An encounter with life

 

Me – God, I will tell you a story.

God – Go ahead.

Me – Once I was driving by a riverside road. On one side flows the majestic, serene Chitravati, and the other side, flanked by a low hill, was a garbage heap. I noticed a rickety wheelchair parked near the heap, and a man in rags sitting in it. He had something in his hands wrapped with a piece of newspaper. He slowly opened it. It revealed a dried-up roti, and a few pieces of onion. A few steps away, on the edge of the garbage heap sat a girl with a torn frock, around six or seven years old, rummaging through the garbage, probably the daughter of the man in the wheelchair. She got a picture book from the heap, the kind children use at start of schooling. She started turning the pages, watching every picture on every page, with a hungry look. Surely, she was missing the school which she never had an opportunity to attend. To tell you honestly, God, I felt so hurt at my settled life and high education that I stopped my scooter a little away from her, and didn’t have the courage to look back at her. I stared at Chitrvati’s unruffled flow, as if all is right with the world, and I had nothing to worry. Tell me God, can you accept this glaring injustice of life as normal? Why should the innocent girl be denied food, shelter and education to find a place in your world?

God –This is not a new question, and you know the standard answer to such standard questions.

Me – Yes, you will throw at me your favourite karma theory! In spite of all the wisdom of the theory, when I imagine myself in her place, and ask myself why should I have to endure this injustice, I have no answer. Do you?

God – Um, running this huge network of life hasn’t been an easy job for me too.

Me – But since you are the engineer who set up this network, you owe an answer to all to those who fall a prey to this system, don’t you?

God – Even though I give an answer, will that help anyone? I can only point out the wrong tabs they hit, and the engine could not be interfered with. The huge network, to stay in the functional mode, must work according to its algorithm.

Me – haven’t you installed any checks when it malfunctions?

God – Say when it does not function the way you would like it to, though you are not in a position to see the entire landscape. That is no malfunction.

Me – The purpose of your network, I suppose, is to ensure healthy and happy life, bring justice to everyone, and make available to everyone opportunities to fulfil their legitimate aspirations. When somewhere the opposite takes place, is it not a malfunction?

God – I have several sets of rules installed to enable its versatility. When you access it, you are free to choose which tab to touch. That activates the set of rules you have chosen. After that you cannot undo it, because the whole system is interconnected. You cannot ask the head of the department to rewrite the system when you hit a wrong tab. The system cannot be interrupted, and by the time you realise your mistake billions of functions had been started.

Me – That is too mechanical for a living system, don’t you agree? And whatever I know of you, you don’t promote a machine-like life

God – Um, you may be correct. I don’t really like a mechanical life. You must have seen a sitar? It has a number of strings of varying thickness. The player should know which string to touch where, when, and in what way to produce any music. But the sitar itself is a tool. It cannot take a decision which raga to play, can it?

Me – But the player can reset the tension of the wires, and when he knows a wrong note has been produced, he can dilute it, or even negate it with an innovative new note.

God – Yes, that is known only to an expert. I am not the player, you are. You must practise to earn that ability. But if you choose to stay a novice, you can only produce dreadful noise, no music. It happens to most people.

Me – Ok, let us come to practical questions. Can you give an expert commentary on the state of the garbage girl and her father on the basis of your sitar theory?

God – My boy, you already know that a good teacher explains the formula, and a good student learns to solve individual problems according to that. The teacher cannot be expected to work out each problem of each student. He might indicate where you could go wrong. He might also point out how to get out of a misstep when you commit one. But you have to

          carry out the remedial step yourself.

Me – In this case whose misstep has landed them in this situation?

God – Both. Everyone in this network is connected. In a dance when one person takes a wrong step, the entire performance is affected. Dhritarastra took a wrong step, and the Mahabharata war was the result. Krishna could not help it. He tried to enter the chain of actions, but could he stop the tragic war? The identity of one person is a mechanism which ties them up with the cosmic identity. The suffering of the father-daughter is both a cause and a consequence. It caused empathy in you, but suffered indifference in others, which created feelings of distress and frustration in them. All this is a symptom of being in the chain, and responding to it your way. The nature of your identity affects you, as well as other identities in the chain.

Me – So God, you are saying that each to his measure is the rule? Each person is part of a huge engineering layout which cannot be modified?

