It was the hour when day folded itself into evening. The river — wide and silver — moved without hurry. Cranes flew home in single file. A boy of about eleven, with a school bag still on his shoulder, walked slowly along the ghat. He had been thinking too much for a child his age.
On a flat stone by the water sat an old man. His robes were the colour of soft earth. His feet were bare. He was not chanting. He was not in samadhi. He was simply watching the river, the way a person watches an old friend.
The boy stopped a few feet away. The old man turned and smiled, as if he had been expecting him.
Saint:
Sit, child.
The boy sat.
Saint:
You have something inside you that is asking a question. Ask.
One — Is there really a God?
Boy:
Sir… is there really a God? My mother lights a diya every evening. My grandmother fasts and prays. But I have read books — Mr Hitchens, Mr Dawkins — they say it is all a story. That the universe is just atoms. And I think — if there were a kind, all-powerful God, why would he allow so much terrible suffering? Small girls hurt by bad men. Honest people poor. Cruel people rich. Why would a loving God permit it? So I do not know what to believe.
The saint did not answer at once. He picked up a small stone, weighed it in his palm, and tossed it into the river. A circle of ripples spread, met the bank, and was gone.
Saint:
You have asked, child, a question that the rishis of the Rigveda asked four thousand years ago. There is a hymn in the tenth book — the Nasadiya Sukta. After describing creation, it ends like this: “Whence this creation arose — perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it did not. Only He who looks down on it from the highest heaven, He knows. Or perhaps even He does not know.”
The boy blinked.
Saint:
You see, child? Our oldest scripture begins not with a confident answer. It begins with the courage to say: we may not know. Even He may not know. So you are in good company when you doubt.
Boy:
But that is not an answer.
Saint:
No. It is the first lesson — that the question is bigger than the answer. Now let us begin to walk into it. Slowly.
Two — What did Einstein think about God?
Boy:
Yes! That is what I was going to ask. I was reading about Einstein. He said something strange. He said he believed in “Spinoza’s God,” but not in a personal God. What did he mean, sir?
The saint’s eyes lit up.
Saint:
Ah. You are reading the right things. Einstein lived a hundred years ago, but he is closer to the rishis than most pandits I have ever met. Listen carefully — I will tell you what he meant, because it is the heart of what we are talking about.
There was once, in Holland, a quiet philosopher named Baruch Spinoza. He polished glass lenses for a living, and he was thrown out of his own community for heresy when he was a young man, because he refused to believe in a God who could be flattered, bribed, or insulted. But he was not an atheist in the way Mr Dawkins is. He said something deeper. He said: “Deus sive Natura” — God, or Nature. The same thing. Two names for one reality.
For Spinoza, God is not a person sitting outside the universe, watching us. God is not an emperor with feelings. God is the very substance of which everything is made. The river is God. The crane flying overhead is God. The stone I just threw is God. You are God. I am God. Not in the silly sense that we are super-beings who can fly — but in the sense that we are all expressions, modes, faces of one single underlying reality. There is nothing outside it. There is nowhere else for it to be. The wave does not need to find the ocean. It is the ocean, taking the temporary shape of a wave.
When you understand that — really understand it — you stop asking “Does God exist?” the way you stop asking “Does the ocean exist?” while you are swimming in it. The question dissolves. You are in it. You are made of it.
Einstein read Spinoza and was deeply moved. He once told a rabbi that the only God he could believe in was Spinoza’s God — a God revealed in the orderly harmony of what exists — and not a God who concerns himself with the small fates and actions of human beings. Do you see what he meant? He looked at the equations of physics — at how a single law explains the falling apple and the orbit of the moon — and he felt awe. He felt that the universe is lawful, beautiful, intelligible. And he called that feeling religious. He called it the cosmic religious feeling.
Boy:
But — that is just admiring nature. Why call it religion?
Saint:
Good. Push back. That is exactly the question. Listen.
Three — The Three Religions
Saint:
Einstein once said, in essence, that the deepest experience available to a thinking being is the experience of the mysterious — and that this is the wellspring of both true art and true science. The person who has lost the capacity to wonder, he said, has in some important sense already stopped being alive. Remember that. It is a torch.
