Standing there, breathing the cold air of that high mountain pass, I understood with a clarity that I know comes rarely in life. I understood the science of clouds. I understood their art. I began to understand the anatomy of the elements of nature and by this understanding, I understood nature. It became suddenly clear to me shivering in the cold breath of the snow, that of all the myriad forms of life that rely on nature for survival, we are the only beings that take time to sit back and appreciate it. We are the only beings who are grateful for it. Perhaps, we are blessed in this. Perhaps, we are blessed due to this.
Descending the wild shoulders of Khardung-La, 3 and I raced Sumanth back to Leh, while Moham followed slowly, enjoying the sheer presence of nature. To the left was the mountain face, and to the right the open air, clear as water in a blue, blue pool. There are mountains around me and skies around me, and I am sinking into a discussion with myself that I have postponed for some time now. This is a good place and a good time to have that talk. I am going to try and define something that I believe to be essentially indefinable.
Our explanations of the deities we believe in have, over many millennia, become metaphorical and symbolic. We fictionalized and embellished and watered down the nature of gods so that everyone could understand them. This was our way of gaining an understanding – equating the cosmic concept of god to local parallels of daily life that are easier to grasp. But by doing so we diluted the essence of god. And through this practice, we have slowly come to believe in the diluted version, rather than his or her complete essence. And to believe is to see, so now when we are asked to imagine god, we can only come up with a diluted, thinned-out image. So gods became human, and gained a human form, and through this we made god in our image, and not the other way round.
To truly understand the anatomy of god, we must remove ourselves from the lazy position of trying to understand the nature and form of god by simplifying him. We must begin by understanding that he is more than the sum of his parts. We cannot define him only by defining his constituent elements. We must look him completely in the eye, and pause to ask – What is god?
Imagine a static universe - a universe without energy. What would it look like? Black and dark, an unmoving expanse of stale, empty space. Listless. Dead. Useless. Something that I cannot imagine would create any value to anything or anyone; this is true death – an existence that creates no value. This is a universe without energy – nothing can be born here or live here because there is no energy here that can sustain it.
How different it is from a universe brimming with energy. We know because we inhabit one. Our universe is an energy-packed entity that still continues to expand outwards, even after thirteen billion years. And in these years the universe has expanded to create a mind-blowing array of things – things like hydrogen and carbon, oxygen and helium, stars and supernova and light-years long color-drenched clouds of hanging nebulae, and heavier elements that gravitated towards each other and formed asteroids and comets and moons and planets. And then the slightest modification of hydrogen - the fuel that ignites stars - mixed with oxygen in the safe environs of a planet and formed water. Do you see now that alchemy exists; how fire becomes water? From water came the simplicity of single-celled life, and this simplicity danced with other simple life to form complexity. And then came enormous dinosaurs and three thousand year old Redwood trees and tortoises who wanted to move as slowly as possible so they grew a thick shell to protect themselves.
What are all these things? In a universe of energy these are pockets of energy. Isn’t a tree, a tree-shaped pocket of energy, and a child, a child-shaped pocket of energy? How quickly they decompose and lose form when no energy remains to maintain their shape. Every blade of green grass is a visible expression of the invisible energy that is thrumming through the invisible veins of our universe. Isn't everything a slight modification, an alteration of that one single energy?
There is something in this wide universe of ours that flows secretly through all of us and all things. This is the source of all miracles and the reason for all miracles. This is the cause of intuition and strange bouts of telepathy. This is what listens to mankind’s infinite prayers and answers them. This is what grants justice to the unjust and just alike. Because it flows through everything it is everywhere every time. It is Omnipresent. Because it is everywhere every time it is witness to everything. It is Omniscient. Because it is in everything, it is indestructible. It is Omnipotent. And this thing that flows through me like some strange, satisfying, honeyed liquid flows through you and the tree outside my window and this pen and the gap between my hand and fingers as I write this.
This is energy. And energy is one half of the anatomy of god.
By very definition, god should be left undefined, because in the solidity of a definition he stops existing. He is more than a mere assemblage of words and characters and ideas. He is more than every definition of him and he is more than this definition of him. Definition is limitation. It is strange how in the way we define the infinite - we confine it, right down to when we label the infinite with words like ‘infinity’. Can we ever define infinity? Can we ever define divinity? I can write ten thousand words and still fall short, and so as a writer I will always fail, and I will always succeed, because every word that has ever been written is an uncovering of the mystery, but it is always only a partial discovery. If perhaps the seven-billion-strong humanity takes up the mantle of defining divinity, through their stories and their art, and their memories and their craft, they will fail and they will succeed. We will come up with many definitions of divinity – as is visible already - but we will never come up with a complete one. For how can we see and define divinity when we are part of that divinity? We are too close, we are too close. We are one magnificent expression of a great, mystic being that is so happily in love with itself that in the birth of every blade of grass it defines itself; in the greenness of leaves and in the blueness of eyes it resounds. We can immerse ourselves in our mutating, ever-shifting perspective caused by our expanding experiences and stitch together an understanding of god. It is clear now that god is found easily in the abyss and the apsis, in the nadir and the zenith of every subject. All that is required is to swim deep enough or fly high enough. It is clear now that the Formless is given shape in the mind, and thereby definition, through the rigorous exercises of exploration, intoxication and meditation. But all these definitions and explanations are limited by our perspective, because the information that we gain is being channeled through the limited bandwidth of our perspective. And so again, only a partial image is gained. If this is the case, if this limitation is caused by our narrow perspective, then in order to gain a complete picture of god, we must examine him with complete ‘un-perspective’ - a vacuum of judgment, prejudice, experience, knowledge and wisdom, so that we project nothing of our ‘self’ on to the delicate membrane of this universe.
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The Anatomy of Rain
The Anatomy of Journey Page 34
