Manifestation

For anyone visiting India, whether as a foreign tourist, a traveller from another part of the country or even a local, there is one place that is difficult to avoid—the temple.

Some go to admire the architectural work and skills of the people who built them centuries ago, others to appreciate the remarkable abilities of our ancestors, while some are drawn by religious faith. For others, it may simply be another place to visit and tick off the list.

For me, it is a little bit of all of these.

The last time I visited one such temple in southern India, I had a rather strange realisation.

But before I get to that, let me bring up something else that has become remarkably popular around the world today, particularly among coaches, motivational speakers and self-help gurus.

Manifestation

The basic idea is quite simple: what we repeatedly think about, believe in and consciously work towards can influence what eventually becomes our reality. The concept has found a huge following, with people being encouraged to define what they want, visualise it, believe that it is possible and keep their focus on the desired outcome.

Whether we call it the power of intention, positive thinking or manifestation, there is something compelling about the idea that our thoughts and beliefs can shape the way we live and, in turn, the reality we create.

And that brings me back to the temple.

Sitting there that day, watching people pray, make offerings and being part of this culture myself, I became aware that many devotees are there to ask the Lord for something they deeply want.

I could also see some coming back with their promised offerings, perhaps because their wishes had been realised and they now wanted the Lord to accept them.

No wonder some of these temples have accumulated such enormous wealth from devotees who considered their wishes to have been blessed.

And suddenly I wondered whether we had been practising something remarkably similar for centuries to what the world is catching up with now.

Could our prayers, faith and rituals be another form of manifestation?

Could it be that we got what we asked for simply because we believed we would?

Faith, Fear, and the Idea of God We Created

Photo by egil sjøholt

What I’m about to say may sound a bit controversial — so reader’s discretion is advised.

Recently I came across a sarcastic statement that shook something loose in me. It said:
There are more than 3,000 gods in the world, and every single one is a figment of imagination… except, of course, the one we believe in. We’re the smart ones. Everyone else is misguided.

It’s a sharp line, maybe even offensive, but it exposes something deeply human.

For thousands of years, the idea of God has been used to guide, govern, soothe, and, more often than not, to control the way we live. And it makes me wonder how all of this happened — what still makes human beings surrender so completely? 

Fear of death, undoubtedly. Once we accepted that our end is inevitable, curiosity naturally followed: 

What happens after? What lies beyond this certainty we cannot escape? Yet no one had an answer that satisfied the human heart.

It was easy to feel the gravitational force that kept the universe in motion. Perhaps that force was the first God — a cosmic architect far more occupied with the orchestration of galaxies containing trillions of stars than with my grocery list or whether I find a convenient parking spot at the supermarket. 

A God who manages stars is admirable, but of little use. A God who manages our survival is irresistible, relatable, believable.

In the beginning, the divine mirrored the wider animal kingdom; then slowly we narrowed our imagination until God resembled us more than anything else— human-like, but prettier, braver, stronger.

And now that we have created God, shaped God, and nurtured this idea for thousands of years, it raises another question: How does someone who doesn’t believe in this human-like version make use of the idea of God at all?

If you have no shoulder to cry on, you can cry to God.
If the world feels unfair, you can hand your hurt to God.
If choices overwhelm you, you can ask God for signs.
If guilt becomes heavy, you can seek forgiveness from God.
If life feels directionless, you can outsource purpose to God.

Maybe that’s what God has always been — not a being, not a judge, not a cosmic king, but an idea we got carried away with. A container where we can safely place everything we don’t know how to carry.

PS: Physicists say our Sun is dragging us through the galaxy at 828,000 km per hour while an even more mysterious attractor pulls not just us, but our entire Milky Way and every nearby galaxy at 2.1 million km per hour. If that doesn’t humble us about what we don’t understand, nothing will.

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