Is what we see a manifestation of the truth? The human sight is not the equivalent of an HD Canon DSLR – the downside of the human, or for that matter any life form with an evolved brain, process (if I can call it a process) is that seeing is not limited to a visual image capture. What makes sights so beautiful is the complex process of interpretation that the visual representation goes through. It is what makes the otherwise chemical composition of organic and inorganic environment so beautiful or ugly or whatever chord it might strike with the individual beholder. In my blog If There Was No God, I spoke about the individual motivation being the representation of their Gods. And from the very enthusiastic response I received from readers through comments, here and elsewhere, I am pushed to ponder over the crux of many similar debates.
“Why can’t you believe what you cannot see?”
And then there is the endless debate around how we can explain the perfection and balance of what we do see?
And this triggers the subject of this particular blog. What we see, hear and feel, very often are almost always subject to the beauty of interpretation of the human mind. And such interpretation is determined by the design and shape of the looking glass through which we view the world. For those of who have grown through a conservative dogma or have at some point in life been influenced by religious or spiritual discourses, the world and its part in the universe looks like bountiful beauty that cannot be solely a matter of science and coincidence.
Then there are those who have been surrounded and trained in discourses that rely on numbers, facts and truth that can be experimented and replicated in practice or on the basis of known theory. People believed that the Earth was the center of the universe – it was not so much ignorance by character as it was ignorance by a distorted viewing glass. There was never any evidence that suggested otherwise and hence there was no reason to question what you saw. The Sun going around the earth or vice-versa, would have the same manifestation to the human eye – what the hum eyes saw and brain interpreted was day and night as manifested by relative motion between the sun and the earth – it exemplifies the kind of dogma that colors the looking glass.
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all times, once said, “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”
The weakness of the act of seeing lies in the fact that most human beings tend to judge and absorb partial truths and groom them into rationalizations based on skewed perceptions that have been built through interaction with extraneous environmental factors that are skewed in terms of their understanding of the nature and laws that govern all things that are. Religion, in its truest sense, is (or should be) the expression and articulation of the absolute truth. Einstein also went on to say “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
As Swami Vivekananda once said, “Each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.” It is the complete assimilation of the universe around us, complete knowledge of it and its components that one and all Religion should be united to preach. Whether that is preached from the perspective of a God as a driving force or science as a reasoning force, or a combined faith, it must be preached to inculcate that opportunity to learn, change and evolve.
Reasoning based on limited knowledge and information, and attribution to God or the Divine or whatever our personal rationalizations may provide, without searching for absolution is not the equivalent of being religious, spiritual or a believer. It is ignorance that drives human beings down the wrong path, the outcome of this is the negativity we see and feel around us – because we seek God in the wrong places and, justify and judge actions based on half Truth driven perceptions.
“Why can’t you believe what you cannot see?”
And then there is the endless debate around how we can explain the perfection and balance of what we do see?
And this triggers the subject of this particular blog. What we see, hear and feel, very often are almost always subject to the beauty of interpretation of the human mind. And such interpretation is determined by the design and shape of the looking glass through which we view the world. For those of who have grown through a conservative dogma or have at some point in life been influenced by religious or spiritual discourses, the world and its part in the universe looks like bountiful beauty that cannot be solely a matter of science and coincidence.
Then there are those who have been surrounded and trained in discourses that rely on numbers, facts and truth that can be experimented and replicated in practice or on the basis of known theory. People believed that the Earth was the center of the universe – it was not so much ignorance by character as it was ignorance by a distorted viewing glass. There was never any evidence that suggested otherwise and hence there was no reason to question what you saw. The Sun going around the earth or vice-versa, would have the same manifestation to the human eye – what the hum eyes saw and brain interpreted was day and night as manifested by relative motion between the sun and the earth – it exemplifies the kind of dogma that colors the looking glass.
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all times, once said, “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”
The weakness of the act of seeing lies in the fact that most human beings tend to judge and absorb partial truths and groom them into rationalizations based on skewed perceptions that have been built through interaction with extraneous environmental factors that are skewed in terms of their understanding of the nature and laws that govern all things that are. Religion, in its truest sense, is (or should be) the expression and articulation of the absolute truth. Einstein also went on to say “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
As Swami Vivekananda once said, “Each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.” It is the complete assimilation of the universe around us, complete knowledge of it and its components that one and all Religion should be united to preach. Whether that is preached from the perspective of a God as a driving force or science as a reasoning force, or a combined faith, it must be preached to inculcate that opportunity to learn, change and evolve.
Reasoning based on limited knowledge and information, and attribution to God or the Divine or whatever our personal rationalizations may provide, without searching for absolution is not the equivalent of being religious, spiritual or a believer. It is ignorance that drives human beings down the wrong path, the outcome of this is the negativity we see and feel around us – because we seek God in the wrong places and, justify and judge actions based on half Truth driven perceptions.
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