Now — there are three kinds of religion in the world, and Einstein named them all.
The first is the religion of fear. When men were afraid of thunder and tigers and earthquakes and death, they made gods to beg from. “Please, lord, do not strike me. Please send rain.” This is a children’s religion. It works when life is short and unpredictable. But it cannot survive close inspection. It is the religion of the cave.
The second is the religion of morality. Here, God is a great judge. “Be good or you will be punished. Be good and you will be rewarded.” This is the religion of most temples and most mosques and most churches today. It is not stupid. It teaches small children to be kind. It builds order in society. But it is incomplete. Because — as you yourself noticed — the world does not actually reward the good or punish the wicked. Not reliably. Not at all sometimes. So if your religion depends on that, your religion will break. Yours has begun to break already, hasn’t it? That is why you came to ask me.
The boy nodded, surprised.
Saint:
The third — and Einstein said this is the highest — is the cosmic religious feeling. It is what comes when you stop asking the universe to serve you, and you simply notice that the universe IS. That there is something rather than nothing. That the same mathematics that governs a galaxy also makes a flower bloom. That a single law of gravity holds the moon in its orbit and pulls the stone I threw back to the earth. That there are stars whose light has been travelling for ten billion years to enter your eye tonight. That you, a small boy on a riverbank, are made of atoms forged inside ancient stars. The iron in your blood was once the heart of a dying sun. There is no way to know this and remain unmoved.
This feeling — this awe in front of the order and depth and strangeness of what is — Einstein called religious. In one famous essay he described real religiosity as the awareness that there is profound reason and radiant beauty in the universe, that we can only ever glimpse it in its most primitive forms, and that the awe and humility we feel in front of that fact is what genuine religion actually means. In that sense, and that sense alone, he said, he was a deeply religious man.
Do you see the difference between the three religions? The God of fear says: be afraid of me. The God of morality says: obey me and I will reward you. But the cosmic God — Spinoza’s God, Einstein’s God, the one named in the Upanishads — says nothing. It does not need to say anything. Its existence is the whole speech.
The boy looked at the river. A bat flickered past. He was silent for a long time.
Boy:
But sir, that does not feel like love. Spinoza’s God does not love me back.
Saint:
True. He does not love you the way your mother loves you. He does not pick you out from a crowd. He cannot. Because he is the crowd. He is your mother. He is you. The love is not a love sent from there to here. The love is the fact that here and there are not two.
Four — Then what about Krishna and Ram?
Boy:
But Krishna, sir? Ram? They have stories. They have wives. They are real, na? My grandmother says yes. She says Ram lived in Ayodhya, walked the earth, fought Ravan. Krishna stole butter, danced with the gopis, drove Arjuna’s chariot. She believes.
Saint:
Your grandmother is right in a way you do not yet understand. But not in the simple way. Listen — and now we go even deeper.
In our tradition there is a word: upaya. It means “skilful means.” A teacher uses upaya when she shows a small child the picture of an apple to teach the letter A. The picture is not the letter. The letter is a shape, an abstraction, an idea. But for a small child an idea is hard. A picture is easy. So the teacher gives the picture as a doorway to the idea.
Now imagine: how do you teach a human being to love the whole universe? How do you teach a child to revere the order of the cosmos? You cannot. The cosmos is too big. It has no face. So our wise ancestors did something brilliant. They gave the cosmos faces.
Krishna with his flute — that is the cosmos in its playful, beautiful aspect, the part that dances. Ram with his bow — that is the cosmos in its orderly, just, dharmic aspect. Shiva in deep meditation — that is the cosmos at rest, before and after all motion. Durga riding the lion — that is the cosmos when it must defend itself against chaos. Saraswati with her veena — that is the cosmos as knowledge, music, learning. Ganesha removing obstacles — that is the cosmos as the friend who walks beside us at the start of any new thing.
They are not lies. They are not even stories in the simple sense. They are doorways. They are how a finite mind — yours, mine, your grandmother’s — can put its arms around an infinite reality. You cannot embrace the ocean. But you can scoop a handful of water and look at it and feel the ocean in it. The handful is real. The ocean is more real. They are not in conflict.
