trend, achieving the ground-breaking discovery that the Brahman, being itself, was also the ground of the human psyche. The transcendent was neither external nor alien to humanity but the two were inextricable connected. This insight would become central to the religious quest in all the major traditions. In the early Upanishads, composed in the seventh century BCE, the search for this sacred self (atman) became central to Vedic spirituality. The Upanishadic sages did not ask their disciples to ‘believe’ this but put them through an initiation whereby their apprentices discovered it for themselves in a series of spiritual exercises that made them look at the world differently. This practically acquired knowledge brought with it a joyous liberation from fear and anxiety.

The Upanishadic sages were among the first to articulate another of the universal principles of religion. The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed and self- preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are engrained in our pain. (The Greeks would call this process kenosis, ‘emptying’). Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate other, draw attention to your unique and special qualities and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace. The Upanishads were written at a time when the Aryan communities were in the early stages of urbanization; reason had enabled them to master their environment. But the sages reminded them that there were some things – old age, sickness and death – that they could not control; some things – such as their essential self – that lay beyond their intellectual grasp. When as a result of carefully crafted spiritual exercises, people learned not only to accept but to embrace this unknowing, they found that they experienced a sense of release.

The sages began to explore the complexities of the human psyche with remarkable sophistication; they had discovered the unconscious long before Freud. But the atman, the deepest core of their personality, eluded them. Precisely because it was identical with the Brahman, it was indefinable. The atman had nothing to do with our normal psycho-mental states and bore no resemblance to anything in our ordinary experience, so it could only be spoken of in negative terms. As the seventh-century sage Yajnavalkya explained: ‘About this Self (atman) one can only say “not . ... not” (neti. . . neti). He says “You can’t see the Seer who does the seeing. You can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving. This Self within the All (Brahman) is this atman of yours”.

Even now, if a man knows ‘I am brahman’ he becomes this whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (atman)

One of the principal technologies that enabled people to achieve this self-forgetfulness was yoga. Unlike the yoga practiced in Western gyms today, it was not an aerobic exercise but a systematic breakdown of instinctive behavior and normal thought patterns. It was mentally demanding and, initially, physically painful. The yogin had to do the opposite of what came naturally. He sat so still that he seemed more like a plant or a statue than a human being; he controlled his respiration, one of the most automatic and essential of our physical functions, until he acquired the ability to exist for long periods without breathing at all. He learned to silence the thoughts that coursed through his mind and concentrate ‘on one point’ for hours at a time. If he persevered, he found that he achieved dissolution of ordinary consciousness that extracted the ‘I’ from his thinking.

To this day, yogins find that these disciplines, which have measurable physical and neurological effects, evoke a sense of calm, harmony and equanimity that is comparable to the effect of music। There is a feeling of expansiveness and bliss, which yogins regards as entirely natural, possible for anybody who has the talent and application. As the ‘I’ disappears, the most humdrum objects reveal wholly unexpected qualities, since they are no longer viewed through the distorting filter of one’s own egotistic needs and desires. When she meditated on the teachings of her guru, a yogin did not simply accept them notionally but experienced them so vividly that her knowledge was, as the texts say, ‘direct’; bypassing the logical processes like any practically acquired skill, it has become part of her inner world.
But yoga also had an ethical dimension। A beginner was not allowed to perform a single yogic exercise until he has completed an intensive moral programme। Top of the list of this requirements was ‘ahimsa,’ - harmlessness’. A yogin must not swat a mosquito, make an irritable gesture or speak unkindly to others but should maintain constant affability to all, even the most annoying monk in the community. Until his guru was satisfied that this had become second nature, a yogin could not even sit in the yogic position. A great deal of the aggression, frustration, hostility and rage that mars our peace of mind is the result of the thwarted egotism, but when the aspiring yogin became proficient in this selfless equanimity, the texts tell us that he would experience ‘indescribable job’.

