Replace the word ‘God’ with ‘Life’
How a simple switch of words changed my relationship with the Divine and in the process eased my journey towards Yoga & Meditation, helped me grow over my fear of divine-punishment, made me mentally stronger, more successful in my material pursuits and helped me answer the most profound questions that have troubled me
God is a ‘photocopying machine’
Many years back i had read a book titled “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch. It is purportedly a real-time conversation between the author, who, totally frustrated with his broken life, starts to write questions to God, and surprisingly he starts getting answers back (it is unclear how the answers come but perhaps responses forming in his head or perhaps auto-writing).
The book in my view is one of the most profound, layman understandable, manuscript on the ideas of Advaita or Non-Dualism… or put in layman terms… that there is simply ONE Consciousness and ONE Energy, which manifests as the Universe. In others words, ‘अहम् ब्रह्मास्मि’ (I am ‘Brahman’) — I am the ‘Energy Principle’ that pervades the whole Universe and is immanent in the Universe. In simpler words, ‘I am God’ (loosely speaking as Brahman is NOT EQUAL TO the commonly accepted idea of a God sitting up there, popularised by Abrahamic religions).
Making your desires come true
While explaining ‘how to make your desires come true’, God explains that this Universe is like a ‘photocopying machine’. Whatever are your deepest, most dominant desires or thoughts about yourself, start manifesting in your life.
For instance, if your most dominant thought about money is that there is never enough, then there will be a manifestation of ‘lack of enough-ness’ of money in your life; and therefore to manifest money in your life one must constantly operate from ‘enough-ness’ of money — a way of changing your base thought would be to start giving ‘as if you had enough’. Fake it and your base thoughts about your relationship with money will start changing. And as the relationship starts to change from ‘i do not have enough’ to ‘i have’ (enough and more, that ‘i can even give to others’), the Universe starts to manifest more money in your life.
A god with ‘no’ mercy
In this sense, the Universe does not care about you being a good person or a bad person. It does not have feelings for your suffering. There is no God out there who is going to show mercy on you and uplift you out of poverty. The Universe has no preference or judgment about who to give more or less to (of money, of happy relationships, of success, or power) — it rather simply manifests your deepest, most base thoughts you have about these good things, into your life.
Replacing ‘God’ with ‘Life’
A radical idea suggested in the book was to replace the word ‘God’ with ‘Life’.
God is a laden word. It evokes feeling of someone we pray to for ‘help’. For pulling us out of our miseries of our lives — of not having enough money OR poor relationships or poor health, etc. We ‘look up’ — sadly even Hindus have started following the Abrahamics for whom God is sitting ‘up there’ in Seveneth Heaven, looking down upon us. Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli raise their bats and helment to the skies and close their eyes in gratitude. Show gratitude is perfect, but perhaps they could equally show that by touching the Earth in gratitude. They don’t, because the idea of a God sitting up there has become so ingrained in our minds.
The fear of God, the fear of being punished for ‘bad’ actions, is drilled in into minds of children from young ages. The problem is very acute in orthodox Christian and Muslim societies around the world. With a term as loaded with meaning, and one that evokes so much emotion of fear, the idea of replacing the word God with ‘Life’ was an easy decision for me.
Prayers to ‘Life’ or ‘Prakriti’
Being raised as a Hindu, in spite of the corruption of indigenous ideas of Divinity — thanks to absorption of Abrahamic ideas of a judging God ‘out there’ — there is always some element of training, to think of all life around us, including ourselves, as nothing but an expression of Shakti — the essential ‘Life Force’, or as Consciousness (चेतन तत्त्व), that is immanent in the whole Universe, and all forms of life within it; from inanimate rocks to amoeba to pigs to humans to the Oceans to Earth to the whole visible Universe.
Consciousness (puruṣa) and Nature (prakṛti) are opposite sides of the same coin
~ Subhash Kak in ‘Light on Yoga’ (https://subhashkak.medium.com/light-on-yoga-8ea8b74431b7)
Purusha is the unmanifest Consciousness which pervades everything visible. Prakriti is the time and space, and the laws and energy, that constructs the Universe and keeps it going. And hence, everything around us is sacred to a Hindu —from mountains to trees, from cows to pigs, from rocks to rivers, from humans to ‘non-human beings’.