The mistake of the fundamentalist is to confuse the handful with the ocean. To say: “Krishna lived in Mathura at a particular date, and that is the only way the divine ever appears.” That is small. The mistake of the militant atheist is to say: “There is no Krishna in Mathura, therefore there is nothing to revere.” That is also small. The truth is between, or beyond. There is something. It does not live only in Mathura, because it is everywhere. It does not have a flute. But your grandmother’s flute-player is one perfectly good way of pointing your heart toward it. So is Einstein’s equation. So is the river in front of us tonight.
That is why we have many gods. No single picture can be enough. So we have ten thousand.
Boy:
So Krishna and Ram are like… pictures of a thing too big to draw.
Saint:
Yes. And the wise person knows the picture is a picture and loves it anyway, because the picture pulls the heart toward something the heart can never see directly.
Five — What is the Absolute?
Boy:
Sir, you keep saying the cosmic God, the One, the underlying reality. Does it have a proper name? What do philosophers call it?
The saint looked at the river for a long time before answering.
Saint:
It has many names. Different traditions reach toward the same thing with different words. Western philosophers often call it the Absolute — the reality that is not relative to anything else, the reality of which everything is a part. We will use that word too. The Absolute. It will do for tonight.
There was a philosopher long ago, in the south of India, named Adi Shankaracharya. He died at thirty-two — yes, only thirty-two — and yet in that short life he walked the entire subcontinent and reformed the way people thought about reality. He taught what we call Advaita Vedanta. Advaita means “not-two.” Not “one,” mind you — not-two. The difference is important.
Shankara said: there is a reality that simply is — without beginning, without end, without parts, without change. He called it the Absolute. It is not a being among beings. It is not a god in the universe. It is the very is-ness of the universe. It is what is left over when you take away every quality you can name. It is consciousness without an object. It is the seer behind every seeing.
And then he said something that startles people even today. He said: “Tat tvam asi.” Thou art that. You — the small boy on the rock — you are that. Not your body. Not your mind. Not your name. The deepest you, the one who notices that you have a body and a mind and a name — that is the Absolute. There is, in the end, only one consciousness, looking through eight billion pairs of eyes, hearing through eight billion pairs of ears. The illusion of separation is real for practical purposes. But it is not ultimate.
Do you see how close this is to Spinoza? Spinoza said: there is one substance, and we are modes of it. Shankara said: there is one Absolute, and we are appearances within it. Different vocabularies. The same insight, perhaps, expressed by two different traditions a thousand years and seven thousand miles apart. When two minds reach the same shore from different oceans, it is worth paying attention.
Boy:
But sir, if I am the Absolute, why do I feel so small? Why am I afraid of getting bad marks?
The saint laughed softly.
Saint:
Because the wave does not feel like the ocean while it is curling. It is busy being a wave. It will feel itself ocean only when it falls. Until then, you are a wave. And the wave’s job is to be a beautiful wave. Do not try to skip over being a wave. The realisation that you are also ocean — that comes in its own time, with its own work.
Six — But what about evil?
The boy was quiet. The river had turned dark. A few stars had appeared.
Boy:
Sir, I have asked many questions. But you have not answered the worst one. If God is everything — Spinoza’s God, Einstein’s God, your Absolute — then God is also the man who hurts the small girl. God is also the corrupt politician. God is also the cancer cell. How is that any different from saying there is no God? Or worse — that God is monstrous?
Saint:
This is the deepest question you have asked. I will not insult you with a small answer.
First — yes. If the Absolute is everything, then it includes the suffering. It includes the cruelty. It includes the rape and the murder and the disease. We cannot pretend otherwise. We must look at this without flinching, or we are not serious people. Whoever tells you the universe is good is selling something.
Second — the religion that promises “God will reward the good and punish the wicked, you can count on it” — that religion is, I believe, false. Empirically false. The world simply does not work that way. Children of saints die. Children of monsters thrive. A good harvest goes to the wicked landlord and the honest farmer goes hungry. We have all seen this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a fool, a liar, or a salesman.
Third — what is left, then, when we take this comfort away? Listen carefully. Two things are left.
