Religion and I

 

Image by Gemini AI

As the new academic year begins today in Kerala’s schools, I’m reminded of the fact that it’s a year since I stopped teaching and took to retired life, the third stage of Vanaprastha in the Hindu vision of life. According to this view, I’m supposed to pass on household duties to younger generation and focus more on spiritual contemplation.

Since Maggie and I are the only two members of our family, I can’t pass on duties to any youngster. But I decided to do some serious exploration of religion and spirituality. That’s how I started writing a book which was tentatively titled The Simplest Guide to Religion.

I’m not religious. I was unable to find meaning in prayers and rituals though I like visiting religious places. My countless visits to such places as well as my observations of people who practise religion earnestly made me want to learn why religion appeals to so many people though it appears absurd to me. That’s how I started working on this book.

I hope to complete it in a few weeks. The book has 6 parts: the pre-religious human, early religious forms, psychological and cognitive roots, from myth to theology, religion and power, and modernity and beyond. I did some fairly extensive studies before writing this. The more and I delved into the topics, the greater was my realisation that religion was here to stay as long as humanity existed. The concluding chapter is titled: Will Religion Ever End? It won’t obviously.

So I needed to understand it and writing this book gave me a lot of revelations and epiphanies. This is not a promotional post. The thought that I’m completing one year of my Vanaprastha made me look at what I’ve done with the year. It’s a question I hear almost every day: “How do you pass time?” When I tell people that I don’t pass time but time flies for me, they don’t believe. When I tell them that I read and write most of the time, they seem to doubt my sanity.

The final stage in the Hindu vision is Sannyasa or Renunciation. One is expected to sever all worldly ties and live a life of total devotion, meditation, and serenity, completely dedicating oneself to the divine. I don’t think I’ll ever reach that stage because the divine is still an intellectual exercise for me, not spiritual. Not experiential, so to say.

In spite of learning quite much about religion and its inevitability in human affairs, I still find it hard to make sense of people who claim to be deep believers in the divine but lack basic human compassion. Writing this book is helping me understand them better. But has it helped to make me more spiritual? No.

The starting point of my book is that religion is “at its most elemental level ... a narrative solution to the problem of chaos…. Gods do not explain the world in the scientific sense; they render it intelligible enough to be endured.” My mind hankers after explanations that appeal to my intellect. And I understand that religion is more of the heart than of the intellect. Maybe someday the stage of Sannyasa will begin to stir my heart.

Until then, let my explorations go on. The monsoon used to usher in the new academic year in Kerala usually. This year seems to be different, thanks to El Nino. But the monsoon has always been a unique drenching experience. I long for divinity to be one such experience.

What else but divinity can be the ultimate climax of human yearnings?