Life was simply another term for ‘Prakriti’ — the visible, manifest Universe. I could now easily look upto the stars in the night sky, fold my hands and send a prayer. I could now, easily sit at a temple, looking at any deity, consider Him/Her ‘Life’ and send a prayer. I could sit at my temple space at home, looking at the rows of Deities and yet look at all of them independently or collectively as ‘Life’ and offer my prayers. And my gratitude.
Shift from ‘Divine judgement’ to ‘reverence for Life’
This idea that the terms ‘Prakriti’ and ‘Life’ are interchangeable and that ‘Purusha’ and ‘Prakriti’ are two sides of the same coin, was very liberating. As a Hindu, i took to it like fish to water.
My fears of the ‘Divine punishing me’ dissipated. My reverence for Life deepened. The frequency of expression of my gratitude towards Life increased manifold. My prayers asking for material things to improve the quality of my life-experience increased — i did not feel like a beggar any more. And this changed my relationship with money, which i honestly believe gave a boost to the quality of the business i ran, and with it the access to money and resources increased.
My life was more pleasant in more things than i had ever had before. And possibly far beyond my capabilities.
No, this is not non-scientific new age mumbo-jumbo!
Simply Google for ‘randomness or luck in business success’ and you find tons of research papers and writings including from Harvard and other research institutions, proposing that ‘luck’ or ‘randomness’ plays a huge role, perhaps the most significant role in determining who succeeds in material life (power, position, money, business success, etc.) and who remains a mediocre.
Most of these studies suggest that in fact it is ‘randomness’ and ‘luck’ which plays a dominant role in the success of businesses and their CEOs than the quality of their talent. Here’s an excerpt from one such study:
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories.
In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.
Author Tony Tjan in his bestselling book “Hearts, Smarts, Guts & Luck” speaks about a study done over 3 years of the most successful businesses in the US and concludes that ‘Luck’ is amongst the four most dominant traits other than ‘Heart’, ‘Smarts’ and ‘Guts’ that lead to success.
He shares that 2/3 of founders are ‘Heart’ dominant. As a corollary they are not ‘Smarts’ or ‘Guts’ dominant — which sort of shares the same insights as the research paper quoted above.
You need to have the humility to believe that there are forces out there that are helping you realise what it is that you want to do ~ Tony Tjan, co-author of “Hearts, Smarts, Guts & Luck”
There is no external agency needed to ‘create Life’
Now comes the great question which has dominated all religious discourse throughout human history — “Who created this world?”
A couple of months back i was visiting Pittsburgh in USA for work. During a walk through the town i bumped into an African-American man in an intense and passionate argument with a Hispanic man. As i stopped for the green-light for pedestrians i overheard their conversation. They were arguing whether Allah is the greater one or the Christian God and discussing their attributes such as mercy, etc.
Unable to resist, i walked upto them and taking their permission introduced the idea that ‘the entire Universe is Conscious and we’re made of the same Consciousness’ and that ‘there is no creator’. Aghast at me, both of them suddenly found themselves on the same side and with even greater passion argued that “there has to be a creator of all this world and because He is the overlord of all this creation including ourselves, we must submit to his authority”. They both knuckle-bumped each other, looked away and started arguing amongst themselves once again.
Realising that my idea was too radical for their comprehension, i walked away.
But even my clarity on this topic came from one of the most profound intellect-dominant spiritual Master that has walked this planet. OSHO! Listen in.
“If God can be there without ‘being created’ then existence can be there without being created” ~ OSHO
This was a powerful statement. In one stroke Osho cut through this argument for a ‘creator-created’ paradigm of thinking about the Universe.
This deepened my reverence for ‘Life’ even more. This brought me closer to the ‘Purusha-Prakriti’ paradigm of thinking about Universe.
Why did the Indians have to face such brutal times?
This one question has bothered me forever. It may seem like a bit of a deviation in the story of this article but it addresses an important point, and hence i’m bringing this up.