One: the universe is not unjust. The universe is indifferent. There is a difference. Injustice means something deserved better and was denied. Indifference means there is no court at all. Tigers do not unjustly eat deer. Earthquakes do not unjustly kill children. They simply happen. The natural world has no morality. Morality is something we — we humans — bring into the world. We are the eyes through which the universe begins to ask: is this right? It is a small fire we have lit, in one corner of one galaxy, on one planet. It is precious because it is rare, not because it is enforced from above.
Two: if morality is not enforced from above, then it must be lived from below. By you. By me. The universe will not punish the rapist; we must punish him, through justice, through law, through social action. The universe will not feed the hungry; we must feed them. The universe will not console the bereaved; we must console them. The cosmos is the canvas, but the painting is on us. There is no one else coming. There is only us.
This, I believe, is what Krishna teaches in the Gita. Read the second chapter very carefully. Krishna does not promise Arjuna that the good guys will win. Krishna says: fight because it is right to fight, and let the result be what it will. “Karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadachana” — your right is to action alone, never to its fruits. This is more demanding than a promise of heaven. It is a promise of nothing — nothing except the dignity of doing what is right because it is right.
So child — I do not believe in a God who stops the rapist. I do not believe in a God who feeds the hungry child. Such a God, if he existed, would be either incompetent or evil, given the world we see. I believe instead in a reality so vast and beautiful that it includes terrible things, and I believe that the only response — the only response that does not break under examination — is to BE the part of that reality that does the good. To be the eyes through which the cosmos sees its own suffering. To be the hands through which the cosmos relieves it. In doing so we participate in something that may be the closest thing to holy that there is.
The boy’s eyes were wet. He did not pretend they weren’t.
Seven — Indians who did not believe in God
Saint:
There is something else you should know, since you are a child who reads books. You think the Indian tradition and atheism are opposites. They are not. Our tradition contains atheism inside itself, openly, without scandal. Did you know this?
The boy shook his head, astonished.
Saint:
There were schools of philosophy in ancient India — fully accepted within the wider conversation — that did not believe in any creator god at all.
There were the Carvakas, also called Lokayatas. They were strict materialists. They said: only what you can directly perceive is real. The soul is a function of the body, like a flame is a function of the lamp; when the lamp goes, the flame goes. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is no karma carrying over. There is no god. They were not exiled or burned for saying this. They were debated. Their texts are mostly lost, but other schools answered them respectfully, which means they were taken seriously.
There was the Samkhya school. Very influential, very old — the Gita itself draws from it. Samkhya is dualist: it sees reality as two principles, prakriti (matter, nature) and purusha (consciousness). But it has no creator god. The universe is uncaused; it simply is. Liberation comes from understanding, not from divine grace.
There was Mimamsa — the school that gave us the deepest analysis of ritual and dharma. Some Mimamsa thinkers were openly non-theistic. They said the rituals work because of their own intrinsic power, not because a god grants the result. The Veda is eternal and authorless; no creator was needed. Pure dharma. No deity required.
Beyond these — Buddhism and Jainism, both born in the same intellectual world, are also non-theistic in their original forms. The Buddha himself politely refused to answer questions about a creator. Mahavira’s universe has no maker.
So when your friend the militant atheist tells you that “religion is for fools,” please tell him very politely that Carvaka, Samkhya, and the Buddha disagreed, and they were doing this twenty-five hundred years before Mr Hitchens was born.
And when an aunt insists that one must believe in a personal God to be a serious person, please tell her, even more politely, that whole schools of our own tradition did not, and were taken perfectly seriously for thousands of years.
Our tradition is a forest, child. It contains the temple-builder. It contains the cave-dweller. It contains the materialist arguing in the marketplace. It contains the silent yogi who has stopped using words. The mistake — always — is to confuse one tree with the forest.
Eight — Across the World: One Cosmos, Many Names
Boy:
Sir — one big question. People in America have their God. People in Arab countries have theirs. My friend at school is Christian, and he says his Jesus is the only true God. My other friend is Muslim, and her Allah is the only true God. My grandmother says Krishna. They are all certain. They cannot all be right. Earth is so small in the universe — surely the cosmic reality, if it is real, is the same one for everyone? So why is everyone fighting? Why is there so much violence in the name of religion? Can it ever stop?