THE BUDDIST VIEWS:
The Buddha had little time for theological speculation. In fact one of his monks was a philosopher, instead of getting on with his yoga, constantly pestered the Buddha about metaphysical questions: “Was there a God? Had the world been created in time or had it always existed?” The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow and refused medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from. He would die before he got this perfectly useless information. What difference would it make to discover that a god had created the world? Pain, hatred, grief and sorrow would still exist. These issues were fascinating, but the Buddha refused to discuss them because they were irrelevant: “My disciples, they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana”, he said.

The Buddha always refused to define Nirvana, because it could not be understood notionally and would be inexplicable to anybody who did not undertake his practical regimen of meditation and compassion. But anybody who did commit him/ herself to the Buddhist way of life could attain Nirvana, which was an entirely natural state. Sometimes, however, Buddhists would speak of Nirvana using the same kind of imagery as monotheists use of God: it was ‘ the Truth’, ‘the Other Shore’, ‘Peace’. ‘the Everlasting’, and ‘the Beyond’. Nirvana was still center that gave meaning to life, an oasis of calm, and a source of strength that you discovered in the depths of your own being. In purely mundane terms, it was ‘nothing’, because it corresponded to no reality that we could recognize in our ego-dominated existence. But those who had managed to find this sacred peace discovered that they lived an immeasurably richer life. There was no question of ‘believing’ in the existence of Nirvana or taking it ‘on faith’. The Buddha had no time for abstract doctrinal formulations divorced from action. It could not lead to enlightenment because it amounted to an abdication of personal responsibility. Faith meant trust that Nirvana existed and a determination to realize it by every practical means in one’s power.

ORIGINAL CHINESE VIEW:

The Chinese called it the Tao, the fundamental ‘Way’ of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Tao had no qualities, no form; it could be experienced but never seen; it was not a god; it pre-dated Heaven and Earth, and was beyond divinity. You could not say anything about the Tao, because it transcended ordinary categories: it was more ancient than antiquity and yet it was not old; because it went far beyond any form of ‘existence’ known to humans, it was neither being nor non-being. It contained all the myriad patterns, forms and potential that made the world the way it was and guided the endless flux of change and becoming that we see all around us. It existed at a point where all the distinctions that characterize our normal modes of thought became irrelevant.

Confucius called it ren but refused to define it (later identified with ‘benevolence’) because it was incomprehensible to a person who had not yet achieved it. But the ordinary meaning of ren in Confucius’ time was ‘human being’. Ren is sometime translated into English as ‘human-heart-edness’. Holiness was not ‘supernatural’, therefore, but a carefully crafted attitude that, as later Confucian explained, refined humanity and elevated it to ‘godlike’ (shen) plane.

ORIGINAL MIDDLE EAST VIEW:

In the Middle East, the region in which the Westerns monotheisms would develop later, there was a similar notion of the ultimate. In Mesopotamia, the Akkadian word for ‘divinity’ was ilam, a radiant power that transcended any particular deity. The gods were not the source of ilam but, like everything else, could only reflect it. The chief characteristic of this ‘divinity’ was ellu (‘holiness’), a word that had connotations of ‘brightness’, ‘purity’ and ‘luminosity’. The gods were called the ‘holy ones’ because their symbolic stories, effigies and cultus evoked the radiance of ellu for their worshippers. The people of Israel called their patronal deity, the ‘holy one’ of Israel, Elohim, a Hebrew variant on ellu that summed up everything that the divine could mean for human beings. But holiness was not confined to the gods. Anything that came into contact with divinity could become holy too: a priest, a king or a temple - even the sacred utensils of the cult. In the Middle East, people would have found it far too constricting to limit ilam to a single god; instead they imagined a Divine Assembly, a council of gods of many different ranks, who worked together to sustain the cosmos and expressed the multifaceted complexity of the sacred.

Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; It did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible. The ultimate reality was not a Supreme Being; an idea that was quite alien to the religious sensibility of antiquity; it was an all-encompassing, wholly transcendent reality that lay beyond neat doctrinal formulations. So religious discourse should not attempt to impart clear information about the divine but should lead to an appreciation of the limits of language and understanding. The ultimate was not alien to human beings but inseparable from our humanity. It could not be accessed by rational, discursive thought but required a carefully cultivated state of mind.

