SPIRITUALITY 2 - MY FAVOURITE GOD

 SPIRITUALITY 2 - MY FAVOURITE GOD

When my friend had asked me “Isn’t spirituality a very personal thing?”, I did not pause to answer and I said “yes”. That was sometime ago and I had posted ‘Spirituality- A Personal Awakening’ on this blog. But when the next question was “Who is your favourite God?”, I was at a loss and could not respond immediately. I was given time to think over and answer. I have been thinking and find it very difficult to come to a conclusion. You may ask why it should be so difficult if I believed in a God at all. I should be able to decide since there were so many of them – a wide range of choices, being born in a Hindu household the choices were many, there was Ganesh undoubtedly the most popular God. There is no street corner in Chennai without at least a small pavement temple. In fact he is an artist’s delight. I have a whole collection of Ganesh idols, in varying shapes, sizes and materials, but all of them are in my showcase. Then there is Siva next door dwelling inside a temple more than thousand years old, surrounded by some wonderful pieces of sculpture. Or I have a choice of Vishnu in any one of his ten avatars. May be I can narrow it down to Krishna, his Bhagavad Gita has been a guiding force and finds a prominent place in my bookshelf. Krishna has fascinated me because he was both human and a God (so was Rama, but he is too idealistic for the likes of me). If I had been a Muslim, it would have been Allah, and Jesus Christ if a Christian. So you see the choice is very wide and one is bound to get confused if asked to choose.

Let me first clarify, I do believe in God. I do puja and meditation regularly and have been doing so for many years. If you ask me how I do it, I can only say I do it the only way I know and that involves lighting the deepam, offering flowers and some prasad and then I sit for meditation. What I do is ‘my’ ritual and I do it not because I want something but as a commitment to a higher power, which I am neither able to define nor describe. But I know that it is helping me towards an authentic life. Years ago I read a book called ‘Zen in the Art of Archery’ by Herrigel a professor of German philosophy who was interested in mysticism. During his sojourn as a diplomat in Japan he enrolled in a class for archery taught through Zen practices. I quote from his book “The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art". Why I have chosen to quote this is that while doing puja this is how I have started feeling, completely empty and rid of the self, there are no strings attached. Then there is the popular book by Robert Pirsig ‘Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance’. The common theme is usually that doing an ordinary task, such as fixing your motor cycle can have a spiritual dimension.

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It is interesting to note that on the gopuram(tower)  of the Siva temple next door the words ‘Anbe Sivam’ is displayed in neon lighting, literally meaning that ‘Love is God’.

I do not believe in the labelling of people as theists, atheists or agnostics and if one wants to be labelled as one I cannot understand why. The very negation of a concept will give rise to its existence.

I am fascinated by the Bhagavad Gita mainly because it seems to address all the questions that haunt us in the process of living our lives. I have not read the scriptures of the other religions, but I am sure that they all address these questions. Chapter eleven of the Gita deals with the vision of the Cosmic form. To Arjuna’s request to see the divine form of the Supreme Being, Krishna reveals to him in the form of the Vishwaroopa darshan. I have been overwhelmed by the description of the form of the Divine for it only highlights that the Supreme power is beyond definition and anything and everything that you envisage or do not envisage are all are contained in it. A student of mathematics will understand by relating it to infinity, something that is beyond definition yet contains all the numbers you can ever think of.

When one looks at the sky at night and sees all those stars and can never see any boundary, there seems to be no end to the spread of the universe. Every new discovery brings with it further frontiers to be discovered.

I have mentioned earlier and I shall repeat it again as I feel it is relevant here. This is about the film ‘Anbe Sivam’, the actor is an atheist by his own admission but in the movie he does believe in a God and he sees him in the tears being shed for an unknown person, he sees God in the person who comes to kill him but drops the weapon and asks for forgiveness. So he does believe that in the humanity of man lies God. He does not believe in a God who is vengeful or grants favours to those who worship him. I like that for it defines the code by which he lives.

So we come back to the basic question ‘who is my favourite God?’. Whatever your beliefs, whatever names, you still spell God with a capital ‘G’. My puja shelf is filled with the idols and pictures of God in his various manifestations. There was a time when I was lost thinking as to who among them should be given first preference, but now for me all of them seem to have merged and I see them as artistic representations of each one’s perception of a personal God, an entity who we are unable to understand nor define. We cannot define for in trying to do so we destroy his omnipotence and reduce him to a level wherein we bind him to the very ravages that we are subjected to and in which case he becomes no longer useful to us. He is a hope for our eternity and therefore stays as such.

