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Blake’s
Truth
Prof.
Asoke Basu
I
noticed recently a stanza from one of William Blake’s poems
that I had first read in high school:
To
see the world in a grain of sand,
And
heaven in a wild flower;
Hold
infinity in the palm of your hand,
And
eternity in an hour. (1)
The
stanza answered a spiritual question for me: What is God?
The most typical way of conceptualizing God is in thinking
that His nature is perfect, His authority the highest. God
is thought of as external to human beings. Often He is represented
as an ideal, a deity or a sacred object. Some view Him in
existential terms. Here it is suggested that God is prior
to and transcends all forms. Any human attempt to represent
the existence of God is futile, because such attempts draw
a boundary around an essential and qualitative Being which
is boundless and undefinable. God is. It is as simple as that.
Then there are others for whom God is a utilitarian concept.
Marxists opine that God is a concoction, a ploy created by
the rich and powerful to keep the rest from changing their
own socioeconomic conditions. Karl Marx’s epigraph on religion
was that ‘Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed
by misfortune, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’
However,
what is common among all three perspectives - supernatural
(that God is external to us), existential (that God exists
a priori), and social (that God is man-made device just to
keep the poor happy) - is that there is a superior authority
that is known through a belief system.
God
in Small Things
The
God that Blake evokes in the aforesaid verse is a conscious
and direct act of living and experiencing life. His is the
way in which we perceive and understand, by means of our conscious
self, the wholeness inherent in the smallest part. God is
in and of ‘small things’. He can be realized personally by
our own human experiences in the interplay of reason and emotion,
logic and feeling. In this straightforward approach, God is
located not in a distant, mysterious segment of the cosmos
but in the natural world. Sacredness is a subjective attitude
which can be witnessed within the stream of secular actions
and temporal events. God, or God consciousness, is in all
things, like flavour in a fruit. Blake experiences this grand
Truth in a ‘grain of sand’ or in a ‘wild flower’.
The
capacity to find the meaning of God is in each of us. What
portends ‘spring’ is, in Blake’s metaphor, the manner in which
we choose to learn of our true identity, and accordingly endeavour
to locate its source. All living beings have the same point
of origin. Therefore it is fundamental that we humans participate
in nature. Everyday acts and observations, however mundane,
allow us to purify and transcend our body and mind and reach
the spiritual Self. The poet wants us to conceive and experience
the art of linking the grandest with the minutest. In this
light of consciousness the bond between the world and the
soul is revealed.
The
knowledge of our Self is intuitive. As all life arose in the
dawn of silence, it is in silence that we experience the eternal
One. The Upanishads inform us that true knowledge is intuitive
experience, samyag-darshana. If we so choose and act, it is
to the One that we can return and find liberation therein.
Most religious texts refer in their own distinctive way to
the cycle of change - birth, life, death, rebirth - until
the self unites with the original Source which Blake’s verse
apprehends.
Approaching
God Directly
Now,
let us raise what is perhaps the boldest question of our times:
Why is there so much disturbance, so much fighting and quarrelling
in the name of God?
Of
late, opinion makers, media analysts, educators and theologians
have theorized about possible factors associated with the
increasing tension between and among religious faiths. In
addressing the theological debate between Christianity and
Islam, the most common civilizational reference is to the
modernization of the Christian belief system - the Protestant
Reformation initiated by Martin Luther. The effects of the
Reformation were manifold. It shaped Europe’s political destiny
and emboldened Europeans with a rational-scientific mind.
Later, the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers sailed out of England and
colonized North America. Their ‘new’ institutional ethos promoted
the rise of the liberal democratic state. At the core of this
social transformation, religion played a decisive role. Max
Weber’s much applauded thesis is that the Protestant ethic
of hard work, acquisition of material goods, duty reformed
by piety, nobility of character, and a moral view of self
in secular action, fuelled the rise of capitalism. Pursuing
this point of view, the theorists suggest an entirely traditional,
subjective, exegetical and canonical view of Islamic theism,
which has, even in its present phase, remained hagiocratic
in Christian view.
It
would be simplistic, if not altogether naive, to conclude
that the so-called ‘civilizational crisis’ can readily be
categorized as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’, or for that matter,
‘holy’ or ‘profane’. In the gusts and eddies of thought and
action tradition and modernity can both be conformist in the
sense that divine or state-sponsored rules govern the lives
of men and women. What is important to note here is that Martin
Luther essentially freed the common spirit in all people.
The truth is that God can be directly approached by all because
each of us is a potent seed of knowledge. Accordingly, Luther
proclaimed that indulgences need not be purchased from the
Church as a ‘surplus’ grace to protect the self from sin or
for absolution.
This
approach to realizing truth is by direct experience.
To quote Vivekananda:
What
right has a man to say he has a soul if he does not feel
it, or that there is a God if he does not see Him? If there
is a God we must see Him, if there is a soul we must perceive
it; otherwise it is better not to believe. … Man wants truth,
wants to experience truth for himself; when he has grasped
it, realised it, felt it within his heart of hearts, then
alone, declare the Vedas, would all doubts vanish, all darkness
be scattered, and all crookedness be made straight. (2)
A
religion that requires the primacy of faith cannot disavow
an appeal to a ‘higher’ authority. The religion that Blake
and Vivekananda refer to can best be described as ‘independent
witnessing’ of the Self, the core of the personality. External
institutional aid in aiming for gods as well as goods can
be grist to the mill only if we learn to separate those attributes
that point to the universal Self from those which bring an
understanding of the concrete self alone. Reason and emotion
are both essential tools in this empirical process until we
break out of darkness into dawn’s light and are able to universalize
ourselves. Just as rational beings can reach for universal
values as reasonable moral judgements, so can pure emotions
lift the fog of our dyspeptic desires and direct us to the
path of happiness. Together, they indicate to us a direct
experience of Self-knowledge, where reason is not independent
of emotion.
References
1.
William Blake, The Auguries of Spring.
2.
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 vols. (Calcutta:
Advaita Ashrama, 1-8, 1989; 9, 1997), 1.127-8.
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