In Conclusion

We can never know the ineffable characteristics of God, but can only glimpse its traces or effects in our time-bound, sense-bound world. It is clear that the meditation, yoga and rituals that work aesthetically on a congregation have, when practiced assiduously over a lifetime, will have a marked effect on the personality. There is no dramatic ‘born-again’ conversion, but a slow, incremental and imperceptible transformation. Above all, the habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule ‘all day and every day’ demands perpetual kenosis (emptying). The constant ‘stepping outside’ of our own preferences, convictions and prejudices is the transcendence that we seek. The effect of these practices cannot give us concrete information about God; it is certainly not a scientific ‘proof’. But something indefinable happens to people who involve themselves in these disciplines with commitment and talent.

When avatar of the otherwise incomprehensible Nirvana; this was what Nirvana looked like in human terms. They also knew that this stake was natural to human beings, and that if they put the Buddhist method into practice, they too could achieve it. Christians has a similar experience when their limitations of Christ brought them intimations of theosis (‘deification’).

The remote God of the Philosophers tends to fade from people’s minds and hearts. The domineering God of modern ‘scientific religion’ over-externalized the divine, and pushed it away from humanity, confining it, to ‘distant deeps and skies’. But pre-modern religion deliberately humanized the sacred. The Brahman was not a distant reality but was identical with the atman of every single creature.

Certain individuals became icons of this enhanced, refined humanity. We think of Socrates approaching his execution without recrimination but with open-hearted kindness, cheerfulness ad serenity. The gospels show Jesus undergoing an agonizing death and experiencing the extremity of despair while forgiving his executioners, making provision for his mother and having a kindly word for one of his fellow victims. Instead of becoming stridently virtuous, aggressively orthodox, and contemptuous of the ungodly, these paradigmatic personalities became more humane. The rabbis were revered as avatars of the Torah, because their learning and practice enabled them to become living, breathing and human embodiments of the divine imperative that sustained the world. Muslim venerates the Prophet Muhammad as the ‘Perfect Man’, whose life symbolizes the total receptivity to the divine that characterizes the archetypal, ideal human being. Just as the feats of a dancer or an athlete are impossible for an untrained body and seem superhuman to most of us, these people all developed a spiritual capacity that took them beyond the norm and revealed to their followers the untapped ‘divine’ or ‘enlightened’ potential that exists in any man or woman.

From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfill their humanity. They were not religious simply because of their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historical sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or merely because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. They were not pushed into faith by power-hungry priests or kings: indeed, religion often helped people to oppose tyranny and oppression of this kind.

The point of religion was to live intensely and richly here and now. Religious people are ambitious. They want life overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly and justly and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life. They tried to honour the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that honoured the stranger, the alien, poor and the oppressed. Of course they often failed. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women live on a higher, diving or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.

One day a Brahmin priest came across the Buddha sitting in contemplation under a tree and was astonished by his serenity, stillness and self-discipline. ‘Are you a god, Sir?’ The priests asked. ‘Are you an angel. . . or a spirit?’ No, the Buddha replied. He explained that he had simply revealed a new potential in human nature. It was possible to live in this world of conflict and pain at peace and in harmony with one’s fellow creatures. There was no point in merely believing it; you would only discover its truth if you practiced his method, systematically cutting off egotism at the root. You would then live at the peak of your capacity, activate parts of the psyche that normally lie dormant, and become fully enlightened human beings. ‘Remember me,’ the Buddha told the curious priest, ‘as one who is awake.’

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Thus, Godliness is an achievable state for man, provided he goes thru the way to achieve it with discipline, commitment and talent. At the end of it, he would be fully awake and alert but with absolute equanimity. It allows man to reach the state of bliss thru awareness, selflessness and compassion where he becomes part of the whole, which is nothing but the transcendent reality – SR Nair