“I’ve been reading up on Hinduism lately”, Lady Lakshmi massaged her temples, as if nursing a headache. “It looks like a whole civilization that practiced only addition and no subtraction for thousands of years, and it’s the worst, most disorganised, internally contradictory chaos I have ever seen, and yet it contains some of the best ideas that have ever been conceived by humans on Earth”.
“I’ve been having an eye on them a bit, but nothing as thorough as you’ve been doing, so I would appreciate it if you could summarise it for me”, Lord Vishnu smiled at his glorious wife.
“The basics are simple enough. There was the Dravidic original religious system. Then the Aryans came and introduced their own Vedic pantheon, that also spread to Greece, Rome and with the Slavic tribes. You know, Indra the king of Heaven, elemental deities of earth, water, air and so on. That was then slowly integrated with the Dravidic pantheon and branched into a zillion sects and followings, and the hermits developed the upanishads. Then came Mahavira and said it’s all unimportant, because nonviolence is the only thing that ultimately matters. Lord Buddha built upon that and basically ignored the entire Vedic system, said that suffering is the cornerstone issue, delusion and attachment are its cause, they need to be addressed, and complete detachment from the world is to be sought. His philosophy came to be prevalent and completely sidelined and eventually extinguished the Vedic system of perpetual sacrifices and rituals that cost money and feed the parasitic brahmanic caste. Hinduism kept evolving in the background, developing a system of puja and bhakti in place of yajña, all based around the newer, much better scriptures such as the Bhagavad-gita and Bhagavata-purana”, she nodded.
“Then tantra appeared, based partly on the upanishads, partly on yoga, partly on a cult of Shiva and Shakti, and mostly on frustration caused by the sexual repression and insistence on purity and mental and social rigidity of other systems”, she sighed. “Also, everybody is trying to present their sect, cult or following as a logical interpretation of everything else, so they just keep inheriting and modifying the whole traditional structure, which at this point means that every single imaginable thing or practice is the right way, and also that its diametral opposite is the right way. They think celibacy is the way to achieve enlightenment, and they think sex is the way to achieve enlightenment. They believe faithful marital union is the only way to achieve spiritual progress, and they also believe that sex with laundry maids from the lowest caste is the way to achieve enlightenment. They believe Lord Shiva is the foundation of all Reality, and they also believe he is a weirdo practicing dark magic on cremation grounds, worshipped by demons”, she massaged her head again.
“To be honest, they got some things right. Lord Shiva is indeed the foundation of all Reality, and he is indeed worshipped by demons, ever since Azazel; I think the story got around and he’s now their favourite deity”, Vishnu smiled.
“You should see how they see you. For the most part you are a cute chubby baby, but you also have 16108 wives, and you are also half the characters from half the epics and other scriptures, while I’m both a princess, a dairy maid and a spiritual metaphor. Lady Shakti is both Shiva’s wife, but she’s like ten different women, and I’m not kidding you here, she’s a celibate, a mother, and a monstrous deity of death, chaos, madness and indiscriminate slaughter that drinks blood”, she snickered. “They manage to see Lord Shiva and Lady Shakti as both metaphors for male and female sex, for family life, liberation from the illusion, and as primordial principles of consciousness and energy”, his wife sighed. “The last part, at least, is actually true. They even included historical humans such as Alexander of Macedonia as Skanda, the general of the army of Gods or something, and the most confusing part is, they don’t actually distinguish between physical and spiritual realities. Every character from a book that has a spiritual purport is seen as an existing deity, or a child of existing deities. Everything they’ve read about must be real, and if it’s real, it must have actually happened physically. On the other hand, if something actually happened, they mythologise the historical persons to the point where they become a part of their theological narrative and pantheon. It’s an incredible mess where you can’t tell cause from effect after a few iterations, and my head hurts”, she concluded.