The saint looked up at the sky for a long time. The first stars were now bright.
Saint:
This is the most important question you will ever ask. Listen very carefully, because the future of our species depends on whether the next generation gets this answer right.
First — yes. By definition, the cosmic reality is one. The Earth is a tiny pale dot circling an ordinary star at the edge of an ordinary galaxy in a universe of two trillion galaxies. Whatever the Absolute is, it is not Indian. It is not American. It is not Arab. It cannot be. The cosmos was here for thirteen billion years before any human had a religion at all. The cosmos does not check anyone’s passport. So if there is a deepest reality, then yes — the deepest God of the American, the deepest God of the Arab, the deepest God of your grandmother, and the deepest God of an atheist astronomer in Chile, are the same. They have to be. There is no other place for them to be.
Now hear this carefully — and you will see something that very few people understand. If you read the deepest mystics of every tradition, they all say the same thing. Read the Sufis of Islam — Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Hallaj — and they describe a God beyond name, present in every face, with whom the seeker becomes one. Read the Christian mystics — Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen — and they describe a Godhead beyond God, a divine reality of which the personal Jesus is one face. Read the Jewish mystics — the Kabbalists — and they describe Ein Sof, the Infinite without limit, beyond every name. Read the Taoists of China — and they describe the Tao that cannot be named, the source of the ten thousand things. Read our own Upanishads — and they describe the Absolute, beyond all qualities, present in every heart. Read the Plotinus of ancient Greece — he calls it simply the One. Read the Buddhists — they call it suchness, emptiness, the unconditioned.
Now look at what they all say together. The same shape. The same depth. The same insight: that there is one reality; that names point at it but do not capture it; that the seeker discovers it as the deepest part of their own being; and that the only proper response is awe, humility, and love.
This is called the perennial philosophy. The mystics of every tradition, separated by oceans and centuries, agree. They are climbing the same mountain by different paths. When they reach the top, they wave at each other and laugh. The fight is not between religions. The fight has never been between religions. The fight is between the surface of religion and the depth of religion.
Boy:
Then why is there so much fighting? Why are people killing each other in the name of God?
Saint:
Because most religion most of the time is not about reality. It is about identity. Listen carefully. There are two completely different things that go by the same word, “religion.”
There is religion as inquiry — the path of the mystic, the rishi, the contemplative. This person says: I do not know what is ultimately real. I will spend my life trying to find out. I will read the wise. I will sit in silence. I will love my neighbour, because if there is a deeper reality, my neighbour is also it. This person becomes more and more humble as they grow. They do not need to convert anyone. They are too busy looking. They are kin to all other seekers, regardless of the names those seekers use.
Then there is religion as identity — the path of the tribe. This person says: I was born into this group. My group has these stories. Other groups have different stories. Therefore my group is right and other groups are wrong. This is not really about God at all. It is about belonging. It is the same brain machinery that makes us cheer for our cricket team. It is the same machinery that made caveman tribes circle the campfire and watch the dark for the other tribe’s fires. It is ancient. It is in all of us. And it is dangerous.
Almost all religious violence is the second kind pretending to be the first. The mob that kills in the name of Krishna does not understand Krishna. The mob that kills in the name of Allah does not understand Allah. The mob that kills in the name of Christ does not understand Christ. Krishna in the Gita asks for non-attachment and equanimity. The Quran has a verse — surah 5, ayah 32 — that says whoever takes a single innocent life, it is as though he has killed all of mankind. Christ said love your enemy. The mystic in every tradition is closer to the mystic of every other tradition than to the violent mob of his own.
Boy:
Then what are the ordinary religious people missing? My grandmother is not violent. My Christian friend is not violent. But still they each think only their God is real.
Saint:
Three things, child. Three simple things, and they are at the root of almost every problem in human civilisation.
One — they have not been taught the difference between the surface and the depth. They were given the surface as a child, by people who loved them, and they confused the surface for the whole. Their grandmother gave them Krishna as a real golden boy in the sky, and no one ever sat them down and said: Krishna is a doorway. Allah is a doorway. Jesus is a doorway. The room beyond the doorway is the same room. Until they hear that, they will keep arguing about doorways.
