LIFE - COLORES INFINITUM (15)
God fearing or god loving!
Though I haven’t seen the movie ‘OMG, Oh My God’ with Paresh Rawal in the lead role, I could come to believe it should be an interesting watch. Its synopsis was enough for me to reach at this conclusion as raising such a sensitive subject in a religiously orthodox society like India
One of it was about what kind of devotees we are.
One of the characters (a typical Baba or religious guru of the day) says in the closing scene (based on the synopsis I read) that the people (read devotees) who were turning away from him would come back to him one day as they fear god and not loved him.
The film tries to tell us about the rational side and methods of the god-worship and how our own fundamental flaws about the concept of god’s existence and rule add to our miseries that we never realize.
True, most of us are like this only. When there is acute shortage of healthcare infrastructure, when there is almost dead educational infrastructure at the beginners’ level, the growing number of multi-million dollar temples and an evergreen multi-billion dollar business thriving on religion tells us this only.
What is this with god and man?
Isn’t yet another relation that we live?
We all need to develop a relation with god and it should come not only if someone else was doing so; not only if others do so blindly. It should develop the way our most intimate relations grow.
We need to question him, fight him, and come to believe in him, the way we do with family members and friends.
But for most of us, god has always been a forced proposition, positioned within us with an imagery that is all sacrosanct, powerful, all giving, all punishing, all caring. This indoctrination begins at an age when we cannot even speak. And this imagery has not even a single human-like element.
As time passes and we grow up, this imagery of the god becomes stronger, making him totally different from us.
We can understand this from the basic ‘spiritual tenet’ of a god-driven world where it is said we don’t need to run anywhere to find god; he is within of us.
Rarely do we feel like it when realizing and practicing it can practically kill all our miseries.
Most of us, we never see that human element of god in us; we never see the human element that is there in the god.
Most of us, we always look at god as someone all powerful who would end all our miseries. Most of us, we always see in god an all powerful giver. Most of us, we live in the circumstances, where we fall short of good happenings, face bad events, and overcoming the resultant chaos goes beyond our capacity.
We look to god then, to give strength to us, to help us in reconciling with whatever that happened; reconciling with something that should never have happened according to our conscious thinking. We all have these moments in our lives.
When we are able to overcome (irrespective of how), we say god came to help us. When we are not and have to reconcile somehow, we say god punished us for something that might even go the previous life (even though we never fully know about this present and real life), if we are not able to dig any possible reason in this life.
Most of us, we stereotype god in this fashion, either giver or punisher. We are told to see him like this generation after generation.
And most of us come to nurture a selfish relation with god thus, making us more and more dependent on him, expecting more and more. Naturally, most of the time, our calls are not heard and we somehow reconcile that it was god’s will or it was in destiny. This dependency, over a period of time, replaces natural devotion with devotion impregnated with expectations, taking in the element of fear.
It drags us to the ways where we become more and more ritualistic, trying to do all to please the deity of our conscious; trying to do all to avoid wrath of the deity. We seldom do the soul searching that may refine our thought process. The spiritual quotient is buried deep somewhere then.
If we follow him blindly without questioning him for the events that our conscious cannot reconcile with, we don’t love him. We follow him then fearing that not doing so would invite his wrath.
True love is free of such inhibitions, be it in any relation. God has to be loved in the same fashion the way we love our closed ones.
Majority of the human population has followed the same process of human evolution over the ages. This basic tenet has remained the same.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
