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Home » God presents to us as his Creation

God presents to us as his Creation

by Anil Bhatnagar
3 comments

Embark on Gomo’s journey as he discovers magnanimous love through healer Koko’s wisdom, unveiling the inseparable connection between God and fellow beings.

“I think he is dead now. Leave him alone. Let the animals have a feast.” I heard them saying. Lying there in unbearable pain, I thanked my lucky stars as I saw them leaving. 

Named Gomo, I belonged to the Tangifen tribe. People of my tribe were self-centered and lacked mutual trust, empathy, and respect. Cases of robberies, gang rapes, mass murders, and wanton killing of animals (sometimes just for even fun) no longer shook their conscience. 

Despite all this, most people looked pious and holy—at least in their own eyes. Every evening, they would gather inside a cave and dance in front of a gigantic carved face of Tangi, their tribal God, while singing his glories. It assuaged their feelings of shame, guilt, and fear. Since the statue of Tangi could neither notice nor challenge anything, it also gave people the liberty to nurture the self-delusion of approved spiritual grandeur.

The cave offered them a convenient escape from the harsh realities and the responsibilities of life. The illusory importance they had attached to Tangi and worshipping Him had dwarfed the value of—and hijacked their attention from—all that was invaluable: people, animals, rivers, oceans, forests, mutual love and trust, and the value of values. 

Those who voiced their concern about this hypocrisy were silenced, made irrelevant, or even killed. That was precisely why they had killed me too—well, almost! Lying there half-dead, I was fast losing my blood and consciousness.

***

When I regained my senses, I found a group of strangers attending to my injuries. A woman among them introduced herself, “I am Koko, and all of us belong to the Renshu tribe. We found you in an unconscious state at the foot of the hill and brought you here”. 

When I had recuperated fully, Koko adopted me as her son. Within a few weeks, I could see that the culture of Renshus was diametrically opposite to that of the Tangifens. The crime was unheard of—even though they practiced archery as a spiritual exercise to develop focus, they wouldn’t hurt even an ant. They practiced deep trust, empathy, and respect towards each other and other sentient beings. They had transformed their tribe into a mini heaven.

I was curious to know their secret. 

***

One day, when I asked Koko if Renshus also worshipped someone like Tangi, she laughed and said, “Yes, we call him Suru. However, instead of one, we have countless living Surus. We treat everyone whom we meet as our Suru”.

“But don’t you think that there must be a supreme Tangi, or Suru, who created everything and whom we should love with all our heart?” I shared my doubt.

“Gomo, I will tell you three things: We do not know, cannot know, and need not know this. Even if there is a Supreme Being, he has chosen to present himself before us only as his creation. Otherwise, we would have been seeing him, not his creation. Let us respect that. It is not wise to mortgage the creation that is right before us for the sake of what may only be in our heads. Now, let me ask you that when Suru could come to exist on his own without the need of an extraneous creator, why can’t you trust the same about creation? Renshus see no creator outside this creation.”, Koko explained. 

“If there is no separate supreme God or Tangi, how could people in my tribe imagine and carve out his face? Isn’t that inspiration coming from Tangi?”

“Gomo,” explained Koko, “what we imagine neither necessarily comes from divine inspiration, nor does it prove its existence in the real world. A human brain is a coherence-seeking machine that cannot live with uncertainty. So, it invents and preserves explanations that comfort us psychologically, even if it must ignore all pieces of evidence to the contrary.” 

I wanted to check with Koko what I had been listening to all my life, so I asked her, But aren’t we the supreme creation of the Supreme Being, God who made us in his image?”

“As I just said, we form beliefs not in the direction of the truth but in that of our psychological needs. In the larger scheme of things, we are merely one among the millions of species on our planet, who, like the organs of our body, are equally important, interconnected, interdependent, and subjected to the same laws of nature,” Koko paused for a while as she noticed an earthworm crawling near her feet. 

Pointing her finger towards that earthworm, she smiled, looked at me, and said: “Look here, Gomo. If it were to imagine a Tangi, it would imagine a God/Tangi having the body of an earthworm—perhaps, with a glow all around it. With billions of planets in the universe, the probability of intelligent species existing on other planets is strong. Some of these species may be so intelligent that they would look at our intelligence the way we look at that of an earthworm. Yet, it is comforting to us to narcissistically believe that we are the center of the universe—the supreme among all species.”

I was hesitant, but I still asked, What if there is a creator outside the creation?” 

“Even if it was possible for Suru to separate himself from his creation and for you to meet him, what would you do with Him?” Koko paused for a moment and winked while trying to tie her scarf around her forehead. 

“I would perhaps begin to express my utmost love and reverence…,” I mumbled while looking away at a distance.

“In a way, isn’t that what people in your Tangifen tribe are already doing? The people in power there who are supposed to serve fellow tribespeople exploit them while finding a shortcut by directly pleasing the head of the tribe. They do so not because they love him but because they love his power. You do not need to go far to know what treatment they would give to their tribal head (or their Tangi) if he were not so powerful. Just look at how they treat those who cannot defend themselves—they cut down the trees, pollute the rivers, rape the women, enslave the children, neglect, and exploit the old, and kill the animals,” Koko’s face had a pensive look as she shared her observations.

Looking away, I was still listening to Koko when something heavy fell at a distance with a thud and startled me. A branch loaded with mangoes had fallen from a tree. Blindfolded, Koko had just shot an arrow from her bow. When she removed the scarf from her eyes, she asked me to try the same with open eyes.

“I can’t. I lack that kind of practice.” I smiled.

“If you cannot do even this without the necessary practice, how would you suddenly be able to offer authentic love and respect to God or Suru if you aren’t practicing these with fellow sentient beings, now? I am asking you this because how attentively we listen to, how deeply we empathize with, and how truly we love and value someone is a habit that forms owing to conscious or unconscious practice.” Koko explained the relevance of her question.

I was speechless. 

“Everything is practice, Gomo. We become not what we know, believe, intend, or worship but what we ceaselessly practice. You will treat Suru the same way you treat your fellow sentient beings now. Moreover, Suru will not appear before us someday in the distant future. He appears before us as His creation, moment after moment. Who or what you are engaged with now is the only Suru you will ever meet. So, respond to everyone and everything with the same love, respect, and importance that you would feel for Suru if He were to appear in person before you.” Koko pulled me towards her in a motherly embrace as she explained the importance of practice. In that embrace, I could feel the ocean of love that Suru or God would find if He were to meet Koko one day. Koko was practicing what she preached. In that moment and that embrace, she was finding her Suru with unfathomable love. And so was I.

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3 comments

Bijal Maroo March 16, 2024 - 12:57 pm

What a lovely story! Hits bull’s eye about our hypocrisy and also in showing how we need to practice compassion from a belief of interconnectedness

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Sanjay Dhar February 1, 2023 - 4:46 am

Breathtakingly beautiful writing. It is shining with its own light. Left me with a certain peace and calm after reading it. The profound insight that “even if there is a supreme being, he has chosen to present himself before us only as his creation” is such a powerful call to humanism that transcends all theosophical debates, and has been elucidated so beautifully through the narrative.

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Alok Rai February 1, 2023 - 3:32 am

For God presents to us as His creation –
Appreciate the basic idea of forming this story. A great philosophical concept was explained in such a simple way through it. The writing style was simple and the flow of the story was good.
Well done Sh Anil Bhatnagar. And thank you.

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