Two — they have not been taught about other paths up the same mountain. They have only met one path. So they cannot see that the other person’s path leads up too. They think the others are walking nowhere. If from childhood every Hindu read a little Quran, every Muslim read a little Gita, every Christian read a little Tao Te Ching, every atheist read a little Upanishad — and we all read each other not to refute, but to find what was true — half the religious wars in history would never have happened. Education in comparative wisdom is the most peaceful thing humans have ever invented, and we under-do it terribly.
Three — they have allowed cynical people to use religion for power. Politicians who do not actually believe anything sacred have learned that they can win elections by frightening one tribe about another tribe. Television stations have learned that they can sell more advertising by amplifying outrage. Preachers have learned that they can fill collection plates by promising heaven and threatening hell. The original mystic disappears in this noise. What is left is identity-religion weaponised by people who do not love God or man — they love votes and money and power. This is the deepest, oldest, most reliable corruption of religion. And it does not stop until ordinary people refuse to be used.
Boy:
How can it be stopped, sir? Really. What can be done?
Saint:
It will not stop quickly. We have been doing this for thousands of years. But it can be reduced — significantly — and every generation can do better than the last if they take the work seriously. There are five things we can do.
First — teach children, from the earliest age, the perennial insight. Tell them: many traditions, one mountain. Show them Rumi’s poetry, the Sermon on the Mount, the Gita, the Tao, the Buddha’s teachings — side by side. Let them see the convergence with their own eyes. Children are not born tribal about religion. They are taught it. We can teach them differently.
Second — tell the difference between the saint and the mob. Honour your tradition’s saints — Kabir, Mirabai, Tulsidas, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore — and honour the saints of every other tradition. Refuse to be impressed by religious leaders who curse other groups. The first sign that someone has missed the point is that they are angry at outsiders. The mystic loves the outsider. The mob hates the outsider. Memorise this difference and apply it.
Third — refuse to vote for people who use religion for power. This is a small civic act with enormous consequences. The politician who whispers in your ear about how you must fear the other group is the most spiritually dangerous person you will meet in your life. Recognise them. Stop voting for them. The day enough citizens do this, the strategy stops working, and they have to find another.
Fourth — practise quietly. The quiet practitioner — the one who lights the diya, sits in silence, reads slowly, and does not need anyone else to convert — is the cure. Loud religion divides. Quiet religion unites. Be quiet in your devotion and let other quiet people be quiet in theirs. The quiet ones will recognise each other across every boundary.
Fifth — take the cosmic perspective. Look at the night sky as often as you can. Remember — really remember — that the Earth is a fleck of dust in an unimaginable vastness. Whatever is at the heart of all that vastness is not the property of any country, language, book, or temple. It is everyone’s and no-one’s. From that perspective, fighting over which name we use for it looks like what it is — small and sad. Not evil. Sad. People fighting over fragments of a thing they have all lost sight of.
Will it be enough? I do not know. The cynics will tell you no. The cynics are sometimes right. But I will tell you this — if a small number of children in every generation grow up understanding what we have just discussed, the world becomes slowly more peaceful, century by century. The arc of human consciousness is long, and bends, slowly, toward integration. You can be one of the children who bends it.
The boy looked up. The Milky Way was now visible from end to end above the river — a faint silver smear where, in fact, two hundred billion stars were burning, each older than the entire human story.
Boy:
It is so big, sir.
Saint:
Yes, child. It is so big. And the bigger you let it be in your mind, the smaller becomes every quarrel down here on Earth. That is the real medicine. Take it daily. The night sky is free.
Nine — Why, then, do we pray?
Boy:
Sir, then I must ask: if Krishna is a doorway, if the Absolute is impersonal, if even atheism is allowed inside our tradition, if every other tradition points at the same reality — why does my mother light a diya every evening? Why do you, sir, walk this riverbank at dusk? What is the point of any practice?
The saint smiled — a deep smile, as if this question pleased him most of all.
Saint:
The Buddha was once asked something similar. He said: when a thirsty man finds a well, he does not stand at the edge analysing whether the well is real. He drinks. The well-ness of the well is proven by the drinking, not by the analysis.
