A few blog posts and conversations with friends have made me unquiet about the concept of Divinity: What is Divinity and what does it mean?
Background
My friend Asuph wrote about Divinity in 2004, when I had not even started blogging. He uses Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality from Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to describe what happens when we experience divinity. In my opinion, Pirsig’s Chautauqua is another example after Immanuel Kant, of how philosophizing can lead to general unintelligibility if you continue to seek metaphysical truths without getting your epistemology right. Leaving Pirsig aside, Asuph makes interesting observations and asks very pertinent questions.
The discourse has recently been over divinity in art and specifically, in music.
In Music Divine, Atul describes music that makes a direct connection to the divine, and pontificates about the role of divine intervention in the creation of such music and art in general. If you read my response, or are familiar with my blog, you can see that I disagree with the concept of divine intervention leading to the creation of anything, let alone artistic works. This idea essentially harks back to Evolution vs. Creationism at the metaphysical level.
Asuph then elucidates his take on divinity in music in the beautiful post – The Musical Language. He says that for him, the formless, nameless territory of divinity is ruled by music alone. If it were possible to consider an objective perspective on divinity, the question in my mind is: how do deaf (and further, blind) people experience divinity?
Sudheendra Kulkarni has touched upon a similar theme in a recent column: Why Sachin’s bat speaks to him. He uses the Sanskrit tanmay and talleen (self-immersed, engrossed) to describe the same things that Atul and Amit describe in their posts. Surprisingly, leaving his right-wing ideological background, Kulkarni turns to the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who architected the theory of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, and calls it a “psychological theory of karma”, whatever that means.
Using An Epistemological Razor on Divinity
What, then, is Divinity? As Wikipedia correctly notes, it is a loosely-defined term. One should be extra-careful with loosely defined concepts since they are a slippery slope from an epistemological perspective. Einstein played on this slope when he wrote to Max Born that “He does not throw dice”, a phrase commonly paraphrased in other words.
Continuing with the Wikipedia entry: The root of the word means “God-like”. It is used to refer to powers or forces that are universal or transcend human capacities or to qualities of individuals who are considered to have a special relationship to the divine.
In essence, anything that appears to transcend human understanding in general appears divine to us. This is what remains after applying the razor.
Experiencing The Divine
Are divine experiences limited to the sense of sound as they seem to be for Asuph?
Does a newborn baby experience divinity in its mother’s bosom? Did quantum physics scientists experience divinity when they observed sub-atomic particles defying all known laws of the universe? Can divinity be experienced by touch? Can you feel it when you see something?
I believe the answer to all the above questions is a resounding yes, because by definition, what we think lies beyond human understanding is a subjective interpretation.
Other than the common divine musical experiences, I experienced divinity when I had my first sexual orgasm. I felt it when I saw the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time through a telescope. I felt it the first time I closed my eyes and dipped a finger into liquid mercury, awed at how such a metal element could remain in a stable state in nature. I lived in it for many days during my trip to the Himalayas.
What is Divinity?
Asuph correctly identifies divinity as a state of mind. And that is what it is. Like many other aspects of the human mind, there is a lot we still don’t understand about it. I suspect it has a lot to do with a state of mind where the amygdala and the temporal lobes of our brain are in harmony, but those are hypotheses best left to neural scientists. I’m comfortable knowing what we don’t know at present.
I made a new friend when I was about 14 years old. We liked the same music. We read the same books and shared our Phantom and Mandrake comics. I used to be fascinated by his collection of Life magazine, with the stunning photographs of Apollo moon landings. He used to be fascinated by my home-made telescope. At a time when we were struggling with our English, he was studying Russian on his own – not from books, but by listening to Radio Moscow over short-wave radio. We spent our academically important 10th grade of schooling by studying long hours together, late into the night. We were ‘different’ in a way, from the rest of the crowd in our area.
We then went our separate ways in college. Our meetings became less frequent as my world expanded in many dimensions. It was after a year or so, that I first began noticing changes in him during our infrequent meetings. He seemed diffident and unsure of himself. After a couple of months, a common friend said something was really the matter with my friend. I went to his home and met his mom. She was in tears. She said he almost never left his room, and sat by the window the whole day, his hands gripping the window bars. Even children had started making fun of him. I went in his room. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and looked away. He was clearly afraid. Afraid of something, I didn’t know what. I decided to act normal, and asked him if he would come with me for a walk. We walked for about 15 minutes, during which I made general conversation while he seemed terrified.
When I came home later that day, and thought about my friend, I realized he was sick. Mentally ill. He needed to see a psychiatrist. I did not know anyone who knew a psychiatrist, or even anyone who knew anyone who knew a psychiatrist. I myself was barely 16. I knew my family wouldn’t help; they’d rather take him to some miracle worker or recommend him to an astrologer. I then remembered that the clinic where my dentist practiced had a psychiatrist too. The next day, I again went to his home, met his parents, and tried to explain that their son needed to see a doctor.
My friend was Punjabi, a North Indian family. His mom was perennially in tears. His dad, who was almost double my size looked menacing, and couldn’t understand. He simply wanted to shake his son out of whatever he was going through and ‘be a man’. After much persuasion, they agreed to let me try and help, so the next day, we were off to see the doctor. The doctor spoke a few minutes with all of us and prescribed some medicines, after which I spoke with him alone. He said it was schizophrenia, and the medication would help only to a certain extent. He didn’t seem hopeful about my friend.
I was busy dealing with the vicissitudes in my own life for the next few months, after which I once happened to meet my friend. I took him to the terrace of my apartment building, where we used to spend time together. He would never look at me, and start to leave the moment I looked directly at him. I tried my best to make him comfortable, and he began talking slowly. He told me he spoke to Lee Falk every day. Lee Falk spoke to him for hours together, telling him what’s happening and what he should do. He had even shown him his own private luxurious bedroom in his rich mansion, something he never showed anyone – my friend gleefully revealed.
In our next meeting, he told me why he was afraid. He was being pursued and followed day and night by LTTE terrorists, who were out to assassinate him. He narrated detailed experiences of how Lee Falk gave him advance intimation of where they were going to kill him and how he had cleverly foiled five such attempts on his life.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes:
He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way.
The far side of the moon is never seen from earth. Humans first directly observed it only when Apollo 8 orbited the Moon. Is that why insane people are called lunatics? When there is Brain Damage, why does there have to be an Eclipse? Why is it Us and Them, and not We? Today, I feel a complex web of emotions. There is a feeling of guilt that I didn’t help as much as I could have. There is also the realization that even if I knew about mental illness at that young age, it was only from an academic perspective. I didn’t have the psychological or real-world wherewithal to effectively help. At the end of it all, there is a sense of loss.
I lost my friend to the Dark Side of the Moon, and he must be saying:
And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear,
You shout and no one seems to hear,
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes,
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon
(In remembrance of World Mental Health Day, 10th October 2007, and my friend.)
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An Unquiet Mind by Mahendra Palsule is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
