Skip to main content

Touching the Divine


One of the many messages that Richard Bach’s Illusions proffers is that once we have climbed certain peaks we won’t descend. Once we have reached certain heights, we will spread our wings and fly. Once we have reached certain standards, nothing less will satisfy us.

When the knight in John Keats’s poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, encountered the ideal beauty, he refused to be satisfied with anything less and spent his entire life pursuing that beauty in spite of its fatal elusiveness.

If you meet your god, how will that encounter alter your life?

Those who touch the divine can never be satisfied with the mundane routines of existence.

Stating that same truth in another way: If you are just another ordinary person on the earth, you have not touched the divine. You have not met your god. Your god is only an idol in the temple or the church or some such place.

There are umpteen religions in the human world. There are countless gods. But evil keeps mounting. And pretty much of that evil is perpetrated in the name of gods! Why? The believers have not met their gods. Divinity stays somewhere out there without touching the hearts of the devotees.

Have you noticed that the nations founded in the name of gods are the most brutal? Worshipping god is not the same as meeting god.

If you meet god, you won’t be satisfied with anything less. You will spread your wings and fly in the divine milieu.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 450: If only Indians were as religious as they claim/pretend to be! #ReligiousPretensions

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanAugust 12, 2023 at 12:05 PM

    Hari Om
    This is true. ....🙏....YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. magiceyeAugust 12, 2023 at 6:40 PM

    Beautifuylly expressed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. peppylady (Dora)August 13, 2023 at 5:10 AM

    I think we alter daily.
    Coffee is on, and stay safe.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousAugust 13, 2023 at 9:34 AM

    Perfect differentiation between worshipping God and meeting God.🙏🏻 Well written sir.👍🏻

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

War and Meaning of Victory

In the summer of 1999, while the rest of India was soaked in monsoon and Cricket World Cup, the country’s soldiers were clawing up frozen cliffs daring the bullets that came shooting from above. India’s incorrigible neighbour had sent its soldiers and militants to capture the snow-covered peaks of Kargil. It was an act of deception, a capture of India’s land stealthily. The terrain was harsh and hostile, testing the limits of human courage with every jagged step. The Kargil War was not just against a human enemy, but against peaks of stones and snow where the air itself was an adversary. Three months of bitter conflict and subhuman killing ended in India’s victory over the invading Pakistan. Victory! July 26 is celebrated ever after as Kargil Vijay Diwas by India. What is victory, however? Philosophically, I mean. We are supposed to be rational (philosophical) creatures, after all. “ W ar does not determine who is right,” Bertrand Russell said famously, “but who is left.” Every...
8 comments
Read more

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...
10 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more