Practice is the same. We do not light a diya because some celestial accountant will tally it on a scoreboard. We light it because the act of lighting it does something to us. It pulls us, for one minute, out of the noise of being a small striving creature with grades and bills and worries, and places us in the presence of mystery. The diya is not magic. The hand that lights the diya is what changes.
Think of it this way. A musician practises scales every day. The scales are not the music. No one comes to a concert to hear scales. But without the scales, there is no concert. The scales are the hands’ way of remembering what the hands forget.
Worship is the heart’s way of remembering what the heart forgets. The heart forgets, very easily, that it is small and the universe is vast. The heart forgets that the people we love will die, and so will we. The heart forgets gratitude. The heart forgets wonder. The heart forgets that this moment, here, is the only moment we actually have. A thousand small worship-acts — a diya, a namaste, a few minutes of silence, a verse read out loud, a walk by a river — are the heart’s daily scales. They keep the heart in tune for the moments that matter.
Modern science even agrees, if you want it to. There are proper studies, with controls and measurements, that show contemplative practice lowers stress, improves immunity, reduces depression, and lengthens life. Not because some deity is rewarding the practitioner. Because the practitioner is becoming more whole.
So light the diya, child. Or do not. But if you do, do it not as a transaction. Do it as a tuning. Do it as a small daily reminder: I am part of something I cannot see the edges of, and that fact is worth pausing for.
Ten — How should I live?
The boy looked up at the stars again.
Boy:
One last question, sir. How should I live?
The saint thought for a long time.
Saint:
I will give you five sentences. Memorise them. They are enough.
First — wonder. Never lose your capacity for it. The man who can no longer be astonished is the only true atheist, and not in a good way. Look at the stars. Look at a leaf. Look at your own hand and what it can do. There is nothing in this universe that is not extraordinary, if you look long enough.
Second — do your dharma. Find the work that is yours to do, and do it well, and do not depend on the world to clap. Some days the world will. Most days it will not. You do the work for the work, not for the applause. This is the Gita’s whole teaching, in five words: act, but not for fruits.
Third — be kind. The universe is not enforcing kindness. So we must. Every act of kindness is a small flame against an enormous indifference. Do not underestimate the dignity of being one of the flames.
Fourth — see the same depth in every tradition. Refuse to call any other person’s sincere search for the divine false, just because the words are different from yours. The mystic in your tradition and the mystic in theirs are climbing the same mountain. Be glad. Be a fellow climber. Refuse to be recruited into anyone’s tribal army.
Fifth — make peace with not-knowing. You will die without knowing for certain whether there is a God in the way your grandmother believes. So will I. So has every saint and sage who ever lived. The not-knowing is not a defeat. It is the ground of the inquiry. Sit comfortably in it. The Nasadiya Sukta sat comfortably in it for four thousand years before you. You can too.
The boy stood up. He namasted, very seriously, and the saint namasted back, just as seriously.
The boy turned to walk home. Then he turned back.
Boy:
Sir — one more thing. Are you the Absolute? Am I?
The saint laughed — a soft, kind laugh that the river seemed to laugh with.
Saint:
Go home, child. Tell your mother you love her. Eat your dinner. Do your homework. The question of the Absolute — you will live into it. Do not try to answer it tonight. It will answer you, in its own way, over the next sixty years.
The boy went home. The saint sat for a while longer, watching the stars come out, one by one, in the dark mirror of the river.
A Small Glossary, for Later Reading
The Absolute
The reality that is not relative to anything else — the reality of which everything else is a part. Also called the One, the Ground of Being, Ultimate Reality, the Unconditioned, the Source. Different traditions reach toward it with different vocabularies. Not a being among beings; rather, the very is-ness of all that is.
Advaita Vedanta
The school of non-dualist philosophy taught most influentially by Adi Shankaracharya (c. 8th century CE). Advaita means “not-two.” It teaches that ultimate reality is a single, undivided consciousness, and that the apparent multiplicity of the world is a kind of perceptual layering (maya) over that one reality. Tat tvam asi — “Thou art that” — is its central teaching.