“Thank you for suffering through this to provide me with your blessed insight, my Lady”, Vishnu smiled and kissed her head, which instantly relieved her headache and made her feel great. “But this is not really a Hindu specialty, after all. The Greeks mythologised actual historical figures to the point where you can’t really tell what’s going on there. The Christians are very new, but they already managed to mythologise Christ into some kind of a king, they turned you into a sexless virgin and his holy wife into a repentant prostitute exorcised from demons. They mythologised some garbage dump where they throw carcasses of diseased cattle into a transcendental hell, and they think that Simon Kefa is literally standing there in the reception room of Heaven with a set of keys, reading from a literal book of life. Failing to distinguish between allegory and actual reality is just how their mind works. Also, it’s not really far from how the reality of that place works, if I’m being honest”.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, after Lord Shiva initially cracked that place, and after I did my own thing later on, permeating the spiritual undercurrent of that place with actual spiritual realities, there’s not that much of a difference between some mystic having visions of the actual spiritual beings, states and realities and then writing a holy scripture describing those realities as fictional persons, and actual physical beings embodying those same spiritual states. In both cases, transcendental reality was reached and it bore good fruits. Also, a difference between an imaginary character devoid of spiritual significance, and an ordinary human being devoid of spiritual significance is equally moot”, Vishnu shrugged. “Also, complexity and multi-faceted reality of how things actually work is something that’s easier to describe in complex imagery, and the reductionist philosophies that believe that the simplest and the most elegant explanation must be true, are self-defeating”, he concluded, rubbing her shoulders as she relaxed.
“I like the bhakti cults”, she murmured. “When they are combined with actual high spiritual states, they resemble what we do to each other, seeing and worshipping each other’s virtues and glory”, she smiled blissfully. “But then they replace that with hysteria and vacuous emotionality that I find revolting”, she frowned again. “It’s as if they alternate between interpreting something from a high spiritual vantage point, and interpreting the same thing from the base human vantage point, depending on who’s doing the reading”.
“Unfortunately, that’s the nature of that place. Imagine someone writing something, or reading it, while being attached to some of the conduits of spiritual power I installed there, building on Shiva’s work. They will describe a God’s glory and drink bliss and wisdom directly from the crack in the darkness of that world, through which they perceive the true light. And then someone else reads it without being attached to a similar conduit, and it’s merely a fairy-tale”, he shrugged. “Also, tantra starts as casting away the rigidity of the brahmanic ethos, and this creates the liberating spiritual impulse. However, it eventually degrades into debauchery and spiritual darkness, as one is lost in the chaos of the worldly energies. Control and surrender need to exist in a balance, and people forget that, and tend to think it’s one or the other exclusively. The understanding that there are different phases in spiritual development of a person, where one thing needs to be accentuated, only to be let go of after the goal of that phase has been accomplished, is important, and it’s also important to understand that not all people are the same, or at the same point in their spiritual life. This understanding of plurality and the need for complexity is important, which is why the rigid, simplistic theologies create more problems than they solve, with their ‘one size fits all’ recipes. Hinduism is chaotic, that’s true, but it’s also rigid for those who need rigidity and discipline, and it’s plural and relaxed for those who need spontaneity and freedom. If you see it as a singular theology, it’s a mess. If you see it as an encyclopedia of all theologies for all people in all circumstances, it is amazing”, he nodded.
“So, you’re saying that some people will worship you as a king with me as your queen, and some will worship us as a shepherd and a dairy maid in Vrindavana, depending on who they are, and where they are in their life? Or they will worship Lord Shiva meditating on a graveyard, being done with the world, or they will worship his holy wife as a celibate ascetic, if they are a woman in that phase, or his wife having a sexual meditation with him, if they are practicing tantra, and so on?”, Lakshmi’s tension released as she started finding her way through chaos.
“Exactly. Or they will worship Christ being whipped and crucified if they are in a hard part of their life, or they will imagine him at the peak of his power or risen from the dead if they need inspiration and an ideal to worship. They will worship One God if they need clarity and simplicity, or they will worship multiple Divine aspects simultaneously or consecutively, if they need complexity that corresponds to complex ideas and situations they are facing”, he nodded and kissed her. “Of course it’s not all true, or all false. Some of it is false, because it’s conceived and understood by worldly and false minds. Some of it is holy and true, because it’s conceived and understood by holy and true minds. And regardless of the chaos, the fact that you can reach into that huge library and find something that will fit who you are at the time, is important”.