FROM AN AGNOSTIC TO A HAPPILY CONFUSED PERSON

I AM BACK!!! After a hiatus of about a year, I am back again in the blogosphere. Now whether I am going to disappear after this one entry or whether I am going to renew my oft-abandoned feeble attempts at blogging, I honestly do not know. But there was something I wanted to share with the virtual world and so here I am...

This post is about how something that happened last week,which has changed my life forever. As many may know, I have been a strong agnostic, from the time I started thinking independently, leaning more and more towards aetheistic tendancies. I always have always stood for logic and logic says everything in the universe can be explained by logic itself in some way. I felt God was something Man had made to have someone to look upto while doing any task and to blame when he messes up something in life. I didnt object to the concept as it served its purpose, which was making people happy in some way. Having skills of creativity no other living being has, Man made so many wonderful tales and fables, of how he pictured a supreme being, if one existed, and thus came different Gods and religions. Aah ok I am deviating again. I could write loads about what I think (or thought) of religion and God but that was not the scope of this post. My point is I am a firm believer in logic and as the concept of a supreme being was illogical, I DIDNT believe in it.

The "dont believe" turned into a "didnt believe" after my experience in Tirupathi with my family last week. I have gone on many a pilgrimage before (probably more than any 20 year old has :D), thanks to the amazing enthu for temples by my family members. I have visited most popular temples, but there was on temple I had surprisingly given a miss, Tirupathi. One of my friends, who was an atheist converted into a believer after his first time to Tirupathi, and he once told me to go to that place to understand why. I wondered about why he said that often but scorned it feeling I would stick to my ideas and principles. So i was just a little curious about the temple and proving to myself that it was just another temple. So we had the darshan at 5 am in the morning, and as we had got some special tickets, we had to stand in an orderly queue for just about an hour or so. So I was in a normal state of mind, neither too pissed at having to wait for long hours in a queue nor too happy about having had to get up at 3 am that morning. I wasnt anticipating too much about what would lie ahead. I just considered it a routine job, which once I finish, I can go back to my hotel room and get some sleep before having to drive back to Bangalore. It wasnt my first time in a famous temple, as I have been to many before. It wasnt the first time I was seeing the inside of a temple completely covered with gold, making it majestic, as I had been to the golden temple at Amritsar and also the Hindu golden temple at Sripuram as recent as last month. I am explaining all this to support my arguement that I was in a normal state of mind, logic prevailing over emotion, and hence what happened next came as a surprise.

We entered the sanctum sanctorium of the temple and I got my first look at the idol. I never thought I would be saying this, but there is no denying to myself that I suddenly, inexplicably felt happy. Not just happy, but filled with joy in every crevice of my body. I cant really put that into words. Tears stared welling up in my eyes as we moved near the God's idol. In ten seconds, as I got a last look at the God (notice how the "idol" in the previous sentence became "God's idol" in the next and now is "God"- thats exactly how I felt during that time) while moving towards the exit, I noticed tears of joy were actually flowing down my cheeks. I questioned myself, as to why this was happening and blinked back a couple of tears and told myself to calm down and take control, but I just couldnt. It felt as if someone had taken control of my sensory organs. I thought as hard as I could to understand what I may be feeling this happy about, but there was no one thing in the brain that I was thinking about. I felt this was the only time in my life where my brain wasnt thinking of anything. It was just blank. And that blankness let happiness flow through it. I have often wondered what yogis and saints think of while meditating, and this was the time I knew it was "nothing" that they thought about. To be able to think about "nothing" is the most difficult thing in the world, for which you need amazing self-control and concentration. I have never been able to do it in my life. Till that moment at Tirupathi. And there I know how good it felt.

For the next ten minutes after I came out, I was smiling insanely, almost laughing, to myself. I knew I sported a wide grin and I told my mind to control it and act normal, but I just couldnt control it. I then got my mind to think of something materialistic to get rid of my emotions, but that feeling of happy nothingness remained and only slowly it faded. Only after this, was I able to stop smiling for nothing. Those who know me will understand how unemotional I am, at least on the outside, and how strange it is for me to have reacted this way. I have tried to attach a logic to why it happened but nothing fits in. Why get such a feeling at that particular place, at that particular time, when I didnt get such a feeling either when I graduated, or when Manchester United won the premier league, or when I got an admit in UC Davis for my Phd. It just cannot be explained and maybe thats what people call God. Now that one incident is not enough to transform me into a person who believes in God, but I shall concede for the first time in my independent life that there are things I cannot explain. I shall not start worshipping God every day, but I shall at least understand when people say they worship God. I still believe helping out the poor and underprevileged would give you more contentment than spending money on going to a temple, but I shall tolerate those who donate more money to temples than to the society, as they probably do get some piece of mind by doing that.

So now I am presently a person who is confused, albeit happily confused, about what opinion to form and what path to take, after that day at Tirupathi. It is probably one of those times where you would prefer to remain confused rather than form an opinion, and so I plan to keep it this way, until another inexplicable incident.