Atman
The deepest self, the witnessing consciousness behind the body and mind. The radical claim of Advaita is that this deepest self and the Absolute are not two: the deepest you and the deepest reality of the cosmos are the same.
Spinoza’s God / Deus sive Natura
The God of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Not a person, not a creator, not separate from the world, but the single eternal substance of which the world is an expression. “Deus sive Natura” means “God, or Nature” — the same reality under two names. Strikingly close in spirit to the non-dual philosophies of the East.
Cosmic Religious Feeling
Albert Einstein’s phrase for the third and highest stage of religion, beyond fear-religion and morality-religion. It is the awe and humility a thinking being feels in front of the order, depth, and intelligibility of the universe. Compatible with science. Inseparable from wonder.
Carvaka / Lokayata
An ancient Indian school of thoroughgoing materialism. Held that only direct perception is reliable knowledge, that consciousness arises from matter and ends with the body, and that no creator god, soul or afterlife exists. Functionally an atheist school inside the Indian philosophical conversation.
Samkhya
One of the six classical philosophical schools of India. Dualistic but non-theistic: reality is composed of prakriti (matter/nature) and purusha (consciousness), with no creator god required. Liberation comes through discriminative knowledge, not divine grace. Heavily influenced the Bhagavad Gita.
Mimamsa
Another classical Indian school, focused on the analysis and interpretation of dharma and ritual. Notable strands of Mimamsa were explicitly non-theistic, holding that the Vedas are eternal and authorless and that rituals are efficacious by their own intrinsic power, without any deity needing to grant the result.
Nasadiya Sukta
The Hymn of Creation, Rigveda 10.129 — perhaps the oldest agnostic poem in the world. It describes the origin of the cosmos and ends with the lines: “Whence this creation has arisen — perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not — only He who oversees it from the highest heaven knows. Or perhaps even He does not know.”
Upaya
“Skilful means.” The teaching method of giving a finite, simple form to an infinite, subtle truth so that learners can approach it. The personal gods of every tradition (Krishna, Allah, Jesus, the Buddha as a person, the Tao with attributes) are best understood as upaya — doorways suited to human hearts — rather than as the metaphysical end of the road.
Karma-yoga
From the Bhagavad Gita: the path of action without attachment to the fruits of action. “Your right is to the work alone, never to its fruits.” A teaching that does not depend on cosmic justice; it is, in fact, a teaching for a universe in which cosmic justice cannot be relied upon.
Perennial Philosophy
The observation that the deepest mystics of every tradition — Sufi, Christian, Jewish, Taoist, Vedantic, Buddhist, indigenous — describe the same reality in compatible terms. Names differ. Stories differ. But the underlying insight — that there is one infinite reality, that names point at it without capturing it, that it is found at the depth of one’s own being — converges. Many paths, one mountain.
A Final Note
This dialogue is not meant to convert anyone to anything. It is not pro-religion or anti-religion. It is meant only to show that there is a far wider intellectual landscape than the simple binary of “blind believer” versus “militant atheist” — and that this landscape is open to anyone, in any country, in any tradition, who is willing to think honestly.
If, after thinking carefully, you find yourself drawn to the cosmic religion of Einstein and Spinoza — to a deep awe at the order of the universe, without any need for a personal divine being — you are in good company. You are also, perhaps without knowing it, very close to the spirit of the Upanishads, of the Sufi mystics, of the Christian contemplatives, of the Taoist sages. The river is the same river, whether you call it the cosmos, the Absolute, Nature, the Tao, or simply the river.
And if, in the meantime, you choose to sit in the room while a parent lights a diya, or stand quietly while a friend prays in a different language to a different name, and feel the small flame and the dark room and the love between you, and not say a word about metaphysics — that is also a perfectly good way to be in the world. The diya does not require your assent to any theology. It only requires your presence. Be present. Be kind. Wonder. That is more than enough.
PS: The idea is originally mine. I have been thinking and writing about this on my blog for the last 18 years, but with the help of AI I could finally put this long version together. Without AI I could not have expressed my feelings in so much detail. Of course, this blog is just one perspective — not my final thought. My curiosity will not end till my last breath.
No comments:
Post a Comment