Mischief of the Gods

Human base instincts

I have to begin this with the confession that I am a man who believes in God. Hence it irks me to come across passages in which the Gods are described in unfavorable terms … including references to their lecherous behavior … drunkenness … interference in human affairs … the source of maladies … natural disasters … disease … and misfortune. I expect that this will diminish in time … especially with the realization that it was all done for man.

 

I write this with the borrowed idealism of a young man … perhaps the young ideal I used to feel … and in reference to losing my faith with the Gods. In the years I spent seeking knowledge … my ideals lived in denial of faith … in avoidance of worship … devotion … and the simple notion of trust in all things. I applied myself to finding knowledge with an open mind … leaving it to the facts to prove one or the other.

 

Hence its awkward to say I believe now … I guess I just left the entire issue on the backburner. But I did come to a clarity of what are the Gods … in relation to man … and the relation we both bear to the universal creative energies. In an analogy its like a game of hide-and-seek … that we jointly agreed to play with each other or in an alternative view … its like a man building a house … and asking his friend to hold the other end of the beam … so that it may be properly fastened in place.

 

In either case … its the ' I ' … the experiencer … the living man … who is indicating his need and hence … in both instances … its a project that is founded on man's desire. Did we come to experience a sense that the Gods had taken away what is rightfully ours? Did they thereafter play at creating it for themselves? Were we shocked at a blatant disregard for our common understanding? Were our days filled with sorrow at the break in the agreement?

 

The newspapers in these past years … highlighted many events in the world … that can only be described as … man's willful determination to end it all. Stop the world from going on. And every conversation we entered into … was lined with acrimony … complaints … and anger … at the fact that things turned out differently from what we thought. The Indics have a phrase for that … they call it … ' vithiyin vilaiyatu ' … or the play of the fates. 

 

Play indeed! It had the force of lab mice … being rewarded for pressing the blue button … and then it was switched … to receive an electric shock. It turned love into a stringed marionette … for the pleasure of someone insistent on simply having their way. The road sign pointing in a certain direction ... was put in the wrong place.The Indics say it succinctly as ' all things go wrong when the head goes wrong.'

 

From Jonah 2:3 ...You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled upon me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. Was it a play then? A disagreement with a work colleague? How would anyone explain to a man … that it was for his benefit? It would I'm sure explain the fact that we held back our natural idealism … and found in the youth of our experiences … a trap-door for the believer.

 

Such a play undertaken by anyone or divine natures … must have appeared like a musing about life.  And the bards of yore certainly brought it into expression that way. The Vasudeva in the Mahabarata  described his actions as ' waging a war with himself.' It was a war that annihilated all plays … imaginings … and make believe … and killed the Vasudeva himself … as the maya.  It was the war that paved the way for man … in the generations to follow … who saw the world with their own eyes … and began the long march to self-determination.

 

Man moved from dreams to physical reality … destroyed the game of hide-and-seek and began a new transparency with his friend … helping him to build his home. Such a transparency must certainly make it coherent … as regards both their roles in the relationship … they have engendered over the eons. Man in the flesh and the Gods … in their divine light of being.

 

The mischief if any … is to be found in the baser instincts of man … who creates no tolerance for order … is lethargic to thought … and delights in deceiving … as if to cuckold the intelligent natures. In that the teachings of the church … temples and other houses of worship … are correct representations of the truth in man's affairs. In attempting to fool another … we fool only ourselves.

 

The origin of such an impulse must surely go to … someone who faces the ultimate debacle of the apocalypse at the end of time … as a problem of the psyche … whose witness to the intelligence in creation … cannot cope with the cause of the annihilation. Someone who can't grasp … the will of the universe as grown bored of its activities … and deciding to shut down. Someone who doesn't understand the will of man in collaboration with the will of nature.

 

It has to be someone who swears by the passions … that its the greatest intelligence of the universe … not the intellect. Its the reason the Emperor Shih Huang Ti burnt all the books in China. Its the visionary Vishnu of the Puranas … the affirmative Zeus of Olympus … and the melancholy felt by man … for a life that is born in full knowledge of itself. Its the source of inquiry into how we know what we know. It is that which persuades man to seek knowledge by forsaking the knowledge we have. Its the strange case of the covenant between man and God.  

 

Reviews

[anne]

I really liked reading it...so many beautiful and wise thoughts...though I have not got few..but it was really worth reading this piece..a great write indeed...
Vasudeva in the Mahabharata described his actions as ' waging a war with himself.' It was a war that annihilated all plays … imaginings … and make believe … and killed the Vasudeva himself … as the maya. It was the war that paved the way for man … in the generations to follow … who saw the world with their own eyes … and began the long march to self-determination.....
best part for me...:))