Hope is what sustains us and carries us forward in the process of living our lives. Whether you believe in God or not in the form that people try to understand him, whether you believe in the theory of Karma or not, you always want to lead a life away from miseries and  leave a mark in this world, what I would term as leading an authentic life. For this you look forward for better things to happen that is you ‘Hope’. Kierkegaard perhaps the first existentialist says that life is filled with angst and the only way to overcome this is by a leap of faith to God. The question of rebirth does not really matter, it is Hope that matters, and in this context to me ‘The Bhagavad Gita’ offers a way of living that will give us the necessary courage to face the travails of life, and the supreme vision of something that cannot be defined or within the comprehension of the human mind. It is a code of life.

So if you ask me who my favourite God is, I shall not answer for he is beyond my comprehension.

FANTASY

FANTASY

As I sit in front of my computer with only the table lamp on and the rest of the room immersed in darkness, I close my eyes trying to think of something on which I should write. I had felt the urge strongly since I have been silent for a long time may be suffering from a writer’s block. One word had kept recurring frequently in my thoughts for the past few days – ‘Fantasy’. I could only presume that this may have been due to the fact that I had restarted my paintings after a considerable period of time and as I spread the colours on the paper trying to translate what I saw, I found that I was giving my own interpretation and the result was not exactly what I saw but the way I saw it. Since then the word had stuck on to my mind and I really wanted to explore what exactly I mean when I say I fantasized. So as a starting point I looked up the dictionary and though there were a number of definitions, two of them seemed to sum up my own understanding of the word – one was creative imagination or unrestrained fancy and the second was ‘an imagined event or sequence of mental images, such as daydream, usually fulfilling a wish or a psychological need’.

I slowly opened my eyes and my table clock showed the time as midnight and here I was set to daydream in the middle of the night. Funny isn’t it? But that’s how it is. We all need to have a space of our own, a world where we retreat to, to fulfil our psychological needs. I guess this is true for every person. We can never really shed the burden of our past life, all those moments gone by are stacked somewhere deep inside us. One word that keeps coming up, again and again from time to time is ‘if’. This for me is the starting point of all fantasies. I have asked myself the question as to what and where I would have been ‘if’ I had chosen a different path, taken a different decision at various points in my life. There is no way other than to accept the present reality and that is the truth. I am told to live the present moment and that’s what everyone who is sane does but the past moments are never lost. Suppressing them will only lead to mental illness and so will being overwhelmed by them. In this connection Jung talks about his work with patients of psychosis. He says that “paranoid ideas and hallucinations contain a germ of meaning. A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis. The fault is ours if we do not understand them”. He goes on to state “it was always astounding to me that psychiatry should have taken so long to look into the content of these psychoses, no one concerned himself with the meaning of these fantasies”.

So the only way to release your emotions as I see it, is to release them slowly through one’s own fantasies. Fantasies are always projections. Great works of art, literature or great inventions have been due to the human mind’s capacity to fantasize.

Whether it is H.G Wells ‘War of the Worlds’ or ‘The Time Machine’ or Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ and other great works of science fiction, they have been a result of the human mind’s capacity to fantasize and project and we can see ourselves moving towards them and one day they may actually be realities. Whether it is Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ or the earliest fairy tales written for the child in us, it has always catered to our fantasy world and we revel in it. Freud considered that men and women ‘cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction which they can extort from reality’. He says ‘We simply cannot do without auxiliary constructions’. Again Jung talks about his own fantasies and visions which seemed to occur from time and he used to write them down as and when they occurred in order to understand and analyze them. In a number of cases especially of visions he found he could correlate occurrences with the visions he had earlier.

As one faces the harsh realities of life, he retreats into his fantasy world to gain respite and it his ability to come back to reality rejuvenated, richer from the experience that would determine the future course of his life.

Fantasies are a fact and they are necessary, only don’t let them overwhelm you.

