There is probably no better place than here in the heart of Hinduism in India to talk about creation. The Hindu creation story has some elements seen in the creation story of the Old Testament. Yahweh is behind the laws of nature. In Hinduism, Vishnu was not consciousness much before the creation of the universe. In fact Vishnu was sleeping quite peacefully g
uarded by Cobra who was also sleeping on the ocean formed by a great flood (hmmmm, another similar theme) that had destroyed the world.Well, Vishnu is awaken by the sound of "Om" welling up from out of the depths of the ocean. When Vishnu awakens, lo and behold, a beautiful lotus is growing out of his navel. Ca
n you imagine the amount of navel lint there must have been in there to allow this to happen? And sitting on the lotus blossom is Brahma. Vishnu, probably still a bit groggy from being awaken from what was undoubtedly REM sleep asks Brahma to create the world which he dutifully does. And the rest is history, well, mythology. But that brings me to the issue I've been grappling with here in India. If we believe that our existance starts when egg and sperm form their union, when does the individual really become conscious of him- or herself that is meaningful to the way they conduct themselves? That's what has motivated this posting. Delving into those memories of childhood and I'm not talking about repressed memories. I like to tell people the story of how my parents taught me to swim before I was even six months old. When the ice was finally off the lake, my folks threw me in and I swam almost immediately. Getting out of rope bindings and then out of the gunny sack were the real challenges. Swimming was easy. Try to remember your earliest memory. I want to share mine with you as a preface to the thoughts I’ve had recently based on events here in Hyderabad and the greater pan-Asian area as well as what I’ve been reading from the news in the US. The earliest memory I retain was a summer day when I must have been about two-and-a-half years old. Our house, still very much a cottage at that time, had a center rear entry with a screen door that faced the road. My family always described the side of the house that faced the lake as the front. What I remember so vividly is that my mother was in our kitchen which was galley style in the back of the house. You actually entered the house directly into the kitchen. It hadn’t started as a kitchen, though. It was originally a back porch with a line of five sash windows facing the road to the right of the door and three facing the eastern side of the cottage. Our ice chest (yes, I do mean an ice chest) and now-oh-so-chic country sink lined the wall to the left of the door. These two items were flanked by floor to ceiling cupboards made from the vertical wainscoting that designers now sell as being compatible with the country sink. Go figure. My Mom and Dad were “fashion forward” with that poverty-chic look. The doorway directly across the kitchen from the entry led to the living space. The evidence that a door once hung in that space was still visible. I was anticipating the arrival of my maternal grandparents who were driving from their home in Detroit to our home in Linden. My maternal grandfather had first discovered the cottage back in the 1920s as a travelling salesman when he sold high-end canned fruit from W. R. Hearst’s San Simeon estate in California. That gig didn’t work out long, but Grandpa Brown eventually bought the cottage, moving it from its original spot on the east end of the lake to its final resting place on what is now called “The Bluffs” of Byram Lake by local realtors. I remember that the road was the luminescent tan color of the clay from which it was made. The county had not deemed it necessary yet to lay down a coat of creosote as it was too early in the summer so every car that passed by blew up a cloud of the tan dust that would either blow off to the east carried on a breeze or settle back down on the road if there wasn’t. It must have been about noon as there were very few shadows leading or lagging from any object when I heard thro
ugh the screen door a car slow near our house. I caught a glimpse of a large olive green Oldsmobile coupe slowly turn into a parking spot across the road. The occupants opened the doors, stepping out onto the dusty ground. I could no longer contain my excitement. I started running directly at the screen door yelling “MangMang, BangMang” which were my names for my Grandmother Brown and Grandpa Brown respectively. I remember that I failed to even put my arms out to push the screen door open as I rushed to meet them. Unfortunately, my Mother had latched the screen door, heaven only knows why, we had nothing, and I mean NOTHING of any value to anyone in the general vicinity of Lower Michigan that would have required latching the hook and eye that was attached to the jam just above mid-door. I hit the door at a full run, my height made my head meet the cross-piece of the door dead-on. I believe I was in the middle of a second M-M and I remember saying Bang when I hit the door and was thrown back on to the linoleum, dazed and confused. I believe I’ve spent much of my life in that state ever since. The rest of the memory is blurred by time and not too many months after this encounter, my maternal grandparents moved into another cottage just down the road from us. I thought that was great. Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure how my Mom and Dad felt about it. Family dynamics like that are always tricky.What has sparked this thought is the temporal nature of our conscious lives. We become aware of the world around us and, depending on how we developed, we end up losing consciousness even before we’ve expired. I started out this blog with a picture that just blew me away when I first saw it. It is one from the Hubble telescope and it is the gas pillars from the Eagle Nebula. From what we have learned about them, there is the potential of future creation stories being formed in those pillars of gas and debris from the destruction of another sun. The story of creation that we continue to discover is more fantastic and awe-inspiring than even the most exotic creation story of any religion I am aware of. Now, mind you, I will witness that if you press me, I will recite the Catholic Profession of Faith to you as the tenet of my belief. So, how do I reconcile the Biblical creation story with what I observe? It starts with another story.
