I have been blessed to be born in a family where faith in god was a gift we received from the day we were born. And we we were surrounded by that in many forms – from the music of MS and Yesudas singing devotional songs that will melt your heart to the daily act of prayer which just happened everyday like we brushed our teeth and combed our hair. We also had the good fortune to have Santhananda Swamigal stay at our house for a few weeks each year. I loved when Swamigal stayed in our house. Not just because our house was milling with people bringing sweets and fruits (we were kids after all); but because I could just sit on the floor and listen to grown ups asking serious life questions to Swamigal and listen to him respond. Many many of those stories have been filed away in my brain but there is one sentence from those interactions that I remembered this week “Yad Bhavam Tad Bhavati” – “As you think so you become or you are what you believe”.
The reason for this post are my kids. M has started reading (and m listens with great interest) Amar Chitra Katha books that have lots of religious stories. R and I loved those stories too. Last week they read Dashavatharam that narrates the story of the ten (dasha) avatars of Lord Vishnu. A sidebar is that the Dashavatharam story has many many similarities with Darwin’s theory of evolution. They also ask me to narrate the stories and one such story is about Prahaladha, a little boy who believes that Vishnu is everywhere, much to the chagrin of his father who is an Asura. His father goads Prahaladha and hits a wall saying ask your Vishnu to come and Vishnu appears as Narasimha (Half man and half lion) and vanquishes the father. This is a synopsis but hope you get the point. Of all the stories, this particular story is vivid in the kids’ imagination. Couple of days ago, I heard m tell the story of Narasimha and concluded that “God is whoever we believe God to be and is present wherever we believe God is”. QED. I heard her from the kitchen and thought about that simplistic sentence- isn’t that the essence of faith? If you believe, it is so.
At this time, I would be remiss not to mention the book “Life of Pi” an amazing story that, to me, has always been about faith. Before I write about the book, let me say that my goal is not to convince people that God exists. I am equally accepting of atheists. Like me,
atheists have made a choice to believe in something, even if that belief declares God doesn’t exist. Back to Life of Pi – it is the story of a young man who survives a harrowing shipwreck and months in a lifeboat with a large Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. As he recounts the story, the officials do not believe his story about the tiger. He says “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer?”. Well, I choose the story with Richard Parker, it is the better story.
Another wonderful quote – “I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: ‘White, white! L-L-Love! My God!‘—and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, ‘Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,’ and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.”.
So, what do you believe in???
epiphanu 