WHY I PAINT

WHY I PAINT

Few days ago I did a painting. Why it is important to me is that after a long time I was able to break the shackles and reignite what was once my passion. What was it that prompted me or you can say goaded me into doing this was the response I received from my friends especially on Facebook when I posted some of the paintings I had done years ago. I liked it all, the appreciation, at the same time I wanted to rediscover myself and not rest on what I could once do. The painting was a view of Notre Dame across the river Seine in Paris. Of course it was from a photograph I had with me. I could not get the actual colours in the photograph and since I was doing the painting in water colours, there was no question of corrections. But I liked the process as in the course of my experimentation I found that the view which was much brighter in the photo slowly change its character and ultimately I found that I had ended up with the colours of the late evening and one can make out from the actual colours on the painting that this should be the Fall season. That is the beauty of water colours the more you apply water and wash the painting with a broad brush you get some exciting effects. Of course there are more water colour paintings that have been torn off because you cannot do anything else if you are not satisfied. You can always correct an oil painting for you can remove the colours and repaint. In this painting I also experimented with water soluble crayons to get some sharper effects. Why have I described all this? This is because as I do the painting I see the images change in my mind and do not stick to the original , may be that is the impression that impinges on my mind. I can understand how Monet  painted his ‘Impressions- Sunrise’ in varying shades and the effect it had on him – it was how he saw it. I possess neither the technical expertise nor the imagination of a true artist but I like it when I put the colours on the paper. It is like a journey to me and I take my time as it grows on the paper. I derive an inner satisfaction and that’s how it has been over the years and I have been happy with it. But friends have asked me on and off why I have not done any paintings for a long time and the answer was that I shall start sometime.

My wife says I am a master at leaving things half done and here she does not mean helping her with the house work. She has seen me not completing or restarting things which I love to do. To be frank, I should admit that I have been plagued by self doubts. I just did not find the push I required, maybe I was too involved with the job that I kept postponing doing what I wanted to do. My younger daughter paints very well with pastels and her paintings are surrealistic and originals, but you can have an exhibition of all the unfinished paintings of hers rather than of the completed ones. I do not know whether the genes are to blame. I am including here a collage of five of her paintings to give an idea.

I remember that I started drawing pencil portraits and being an engineer and a good draughtsman I could more or less reproduce from a photograph, so much so I ended up drawing the portraits of the parents of some of my colleagues and they seemed happy with it and that made me happy. A portrait is very tricky, if you do not get the eyes right you change the whole personality of the subject. It was the eyes, that I always did first, may be that is against the norms. Once I got it right the form fell into place. For the first time I ventured to do a colour portrait in pastels of my favourite artist Van Gogh and I got it more or less ok. But it is the black and white pencil portraits that pleased me a lot. You ask any photographer his satisfaction has always been with his black and white photos. That is because the depth and the shadows you achieve enhances the character of the subject. I still remember Satyajit Ray’s movies especially ‘Pather Panchali’. The effectiveness of the movie lay in its black and white shades, pathos cannot be conveyed more effectively.

When children paint they do so with gay abandon, they are not bothered whether anyone is watching them do it. I remember the time when I was one of the judges at a children’s art competition in Ahmedabad. It was sheer joy watching them paint especially the younger ones. They were translating there own way of looking at things surrounding them. I can only remember and understand what Matisse said ‘When you paint you have to look at the world through the eyes of a child’. In the process of growing up we are subjected to so many influences and our perception of the world around us keeps on changing. Everyone needs adulation or appreciation as a motivating factor to achieve greater heights. Only when we let these corrupt our way of looking at things in an effort to become more saleable do we cease to be genuine. Thanks to all my friends.

    

THE DELHI RAPE CASE - CAN WE ASK WHY?

THE DELHI RAPE CASE - CAN WE ASK WHY?

There has been a large scale outburst of public anger and angst at the brutal rape of a girl in the Nation’s capital and her ultimate death. The cry has been for the severest of punishment to be meted out to the culprits. My own outrage has been such that I felt the death penalty would only bring to end the life of the perpetrators and this will not serve the purpose. I wanted them to be maimed and castrated and thrown into jail for the rest of their lives. May be my feelings were barbaric but so was the act. This is a happening in the nation’s capital and it has received the attention it deserved but what about the happenings in the rest of the country where children are kidnapped, raped, murdered and the bodies thrown away to rot on the wayside. These are acts that keep on happening and what have the police and the politicians done to effectively bring down such crimes?

In a nation with a population of more than one billion and which carries with it a history so ancient that making it fall in step with the need to adjust to changing times is a herculean task. The gathering of so many people in Delhi to protest against this crime and demanding for immediate reforms and implementation in the setup of the judiciary and police is the need of the hour. But does this end here? These crimes will continue to be committed, some reported and others unnoticed. This is because we as a people are affected by a deeper malaise. I will not stop at that, because I feel that this is a global phenomenon. Does this not happen in other countries? It does, but may be the system of policing and detection is far more advanced. Who cannot abhor the dastardly act where a large number of school children in the US were killed in a mindless act of violence and this was not an isolated incident.

