There's a famous story in India about six blind men who try to understand what an elephant looks like by running their hands over its body. One feels its trunk, another its ears, another its leg. A fourth man fingers its tail, a fifth its belly, and the sixth rides around its back. Not surprisingly, they come to completely different conclusions about what an elephant must look like.
Hindus believe God is like that. He's so big and so multidimensional and so impossible to grasp with the human mind that everyone who has something to say about His nature may be absolutely correct, but only about the one small part of His nature they are able to understand.
Imagine we're standing together in a dark room. I hold up a sheet of paper. You shine a flashlight on it and see that it's white. Okay, that was a no-brainer.
Now you imagine your flashlight has a yellow bulb instead of a white one. This time the paper looks yellow. If your flashlight has blue bulb, it would look blue. If you turn off your flashlight, you won't see the paper at all. It's merged in the darkness. So what color is the sheet of paper really?
There are many thousands of different darshanas, ways of looking at reality, in Hinduism But six are most important. They're all looking at the same divine reality, but they see it in different colors.
Please note that in summarizing these complex systems of Indian thought for you, I will be oversimplifying shamelessly.
No comments:
Post a Comment