This post is long long over due. I first started writing it in my notebook when I was over at a spiritual retreat on Good Friday (turned out to be quite Good =) ). This post was written after a heavy lunch in a cool airconditioned hall so expect the half asleep incoherence. Treat it like a ridiculously long haiku.

     I am currently in the lecture room of the hotel. A couple of fruit flies buzzing around ( I would like to belive they are Drosophila melanogaster, the Geneticists buddy) and a few of them areo n my leg. The past few days have been quite a ride and I'm still sorting things out in my head. I was reading Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and attending ninety minute lectures every day on the Bhagawav Geeta Chapter 13 and 3 hour lectures (split into two) on the Ramayan (don't be picky about transliteration, you know how it is pronounced). I feel that things have changed but also not changed I would also say things have been tweaked. There are a couple of issues resolved satisfactorily while others not.

     Take the idea of spirituality. It is (to me) the process of acheiving a lasting peace and joy and considering its challenge is a life-long process of continual self-improvement. Taking my atheistic background into account I feel that is a reasonable and workable definition and first principle. Prior to that, I felt that most first principles like God or Maya or Sin were too difficult/unproveable/irrelevant to use as first principles for any life-philosophy so I kept looking. Nonetheless there is still work to do. There are loads of good values/ideas lying hidden in the texts which need to be taken out of  the page and into the head. That process especially in the absence of a religious framework needs to be worked out from scratch since I can't go upto Swamiji and say "how does an atheist practice self-control when you keep recommending prayer as an aid? Who does he pray to, Dawkins?"

     It seems that I'll have to rely on the school of hard knocks (i.e personal failure; someone asked me who runs it) the way I did with my magic since I had minimal contact with other magicians during my formative years so I learnt by going out into the field and practising and making mistakes and evolving. However, in those times I could gauge success by the reaction and subsequent increase in fame. But spirituality is such an internal process that you have to be alert internally to symptoms that you're making progress at all.

    I further think that my search for God, as protrayed by Swamiji so far is at a dead end especially since he used something similar to William Paley's Watchmaker Argument which made the whole argument a tad primitive and disappointing. The Vedantic concept of God is alot more complex and syncretistic and open compared to *some religion* that I felt the supporting argument for theism shouldnt be the same. Kokila tried to convince me once that the God I was looking for was a sort of strawman. Over here, though, ,the God concept I had in mind (the so called stereotype) was very real and contradicts the less-evolved-ness of the idea. What is even more interesting is the amount of conviction Swamiji had towards his supernatural entity. (I see Kokila for such a short time that I do not feel like going into deep philosophical discussions with her).

    I honestly feel that if there were good reasons, I might be a theist. Might. But one other issue I had was when I aksed how we know that Rama, Krishna etc are incarnations of God? According to him that was supported by the fact that the Scriptures say so and due to the miracles they can do. Talk about miracles to a magician. Refer to my post on it. Alot of the evidence presented by him for the Law of Karma and reincarnation etc is very much subjective and feels alot like reading divine purpose into our already complex human interactions.

     Reminds me of those magic tricks where you're thinking of the same card as the spectator by sheer chance and you exploit the situation to make it look like you knew it all along. That presents such apparently incontrovertible evidence for your mind reading claim that your audience buys into it. I need objective evidence and I think that if God exists and really gives a damn, Ill find it.

     The thing about being a magician is that you tend to lose faith in miracles or the supernatural origins of miracles because it could simply be a trick which you cannot figure out. So I think thats enough of magical, spiritual and atheistic musings. =)

Read More 1 Comment | Cheers, csJoshi |

1 Comment

1. Kokila on 3:22 am

   Why're you so skeptical about miracles, mr magician? Miracles don't have to be supernatural. They're all around you. Ever seen a baby being born? It's quite a miracle ;)