So is making stricter laws that bring to justice the perpetrators of crimes immediately going to put an end to crimes? It may act as a deterrent and may be, it is the first step, towards making people feel safe. But like I said earlier the deeper malaise lies elsewhere. It lies in every home. We are being subjected to what Alvin Toffler terms as the Future Shock. Our societies are fractured and our relationships have started becoming disposables. Consumerism is the order of the day. We make what sells. That is why we have movies which depict mindless violence because they sell and who is responsible for that, of course we ourselves. We want our adrenalin to flow and titillate our senses along with the action scenes on the screen.

The media has become one of the most powerful tools that has taken over the mindset of the populace. I am not saying that this is bad, for the media is also a powerful disseminator of information and knowledge. Its role can be constructive or destructive depending on the sensationalism that it resorts to garner popularity. We should admit that without the reporting of the gruesome nature of the crime that was committed, the gathering of such a large number of people in all parts of the country to protest against the ineffectiveness of the authorities would not have been possible.

When I said every home earlier, I meant that each and every citizen of this country should be made to realise his responsibility towards the society and the nation. This is very easily said but how does one go about it? We need educators, we need reformers and we need leaders with vision and with a fierce commitment to the country. But once again, where do we find such people? Is it true that we get what we deserve?

Let each one of us make a start at our own homes. Can we pay more attention to the emotional needs of our children rather than drive them up the intellectual ladder? Are we only bothered about how well they do in their material lives? This is a question each one of us as a parent has to answer for himself. 

SPIRITUALITY - A PERSONAL AWAKENING

SPIRITUALITY -  A PERSONAL AWAKENING

My friend asked me “Is’nt spirituality a very personal thing?” I did not pause to answer and I said “yes”. In an earlier posting of mine I had written that ‘Spirituality is not about God, it is not about religion though it forms an integral part of religious practices. I could not bring myself to define or describe spirituality, for me it was only an experience, an inward journey and how can you express it in words?’. When a person embarks on a journey of self discovery, to find the very essence of his being and to define the deepest values by which he is to conduct his life you can say that he is on the spiritual path and the very process may be termed as spirituality. Why does he embark on such a process is a question to be explored. This exploration is a lonely voyage and to each his own path and that it is why it becomes so personal. As to the question why he feels the need to embark on such a journey, we can only presume that he has come face to face with a Sisyphean situation and feels the need to break out of this stranglehold. It could be a fear of termination or the sheer futility of his everyday actions. Albert Camus in his critique of Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ says “to live knowing that life is pointless is what gives rise to anguish, and if you live against the stream, the whole of your being is seized with disgust and revolt and this revolt of the body is what is called Nausea”. This is perhaps the beginning of the journey inwards.

I guess that everyone, whether he believes in a God or not, is always on a search throughout his life. A search for perpetuation whether he believes in reincarnation or not. That is why Sartre a confirmed atheist and who says that there is nothing beyond the life we are living now, ends his book Nausea with the hero who in our parlance had undergone a spiritual experience in the form of Nausea, decides to go back and complete the book he was writing in order to bring about an authenticity to the life he is leading.

What is the experience that one undergoes and which we can term as a spiritual experience is very simply described by Hermann Hesse in his novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’ – “My awakening has a similar kind of intensified reality for me. That is why I have given it this name; at such times I really feel as if I had lain asleep or half asleep for a long time, but am now awake and clear headed and receptive in a way I never am ordinarily.”

So where does God come in to all this and what is the role of religion? If you ask me I would say- define your God and follow Your religion. If it helps you on your voyage of self discovery and helping you to chart your course in life, you cannot ask for more. The problem or confusion arises when we search for an external God to answer our questions. We may benefit from the experience of others but we have to find our own answers.

I do not like it when some one tells me that this is what one should do to attain salvation, I do not appreciate preachers but I do not mind listening and learning from their experiences. Belief in God and religion is an individual choice as long as your beliefs make you a better person.

Yes spirituality is a very personal thing – to quote Albert Camus once again before I end “ An awakening of conscience, no matter how confused it may be develops from any act of rebellion and is represented by the sudden realization that something exists with which the rebel can identify himself even if only for a moment.”

A MATTER OF LIVING

A MATTER OF LIVING

You have your beliefs,

I have my doubts,

You live your life,

As on a leash,

I live mine,

Unbound and free.

You live your life,

In yester years,

Waiting for the coming tide,

And the hand of destiny,

While I live my life

Every moment an eternity.

You have your chores,

I have my dreams,

You settle down,

To mop the floor,

While I spread my wings,

And fly away.

ON QUALITY IN ART – PART 1

ON QUALITY IN ART – PART 1

I guess when we talk about the value of art in our present time, it is because of the astonishing prices that are paid for acquisition of a work of art be it a painting or a sculpture, whether it is the work of one of the old masters or that of a contemporary artist. We are all the more puzzled when we think about the fact that Van Gogh never sold a painting during his entire lifetime, may be one, but now his paintings sell for millions of dollars and their acquisition is not only a matter of great pride but also as an investment for an art gallery or an individual collector or a corporate house. We have even had fund houses floating art funds. Why so, what are the justifications for such a development?