Ancient Indians have reflected upon the nature of the creator and creation over millenia. The ‘Rg Veda’ is perhaps the oldest known religious scripture known to man which has reflected upon this eternal quest for ‘the nature of life’, purpose of life, man’s position and role in this creation, etc.
Out of the need for interpreting the Vedas and following the rituals prescribed in them, rose the sciences. Study of Astronomy, Mathematics, and Physics, numerals were invented, the ‘zero’ and negative numbers were invented, study of how a human body can stay healthy was discovered, and so on (very little credit is given in western scholarly spaces to the Indian contribution to sciences and mathematics — but slowly and surely history is being unpeeled).
And yet the Indians had to face the most brutal genocide the world has seen lasting over a thousand years with incredible human cost. Here’s Will Durant reminding us:
The ‘Divine Mother’ or simply ‘Life’, does not take sides
The answer to this most troubling question came from the movie ‘Avatar’.
The protagonist, Jake Sully, is getting into a war with humans who’ve landed on Pandora to mine for a special element, and in the process are destroying the natural world and the lives of the millions of natives of the planet.
The natives of this particular tribe have a tree which they call the ‘Tree of Souls’. The tree helps the tribes speak to their ancestors and get a guidance from them…via insights and intuition.
Jake Sully, knowing well that the natives would be decimated by the war-machines that humans have brought to Pandora goes to the ‘Tree of Souls’ to ask ‘The Mother (of the Universe)’ for help in fighting humans.
Seeing this, his girlfriend, tells him, “Our Great Mother does not take sides, Jake”. Watch.
This clip shreds to pieces, the irony that some religions carry…that the creator they believe in, will come to save them from the non-believers. Gods of various religions promise their followers of such divine-retribution for the non-believer.
Life (or God) is NOT merciful
Most often human beings seek solace for their problems. Mostly, finding solutions, instead of solace, is hard work and we are not trained to not avoid hard-work (or not avoid hard thinking).
Life is difficult. And ‘suffering’ is embedded in the very nature of all life. ‘Why is it so’, etc. are not questions that bother me any longer. I invite you to build the courage to break away from this quagmire.
‘Life is difficult. There is suffering in life. It is so! What should i do about it?’, is a better question to struggle with, reflect upon and learn from ancestors and Masters who have found some (and often different) answers.
Perhaps one solution to our problems lies in working within the framework of ‘replacing the word God with Life’ and thinking of ‘Life as a photocopying machine’.
Why am i writing all this?
Firstly, because i am unable to live a life ‘at the surface’ —learning, talking, thinking deeply about profound existential questions is important to me. It is hard for me to live with unconvincing answers. It is hard for me to do so ‘out of fear’… out of fear of divine retribution.
Second reason being that it is hard for me to do things without often understanding why we do them. For instance, offering prayers to Deities, as Hindus do, without integrating within me the ‘why’ of the worship and the rituals. It is hard for me to do so ‘out of fear’… out of fear of divine retribution.
And finally, because there is an innate ‘need’ for me to synthesize all the ideas i have picked up about life, god, devatas (deities), spiritual practices, Yoga, meditation, ‘attracting money & success’ to oneself (popularly written about in the global bestselling book, “The Secret)”, into a coherent story of my ongoing experience of life. Synthesis and internalisation of ideas is deeply important to me.
And writing helps me synthesize disparate ideas that i have gathered.
Hope you enjoyed reading. And hope these ideas will propel you forward on your own journey. The distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ representing the ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ respectively, is really an artificial one. And so is the distinction between work-life and non-work-life. These schisms are not helpful. They divide and bucket our life leading to a disintegrated view of who we are. Such bucketed views become an impediment for achieving mental, emotional and physical health. Such bucketed views offer a life of mediocrity, and not helpful in the pursuit of excellence and success in whatever that is important to us.
There are of course still more questions. One such set of questions that has occupied me for a long time is “Who are the Devatas?”, “Are there non-human beings out there?”, “Why do we worship and appease them?” and so on. Hopefully i will keep evolving this post or keep writing new ones to integrate and assimilate new data and insights that i gather along the way.
