Tuesday 28 April 2015

Microtoming the Obvious


It’s obvious that God as understood by all believers is an entity beyond reason. The human mind cannot comprehend that reality and even the bare concept of existence seems inadequate to an eternal being. Existence for us is a bounded fact, things rise and fall away and the boundless is like all other words, a mouthful of articulated air. It is only through the experience of mystics that the notion of the absolute as a ground of the relative becomes a troubling intimation that demands a response. When those ones who know, those sages, fall back into relative ordinary consciousness they express their experience in terms which are culturally conditioned. It is the western believer with the background of a belief in creation and an infused soul who can formulate rational grounds for the belief in God. Somehow there must be a reflection of his existence in the deep structure of that creation. Arguments from contingency and causality arise out of an implicit metaphysical matrix. Similarly arguments which seem egregiously circular to the westerner i.e. because there is karma, because it says in the scriptures, are not a serious rational theology but a sort of rumination, manana, on accepted truths.

Should you reply that some knave first devised the custom of offering sacrifices as means of obtaining heaven, and the rest of mankind were cajoled into following his example, this
is met by the words " nor can there be such a deception." For who could be so utterly different from the rest of mankind as for the mere sake of deceiving others to impose upon himself a round of actions which necessarily cause all sorts of trouble ? and hence we may safely infer that the universal practice of sacrifice is a proof that sacrifices do produce heaven as their result.
(from The Kusumanjali)

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