God Is Blue!

Had a long conversation with an Imam from the nearby masjid over lunch yesterday and I was doing the questioning while he was patiently answering me about some basic tenets of Islam. We talked of basic laws governing the afterlife, as to who gets to be in heaven and who does not and the bottomline is that he who submits to the will of Allah by the virtue of his professing the Mushahadah will eventually end up int heaven even if he has transgressed in his lifetime. By acknowledging that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His messenger, one becomes a Muslim and observes the five pillars of islam and refer to the Quran as a guide in daily life, as a revelation or word of God. Islam is a very simple religion which is made to seem as a harsh and demanding one by some who practices extremism. We talked of the performance of the Haj and he was very excited of this for the fact that once a person has completed his/her pilgrimage, the slate to his life is wiped clean; all sins are forgiven. I kidded like that's why there's millions who wants to get there every year, the world is full of sinners.

One of my question s was, how does one knows that God has forgiven or accepted our repentance? he said that when you start feeling you are incontrol and sinning less, like drinking or gambling lesser and lesser and it has not more control over you and you finally kick the habit for good, God has accepted your repentance. Being in relationship with God or being religious is  more of a feeling rather than perception. You feel God's presence when you call on Him, less than what you see happens or does not happen when you call upon Him. Often when you witness an extraordinary sight in nature you feel awed, and your hair stands at the back of your neck and you whisper to yourself, there is a Divine presence here. God is everywhere but most of all is within you; you are the temple of the Living God. 

Why is it so difficult for man to accept the fact that he is in essence of a divine nature, that he is not just an evolved amoeba that has taken a long time to become human. Is it ego? Is it pride? In the Quran it is mentioned that Pride is the origin of evil. Why is it so hard for man to bow before that which has been proven over the ages to be the all Encompassing all Knowing Lord of Creation by almost religions giving It different names according to geographical and cultural and historical heritage if not by the spoken language itself. Perhaps what is hard for us to do is to discard the image of God that our minds has created by virtue of a specific culture or description of a certain scriptures; we have created a humanlike God and thus endowed with human traits; an angry God, a jealous God, a wrathful God, a compassionate God etc. A God we can depend upon to ask anything of and lay the blame on, a God that is fair and negotiable with; a God of reward and punishment.


Now that we have pegged and pigeon holed the The All Mighty Creator, analyzed and dissected every aspect of His condition, what do we do? We run around claiming whose God is, The God, Whose God merits worship and total faith, in simple terms whose God is the right one and we are willing to kill for our stand on our believe in our God. Hallelujah!, God is Great! Is this all there is to it? Are we merely victims of our own delusion as Richard Dawkins claimed. We will have to wait till afterlife to find out, because God is not going to come out of His mountain and give us any clear sign more than he has already been giving  us all through our human history. This Internet for instance is a Miracle of Miracles unless we are too blind to see it as such and take it for granted as just another human collective intelligence putting together yet another tool for our usage in dealing with our daily lives. Perhaps this is the tool that is supposed to reconstruct the Tower of Babel, undo the schism that was wrecked upon humanity for our arrogance in thinking we could outthink God!  

"If you ask me what or who God is, I would say God is Blue and plays the bamboo flute." - A Hare Krishna Devotee.