Evolution is like The Theory of Relativity – it explains everything. Ever since we began all those billions of years ago as miniscule pieces of DNA, the main foundation of our activities has been just one – the desire to exist. For that we have fought with the environment, with other animals, and most frequently and brutally, with other animals of our own species. And we continue to fight for everything – for better food, for better comforts, for more power over human and material resources, for better mates – even though our battles are now less physical and more subtle, being fought in glamorous boardrooms with yawn-inducing PowerPoint presentations or in ‘civilized’ debates in TV studios or Parliaments.
And yet, there have been people, both men and women, though few and far between, who have not succumbed to this most primitive instinct of survival of the fittest. Instead, their inner eyes have been fixed so firmly and rapturously on something called their passion which has made them oblivious and indifferent to the constant power struggle in life. Consider the cases of Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka. They never earned anything from their writings, neither fame nor money, and died largely unknown. It could not have been the compulsion of an evolutionary power struggle that made them pour their souls into their works. Such dedication with no material rewards can only be the result of the inner eyes being so fixed on a pure passion that nothing else in the world seems worthwhile. And the mere theory of survival of the fittest would be hard put to explain this phenomenon without logical contortions of the Russian gymnast kind.
Life as we know it in our everyday struggles and pleasures is mostly dull, drab, dreary, petty, unedifying and uninspiring. We go through it because of our survival instinct that spirals through the very core of our being in the form of our DNA. And yet, in rare moments – in a snatched fragment of a song, in a poem that like the sudden springing of a trapdoor plunges you into the hidden depths of life you never suspected, in a sky of an unusual blue, in the green spring leaves ruffled by a caressing breeze, in the melting eyes of your lover – you experience a sudden clarity of vision, a sudden experience of possibilities beyond the ordinary humdrum worldly existence. That vision of the something beyond the confines of the cage of desires welded together by the logic of self-interest opens up an entire new sky which is something more beautiful, vast, eternal than our own petty existence. Something that is beyond victory and defeat. And that timeless, eternal, yet ever-fresh and ever-invigorating, thing or phenomenon – that is God. A God whose essence can never be captured by the mind-numbing rituals of religion or by mechanical methods to find Him through meditation or austerities. That God can only be found when the inner eyes are focused on finding the highest good in our human interactions, in our passions. That love for the good and creative, that feeling and striving for the better nature of humankind – that is the only way to find God.
I have always been a great believer. I've flitted from one belief to another, from religion to atheism and from one philosophy to another, until I finally settled on J. Krishnamurti whose philosophy is that there is no philosophy. So now I firmly believe that there is nothing to believe. Now such a belief would, I believe, have been considered dangerous to society if the authorities had believed me to be of any consequence. No man of consequence they believe would waste his time on the pursuit of blogging!
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