God – It can be modified, but not by an external agent. It can be done internally by modifying individual responses. For example, you feel empathy with them, but this is not a fixed response. The sight of the calm river flowing by might have triggered a certain mood in you which facilitated empathy to arise. There may be a hundred causes acting on you at that moment, a consequence of the way you have handled yourself in hundreds of different situations. You stopped there, and deliberated about it, which was your choice, while others passing by them might not even have noticed them. And that was their choice. I give you an opportunity to modify your responses to life, how you do it is your choice. And, you will agree, the duo’s response to life is also affected by yours. I am an outsider; I cannot alter it unilaterally.

Me – But God, you are also known for interventions in individual lives, and alter them drastically.

You did that to Angulimala. You did that to emperor Ashoka. You have done so to scores of others.

   God – The entire mechanism of life is built on the technique of compassion. Compassion here does not mean an out of the way response. It is a way of providing an opportunity, an invitation to modify your responses. I only facilitate this opportunity to be noticed, and the subjective experience, to switch your channel. That might, at times, manifest objective alterations. When Arjuna faced the army with Krishna holding the reins, it was an opportunity for him to take stock of his responses, and the way he struggled for an anchor resulted in the Geeta, which was a huge thing for the entire mechanism of life. Krishna had not planned this, but he allowed Arjun’s intensity to work out. You have to decide if you want to live your life intensely, or go on willy-nilly floating.

Me – Okay God, given that all you said is very wise, and irrefutable, there still remains another side to this question of human suffering.

God – What is that?

Me – When a person needs a wheelchair to be pushed around by a daughter seven or eight years old, denied her legitimate claim to food, shelter, and education, looked down upon by the world as pest, what should be their response to your elevated ideas of life? Won’t they feel anger, frustration, envy, and raise arms against the cosmic dispensation? You and I can talk about whatever we did from outside, and you admitted that you an outsider to the system, trying to justify the management, but can the people inside it see the way you see it?

God –You asked me about the mechanism, and I explained it to you. It remains in place whether you notice it or not.

Me - Shouldn’t you do something to help them notice the mechanism? However, even if they notice it will their suffering end? How do you want them to respond to their own helplessness? How do you want them to respond to an apathetic world? Do you want them to see it as cause, or effect?

God – You are making the same mistake again and again. I want you to see the life situation as a part of the entire mechanism. Your response to your suffering is part of the entire response chain. Don’t you see if you had stopped near the garbage heap, and spoken to the duo kindly, offered them a packet of sambar-rice, or offed to help the child go to a school, they would have modified their complaint against the cosmic dispensation, as you say? But you were satisfied with a fleeting feeling, and passed on.

Me – O’ I did not see this your way.

God – Their suffering caused empathy in you, but you fell short of the need to act on it, and came straight to me to accuse me of insensitivity, of a mechanical universe!

Me – No God, I am not accusing you of anything. I only imagined how I would have responded if I was them. I came to you to understand how I should look upon the huge disparity in life created by a kind God.

God – By your empathy you initiated a subtle chain, but could not carry it further. There might be several reasons. Imagine all the people who pass by them notice this chunk of life and begin to believe they are also connected with it at some level, and had some responsibility towards the duo, would they still feel that the world is apathetic? And with that won’t their response be gradually modified? The duo’s life is not entirely their responsibility, it is part of the social responsibility. Even if their present life is a consequence, you can stop it from being a cause for more poverty and ignorance, and help rewrite the rules. In usual human relationships too, I provide you with a lot of opportunities to reset the function of the chain.

Me -- My feeling of empathy could be an expression of my subjective life. How can I spread it to others? Their subjective landscape could be completely different. How can I be part of the social responsibility?

God – That depends on the strength of your subjective life, your ability to harness your conviction and your understanding that all life is connected, and is governed by the response of each to each. This inability to comprehend and connect with the scheme affects your life too.

Me – What! I am also affected by their suffering even if I don’t have a role in it?

God – Suffering is only a symptom of a deeper malady. You have a role in helping them overcome it. If you don’t perform your role, you are drawn to the chain of consequences, and for not making full use of your capacity for empathy built into your life, you may be denied more subtle capabilities.

Me -- God, you are scaring me. Don’t you have some way of entering into the mechanism at least through a trap door?

God – I am doing that all the time. I have a constant watch over the mechanism, and make subtle changes to keep it humane. Besides, I keep sending messages to people who really need me. You never know how many ways I intervene in their lives to keep the possibilities alive, but I don’t want to take the credit. I love them to believe they have done it; they have rechartered their lives. But I must admit I cannot hide all the time. Someone figures out my hand in their affairs, or my invisible presence at their desperate moments. Of course, I love to be caught like that.