When I think of the Biblical creation stories in Genesis, a story that had its origins in an oral tradition of the nomadic people of the Levant, I imagine a shepherd huddled around a small fire gazing up at the stars, listening for any threat to his flock, and wondering "how did I get here?" I think of his perspective being influenced by the arid rocky desert. What would he want? Any place with water would be nice. Maybe it could have a date tree or two. Yum! Perhaps it could have enough grass for grazing his herd. A garden, perhaps? How did this wonderful place that I dream of get here? If I'm here in this inhospitable place, what did I do wrong that I'm not in a delightful wadi where I don't have to worry about finding water or food for my flock? Where is it that I don't have to worry about predators carrying off my flock or worse, some dudes from over the next hill coming to take my flock and kill me? And now that I think of it, what did my folks do wrong? And so the questions require an answer that he couldn't just go on the internet to find an answer. It will be well over 5000 years before D. W. Griffith will attempt "Intolerance" as an explanation. So, what's a nice nomadic boy to do on a cold, lonely night, far from home, alone with his thoughts and his flock? Whoa, we better not go any farther there. The thing was, there were communities around when the Levant story was forming, so our fictional shepherd could have heard or maybe even seen a village or larger community. How do ya keep 'em down in the desert once they've seen Ur?
And it all starts with Genesis. "In the beginning" or the creation story is one of the great faith stumbling blocks for any Christian faith tradition. It's gotta be real for the rest of the salvation story to have meaning. Certainly the Catholic Church has explanations in the Catechism for the origin of Cain’s wife and all the other inconsistencies However, I marvel as well at the Hindu creation story and how Vishnu sleeps on the cosmic ocean, laying on the seven-headed serpent he vanquished, dreaming the dream of the world. Vishnu is the perserver. Now, Hindu belief is a mythology, right, just like the Greek, Roman, and Norse gods were mythologies. As the late Joseph Campbell put it "Mythology is what we call someone else's religion." And all too often what we fail to realize is what the common function of religion has been which is a path to take a person from that point of their existence that they become conscious of the world around them until they lose that final consciousness through death or watching the last three seasons of American Idol or DWTS.
One of the benefits of cultural isolation is that your mythology or my religion don't have the problematic issues that pop up when someone else raises their hand and says "hey, what about my way of thinking which is better than your old way of thinking?" And here in India, Hinduism (again, a misnomer first used by the early colonialists to describe the polytheistism of India) had plenty of time to set up a rigorous storyline of how the world was created, what the rules are for those in the world (as they see it) and how individuals are to act. The Caste system came out of this and the Brahmans were on top of the Indian totem pole and the Dalits (untouchables) were just below the ground level. And the creation story suggested that what Caste you were born into is the exactly right one for you! So if you are a dung beetle or a life insurance agent, you know that in a previous life or lives, YOU loaded up on some bad karmic matter that you're paying for in this life and will, certainly in the case of the insurance salesman, probably be paying off for an infinite set of lives until at some time long in the future, you will become a Brahman and a yogi from which you will reach your Moksha.
This brings up our naive western approach to thinking about reincarnation. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say that they recall being a Egyptian princess or a great warrior or king or some grand personage of some kind. Well, what's with THAT? In eastern religion, each time the soul goes to it's holding pen waiting for the next incarnation, it doesn't know anything of what it was. It doesn't recognize any of its former lives. It just knows, as George Harrison penned, you gotta carry the weight of all that karmic matter a long time. So any time you have those Deja Vu feelings, it's probably something you ate; an undigested morsel or cheese or fermented gruel. It will pass.
