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Anthology XXX PDF Print E-mail
Thursday, 29 July 2010 13:27
The following is an excerpt from Srila Acharyadeva's anthology in the making, compiled from various lectures and writings of his, taken from the category "God," subcategory "Etymology":

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If we meditate away our own personal existence, it is a tragedy. Every one of us exists as a free conscious individual, capable of loving and being loved and capable of unlimited creativity. That conception should never be trashed and is the most precious thing that can be. There is no limit to how much we can advance and expand our consciousness.  Because we are part of God and God is infinite, there is no limit to the happiness and wisdom we can achieve according to this view,

Ultimately, we have to go back to our roots and think back to this logical principle which was accepted by many of the philosophers in Buddhism, Vedanta, and other Indian schools, sat karya-vat, that the cause is present in the effect. Imagine a medical researcher. Someone has a disease. If you study it, you can find the cause in the effect. Virtually every type of research or investigation accepts this idea that causes are present in effects. That is what a historian does. In history you start with the effect and reason back. Events take place in a certain chronological direction and analysis reverses the chronological direction. Start from the effect and go back.

Therefore, if we are trying to find the source of our existence, where we came from, this is a very healthy project. Ultimately, we have to start with ourselves. We are the effect, so what are we? If you really accept yourself as a person, maybe imperfect or a work in progress but with unlimited potential, this strongly suggests that the source of your existence is somehow personal. Therefore we can live in a universe that, ultimately, has a good purpose. The obstacle is, can we be humble enough?  Not only for ourselves, but on behalf of humanity. Can we be humble enough to accept that there may be contaminations of the soul so deep-rooted that sometimes invasive procedures are the only way. I personally know people who died, who believed in the doctrine that in every case you can cure every disease without anything invasive, when they could have been cured.

From this point of view, are we big enough and are we humble enough? And from this point of view, big and humble are often the same thing although sometimes we think proud and big are the same thing.

It is emotionally, psychologically and spiritually very challenging to really embrace a personal view of reality and thereby to see everything that happens in our lives simply as an exercise. If I can respond spiritually to difficulties with a deep understanding of myself as a spirit soul and with an understanding of God, this is a great workout, and I am going to become very strong, spiritually. So for those who want to get in shape, spiritually, these are great times because there are all kinds of financial and vocational exercise machines.

Question: What if we created God only because of our need for him?

HDG: It is a very interesting way of arguing that, if you feel a strong need for something, then you imagine that the object that can fulfill your need does not really exist.  We have a need for water, so we simply imagine that there is such a thing, but it does not exist. Or there is no food, there is no oxygen, there is no friendship in this world, there is nothing, because we have needs for these things.

That is one way to examine the validity of an argument: if you apply it to other cases and it leads to almost immediate absurdities, it is probably not a great argument.

The psychology argument cuts both ways: Every time an atheists says, for psychological reasons, you believe in God, the theist can say, for psychological reasons you believe there is no God. This argument cancels itself out in the first five seconds. 

Question: How do you talk to someone who is not ready for any argument?

HDG: How do you sell popsicles to someone that hates cold food? I do not think we should begin with the assumption that there is an argument and a way to persuade everyone. It may be the case that some people, at this point of their evolution, are not really open to serious discussion.

I think that Blaise Pascal, the great French scientist and philosopher of the 1600’s— he was a great mathematician, inventor and a very devout Catholic- at the end of his life he gave up all his philosophy and science and went to a monastery in Southern France. He is famous, among other things, for what is called, Pascal’s Wager. He said that there are four possibilities:

1. You don’t believe in God and there is no God
2. You don’t believe in God and there is a God
3. You believe in God and there is no God
4. You believe in God and there is a God

These are just 4 logical possibilities. He says that if you do not believe in God and you get it right, you will never know you are right because if there is no God, no one is omniscient and therefore no one knows everything and therefore no one knows if there is a God or not. If you don’t believe in God and there is a God, you are a big loser – and not just because you go to hell forever which unfortunately they believed back then but because you are cutting out of your life the most valuable thing. If you believe in God and there is no God, you may still benefit because there is a growing body of mainstream research, which shows that people with faith often recover more quickly from diseases and deal better with certain kind of stress. I think you could make a fairly cogent argument nowadays that if there is no God and you believe in God, that it’s still beneficial, and if there is a God and you do believe in God, then the benefits are unlimited. And apart from God, the Jain tradition believed in an eternal soul but no God although their jinas, their tirthan-karas, their great sacred leaders, started to look suspiciously like deities after a while.

It seems to me, there is something existentially bizarre about someone being born on earth and despite this massive testimony from most of the people that ever lived on earth that there is something like life after death, there is some kind of existence, even eternal life, and somehow this life after death in its various formulations, is connected to having an appropriate relationship with a divine power. So, we have this massive testimony, which we can say doesn’t prove anything. Yet, if you’re trapped because of an avalanche or your boat sank and you’re in a life-preserver, if there is any chance to survive, it seems to me, it’s just part of the human spirit that a normal, healthy person would say, ‘If this is my only chance, and if I don’t do this, it’s curtains… let me try.” Not that a person has to join this or that religion, or has to adopt this or that doctrine, but the general idea that under appropriate circumstances and with a proper effort on my part, I may be able to perpetuate my existence. No. I prefer to argue and further, to fight for the belief that I cannot survive. Imagine you are trapped somewhere on a skiing trip and you have someone in your party saying, “We are going to die! We are going to die! Stop thinking we can get out of this. Just sit down and die.” Would you consider that to be the most balanced, healthy person in your skiing party?

Also, it seems to me that being psychologically predisposed against God we certainly don’t have to accept a particular version of God. We may find certain theologies unacceptable, even evil, like the idea that God does the most horrific things to people for apparently innocuous reasons. So we certainly have every right to discard conceptions of God that do not match our sense of what a divine being would be. So it is not a question of being committed to this or that dogma, but the general notion that in or beyond the universe, there may be an infinitely powerful, infinitely good being, who is willing to accept friendship with me, who is willing to love me, who does love me, and is inviting me to love Him/Her/It or Them. That general idea is very beautiful. Plato, using Socrates as speaker, gives that idea long before there was anything like Christianity. So, to be adamantly, aggressively predisposed, psychologically, against the idea of an infinite loving being and to reject the idea of an infinite, loving being, a priori, despite all the inconceivable logic and art in the universe (ie. in snowflakes or water crystal) is not scientific, because it is not neutral. It is not objective. In a scientific investigation, if you have a heavy emotional predisposition toward a certain result, you are probably not qualified to carry out that experiment. For example, it is even a legal principle in our country that people who are emotionally predisposed cannot be objective. If someone is accused of a crime, that person’s mother cannot be on the jury.

(“Staying Calm in Hard Times,” a lecture given in Atlanta on March 9, 2009)
Last Updated ( Friday, 03 September 2010 14:05 )
 

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