The biggest reality show on earth

Spirituality


The biggest reality show on earth


The biggest reality show on earth is a miraculous faith-myth-legend curry. It is also a moveable feast and India, China, Greece and Rome – ancient cultures all, don’t hesitate to mix it up. Fertile as God intended, they gave birth to every religious tradition (bar animism and other dawn of civilisation practices), that has come down the pike, but only some of their progeny have escaped the clutches of dogma. For the escapees, freedom is heady and interesting. In their garden, modelled on paradise, legend illuminates myth, faith animates reality and everything in the churn is geared towards the pursuit of happiness. These are believers of myth, a word spawned in ancient Athens as Mythos, the original image-maker.

These free children have spread out across the world now and their numbers seem to be growing. The neatest, defined by the greatest use of abstraction, right from concept to calligraphic character, is certainly Chinese. In the middle-kingdom it all began, not with Gods and Goddesses, but with the Tao or the “unexplainable eternal rule of return to origins.” Curiously, it is this same inscrutable Tao that bestowed some lasting and useful gifts upon the world. It is Tao that taught us life skills – how to free up stagnating Ch’i and boost relations between our Yin and Yang. It is Tao that gave us Feng-shui and the pattern of the yarrow stalks we call the I Ching. The ringing idolatry of statues and dragons, tortoises, frogs, colours and coins- they all came later. These things came, gradually, as fact mated with legend, and abstraction was forced to explain itself to ordinary people. Wonderful Gods and munificent Goddesses arrived, migrating from the unshackled provinces of Tibet, Mongolia, and from India, with a message from the Buddha.

In ancient Greece and Rome or India, no one thought it unusual that immortal gods and demons should mingle with fragile mankind, granting boons and graces as they went. No one was surprised when full-body versions of planets, shadow-planets and 27 stars in the sky intrigued and lusted, fought and favoured, incorporating nature and the elements in their schemes as well! Things have changed in Greece and Rome, pressured perhaps by the Age of Reason, but in India, and, under the eiderdown, in communist China, billions of people clearly like living cheek by jowl with legend and ancestor.

Is this then the triumph of open, non-prescriptive and assimilative religion over dogma and tradition? You can, after all, be any kind of Hindu or Taoist to suit your individual taste. You can pick what you want to eat from a most lavish and varied buffet. There are no core articles of faith. There is no concept of heresy. There is, instead, a great coral reef of a religion, constantly adapting and modifying and renewing itself in the birthing waters of time. Versions and variants, inflexions and overtones afford a very strong sense of ownership and grasp for all. By way of contrast, dogma and orthodoxy seem to devour their own, maddening adherents with fanaticism or turning them off altogether.

Ordinary people have great imagination. They don’t flinch when confronted with gods that transform themselves from ideas to human-style corporeal beings. They exhibit no scepticism when these self-same gods change into animals, plants or the elements. They love them all the more for exhibiting human frailty because it swells their own hearts with hope. Metamorphosis is the ideal cousin to reincarnation after all. And twinned to the idea of happiness and suffering is the trick coin of life and death itself. Ordinary people know all this instinctively and reply with the greatest gathering of people on earth, an astounding 70 million! This multitude attended the last Maha Kumbh Mela (Grand Pitcher Festival), in India, over 44 days,(9 January-February 21, 2001). The first such festival took place, I have learned, as recently as 3,464 B.C….

Everyone there, on the banks of the Ganga at Allahabad, believer and atheist alike, had come to experience, first hand, the power of myth and the legend. The Dalai Lama came, as did Moslems and Christians and Hollywood stars. The millions bathed in the river, at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the invisible Saraswati. They meditated on the battle between the gods and demons for the pitcher (Kumbh) containing the elixir of eternal life. They seemed glad for the slight spillage from the tussle, the grant of a little nectar for the benefit of deserving mortals. Seventy million chosen ones. Quite a satellite picture moment.

(775 words)

Title: The biggest reality show on earth
By: Ghatotkach
Wednesday, August 17, 2005