Me – God, you must be a very busy person. But if a hundred persons call you at the same time, how do you handle that?

God – O’, don’t tell me! Not a hundred, it is millions. But I love to remain connected all the time. So, if someone does not call me, I call on them! Someone long ago said I have a thousand hands, and a thousand eyes. In fact, he didn’t count them to a thousand. He was so overwhelmed that he just uttered a number for no specific number. I should justify that, shouldn’t I?

Me – And some poet said that he won’t commit the offence of describing you as an ocean of kindness, because the ocean itself is a drop of your kindness.

God – You know, I am really scared of these poets. What they don’t say about me! Sometimes most outrageous things, and sometimes they put words in my mouth which I never said! But they are nice people. Therefore, I once agreed, I am also a poet, but I made it a point to add that I am also a lawgiver. That doesn’t make a pleasant combination, does it?

Me – Is that a part of your algorithm as well?     

God – Hm, the network becomes insane without some fun. I have planted some rebel             seeds here and there. They manufacture viruses and release them into the                       system. Then I get sos calls. 

         That gives me an opportunity to pack my tools and arrive at the disturbed place. Ravana was such a moment, and Kamsa. But they were extreme moments when I choose to be visible. I send my workmen all over the cosmos to work for me. I hate dullness, certainty, legality, predictability which steal the music from the system. Therefore, I need a Meerabai, an Annamaya, a Ramadasu, a Kabir, a Shivaji, or a Khudiram. No one is perfect, for perfection is your invention. Perfection is an eternal search, an endless dream which motivates the system to work incessantly. I like that way; it gives me work to do.

Me -- So you accept there are aberrations even in your system?

God – My boy, you create words with very limited scopes, and try to bind me with them! Words come from silence, you must remember, which is far more potent than all the noise you make with words. Even silence cannot bind me.

Me – Some people truly say God is an autocratic tyrant!

God – Get out of the tangle created by your prattling brain, and connect with me in silence. If I allowed the deprived life of the man in the wheelchair, I allowed your compassionate heart too to be moved by it. Don’t you see a design in it? I have the most enviable task of combining opposites, and installing the skill in the cosmic management scheme. You cry in pain; you cry in joy as well.

Me – I guess I have to accept two things: an apparent discord, and an apparent unity, both apparent only. I have no way to go beyond the apparent. Disgusting.

God – Even from the position you observe this is apparent! Unless I shake you up badly, you don’t wake up. This universe and its contradictory nature is a wakeup call for you. It is not structured to fulfil your ideas of justness, but to awaken your need to be where I am.

Me – Ok God, I understand you want to defeat me, so that I will work for a win?

God – Exactly.

 

 

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                        August 23

 

 

 

 

 

 

                   WHO ARE YOU

 

              God, where are you?

              And what are you?

             When I kicked a stone, and broke my toe,

             I saw you as pain;

             When I went to a doctor for my stomach ache,

             And he said it could be cancer

             Which my mother killed

             By the juice of a leaf from our backyard,

             I saw you as anger;

             When I was caught up in a road rage,

             And lost a promised job,

             I saw you as frustration;

            When a developer felled

            The green cover in my neighbourhood

            For a minister’s son’s new mall,

            I saw you as greed;

           And when the only support of an old widow,

           Her only son, was killed

           By a drunk biker,

           I saw you as cruelty.

           But when my neighbour’s son

           Gave away his lunch box with a smile

          To a hungry boy at his school’s gate,

           I saw you as compassion;

           And I saw you as loyalty

           When a street puppy,

          Whom I fed once or twice,

          Jumped before a snake to shield me

          And gave up her life to poison.

          I have seen you in love,

          In friendship, in dedication, in charity,

          In forgiveness, in peace,

          And in hate, conceit, violence too,

          But I know not who you are.

           You assembled all this I see,

          And probably all I don’t as well,

          Gave them to me to live for you,

          But I rearranged them to my likes,

          And recreated myself life after life.

          Dear God, for I know not

          Any other address, I meet only you

          In whatever I do, wherever I go,

          In a pub, or a temple,

          At home, or in the wilderness;

          You chase me as a shadow,

           A far-off song, as blowing wind,

           All around me, all over me,

           Yet not me.

           I am tired now,

           I am breaking down under 

           The weight of what I am;

            Is that the way

           To become whatever I am? 

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           August, 23