Before we really come to the question of the value let us see what is it that we look for when we view a piece of art. We would necessarily talk in terms of the quality of the work involved. So what do we mean by quality in art? We always think that a painting has to be beautiful to be a piece of art, like landscapes by Constable or a painting by Rembrandt with their perfection in lighting and well defined shapes. There is technical perfection and we marvel at the skills of the artist. That is “we always assume that all that is beautiful is art, that what is not beautiful is not art, and that ugliness is the negation of art. This identification of art and beauty is at the bottom of all our difficulties in the appreciation of art.” Quality is confused by beauty, taste or style. We should beware of this confusion and avoid identifying quality with any of them.

What is beautiful varies from individual to individual. Whether artistic value can be objectively traced in a work of art or whether it is only subjectively felt and is simply a matter of personal opinion then a common agreement would fall within the realms of aesthetics and philosophy.

I remember that when I was in Paris on a short visit, I had gone to the Louvre and since I did not have that much time I had to literally run through the museum, but I did manage to spend quite some time in the Italian section. When you arrive at the museum it appears that all roads lead towards the ‘Mona Lisa’ but for me this paled into insignificance when compared to the massive religious paintings adorning the Italian section. The next day I was at the Musee d’Orsay and as I stood there in the halls surrounded by the paintings of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne and other impressionists and Van Gogh it was a pilgrimage fulfilled for me.

So what was it that made me spend more time at the Italian section and the Musee d’Orsay then the rest of the Louvre? That was because that’s what I preferred, that’s what I liked. A subjective appreciation, is’nt it? Both the museums consist of various other priceless works of art and so do all the museums in the world. Whether I like them or not they are undoubtedly of great value. So over and above subjective appreciation there is an objective element which defines the value of art.

Jakob Rosenberg in his book ‘On Quality in Art’ when talking about artistic value says “Artistic value or ‘quality’ in a work of art is not merely a matter of personal opinion but to a high degree also a matter of common agreement among artistically sensitive and trained observers and to high degree objectively traceable. Our value judgement is a composite of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ elements.

Quality may be sensed in a work of art without a proper approach and analysis, but it cannot be fully appreciated without these means and without a thorough and definite effort on the part of the observer.”

For any individual the most important part of his psyche is his imagination, this is what allows him to explore his subconscious. For an artist it is the urge to convey, create a work through which he is able to translate his feelings or emotion. Each one of us is different and we see things and feel differently. But it is the artist who is able to express and connect with an audience.   

Our mind functions in two different ways while trying to understand a work of art. One is the through the direct experience of the external world, i.e the immediate perception of an image and through symbolic representation i.e the image plus its mental associations. It would be relevant to quote Van Gogh’s own words here to help us understand and feel through the artists own eyes “a painter as a man is too absorbed by what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master of the rest of his life. I myself am quite absorbed by the immeasurable plain with cornfields against the hills, immense as a sea, a delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil, regularly chequered by the green of flowering potato plants, everything under a sky with delicate blue, white, pink, violet tones. I am in a mood of nearly too great calmness, in the mood to paint this.” (From his letters to his brother Theo). This is a mood of direct experience which he is talking about and when we do gaze at this painting we are also overcome by that mood of too great calmness which he talks about and translated it into his paintings. It is this capacity to retain and express it through a medium that distinguishes the artist from others. Each one of us have felt carried away by certain direct experiences but our ability to sustain it is limited.

At the other extreme we have the artist who translates his experiences of the external world into symbolic representations associating his experiences with his consciousness, beliefs and emotions. Herbert Read while quoting Whitehead says “an artist of the symbolist type is creating a combination of forms and colours which will convey a meaning, and in art this meaning always has an aesthetic or emotional tinge. Art of this kind may therefore be defined as ‘the symbolic transfer of emotion’, and this definition is at the base of any theory of the aesthetics of art.” We can see the significant shift towards symbolism with the latter day movements of Surrealism and modernism, whether in the paintings of Salvador Dali, Kandinsky, Mondrian or Paul Klee.

For a true understanding of the quality of a work of art, apart from our own subjective appreciation, it would be necessary to understand that the development of art has run parallel to the evolution of human thought through the ages. I intend pursuing this in my subsequent postings on this subject. (Reference – Herbert Read’s ‘The Philosophy of Modern Art’)