Apathy, Atheism, and The Last Call by Dushyant Rakheja

I spoiled God’s divine plan at the age of 17. My mother was shouting at me to not throw a bucket of water at my sleeping brother, yet I did. As expected, she was as enraged as was my brother, but he’s not important for now. My mother, or rather her beliefs as a Hindu, however, are. According to Hinduism, God has a divine plan for the world and everything that happens in a human’s life happens for a reason that only They know. Hence, it is often preached that one should not give into rage because all bad things are Their plan. If one reads again closely, they will find that I was able to aggravate a firm believer of this notion. I had her, just for a moment, “step away from God” and commit a sin. That possibly wasn’t part of his plan. I beat God…or did I?

Later that year angering my mother became a second habit, and questioning Their existence became the first. That was because I had concluded at this point that there was no divine plan that we followed. Call me skeptical but I fail to understand why the plan called for people to die at the hands of others for money. If there was a God, would he make a plan that could lead to this? Though I did know the answer already I wanted confirmation, which I found in Alan Watts’s The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. He confirmed my suspicion in the very first chapter by saying:

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. (Watts)

Hindu philosophy states that we are born of God and we are one with Him. Watts seconds this notion by stating “there is nothing outside God.” Ergo, inhabitants of the earth, we all collectively are God! He is more you and more I than he is in Himself. The fog dissipated at last, giving way to why the divine plan led us to an era where the majority is not happy to be alive.

“… Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions.” (Harmon)

Being the Devil’s advocate, or maybe the God’s advocate, I started questioning priests and learned people about whether they knew God or not. More importantly, had God given them what they asked for any more than their parents or friends did? Before the big reveal, however, it is important that one knows about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Consider a bunch of prisoners who were chained up in an underground cave ever since birth. Their only sources of light are the diffused sunlight coming from the mouth of the cave and the fire burning behind them at a higher elevation than them. From in front of the fire passes a road where showman and puppeteers perform casting a shadow on the opposite wall, the only wall that prisoners can see. Since that was the only thing they saw since the beginning of their lives, the prisoners accept the shadows to be true and hence start naming and familiarizing with them. If from a bunch of these prisoners one random person was freed and shown his surroundings – the fire and the diffused sunlight – he would start questioning his conception of reality.

Furthermore, if he was led through the mouth of the cave and into the outside world, his eyes would find the sunlight too bright and it would be hard for him to adjust. But once they do, he is introduced to a whole new world that he could not have dreamt of in his wildest dreams. He is exposed to figures that have depth and color, that cast shadows. After a while of discomfort and a lot of questions, he would recognize the sun as the source of light and objects as the source of shadows. He then deciphers what we consider basic reality.

Illuminated by this new knowledge, the prisoner returns to the cave to help his fellow prisoners differentiate the true from the shadows. Before making a decision, I would like you to try and remember your reaction when you figured out your mother’s name was not “mom,” or some other variation of it, but rather something else. I, personally, did not accept the fact and it took a lot of explanation to reconcile me. Or, try telling somebody that cockroaches cannot harm them and do not need to be feared. If one can be unaccepting of such minor changes, it would come as no surprise that the prisoners did not want to believe the free man. Since his eyes were more adapted to light, he could not see the shadows of the cave properly whereas the other prisoners could. They used that fact to establish their superiority and shunned him aside like a lunatic. The prisoners in this case could be exchanged with the priests I talked in my quest for sun. 

Some debated with me back and forth and strengthened my point that God resides in all of us, and prayer is just a way of reminding oneself what’s important to them in life. Others entered a state of absolute denial or even became a little hostile with their words and called me the personification of blasphemy.

Societal pressure, however, did not stop my investigations. I had progressed to finding the meaning in every mundane aspect of life: each blink, each wink, the flutter of the bees that I now consider my equal, each breath we take. The last question popped up to me during my grandfather’s funeral. He was clinging to life with an oxygen mask as Alzheimer’s took away his ability to breathe. My uncles and father gathered around him and were showing him images of the deity he worshiped and whispered, “They are calling you. You want to go to Them, right? You can go.” Among the loud sniffles, cries, and wailing, this sentence rang loud in my mind. If one believes in living a better life after death, why do they fear it or get sad when a close one dies? 

“Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die…” (Whitman)

Walt Whitman’s 52-piece series called “Song of Myself” covered most of what I would like to know about life. It is true that the way I assimilate the message may be radically different than what he intended, but it resolved my issues. From Song 1, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself…,” I learned what it truly means to live and bask in the glory of oneself while enjoying the moment. Song 6 talks about leaves of grass, affirming oneness among humans and the earth; all of us being part of the same, being born and dying to be the same. Why should I then treat anything or anybody any different than others? The grass I walk on is not less deserving of my respect than the stranger I share a smile with at the coffee shop. My reaction on my phone falling out of my pocket and breaking must not differ from when I found out it was just my tempered glass protector. Some people mistake this for my apathy, but I am merely taking things as they come, like the Chinese farmer.

The Chinese farmer, in Alan Watts’ The Story of the Chinese Farmer, as one may have guessed by now, was a statute of the Buddhist principle of impermanence with an eye to the tao (zen). When dealt with seemingly good or bad situations, the farmer stays calm and waits for them to play out on their own, much like Arjuna learns in the Bhagavad Gita, that is, non-attachment to the fruits of one's actions. Divergence of the actual outcome from our expectations is what causes our sadness and not the outcomes themselves. This happens to be an unrealistic thing to chase after, but we all hope for a miracle every day.

Through my journey of life till now, I have been transformed into an atheist who does not believe in god, but after being acquainted with Alan Watts and Plato, I believe in humans and our power to change our lives as well as others. Hence, I would rather say that I am non-theistic but still pursuing truth. I believe in questioning what I see and am told to believe without reason. Walt Whitman gave me new questions to think about and a new perspective to view things from. The Chinese farmer challenged me to not over-think too much and to take things as they come. I was resolved and challenged to break the shackles and go to the light, to stand at the edge of the cave and learn about all the new parts of me that I see and not be overwhelmed by it. I have a new rail to take my train of thought on, and this is the last call. All aboard!

Works Cited

Clay, Becky. “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.” YouTube. 5 Jun. 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOVFO4Qnqg&feature=share.

Dhyani, Divya. Haridwar. Jan. 2015.

Harmon, Marion G., Ronin Games, Vol. 5. USA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. Print. 6 vols.

Living, Raw. “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in Cartoon!” YouTube. 4 Nov 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0GLmYm-SRw

Plato. Allegory of the Cave. Trans. Jowett, Benjamin. Los Angeles: Enhanced Media Publishing, 2017. Print.

Plato. Great Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Eric H Warmington and Philip G Rousse. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse. New York: Signet Classics, 1999. p. 316

Watts, Alan. Chapter 1 “Inside Information.” The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Aylesbury: Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, 1973. Xvii. PDF

Watts, Alan. “The Story of The Chinese Farmer.” YouTube. 20 Nov 2016. Web. 02 Dec. 2018.

            Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. Dover Publications, 2001. Print.

“Walt Whitman, Alan Watts, and We” by DaisyMae VanValkenburgh

The most fascinating thing about a young adult’s life is that it is always changing. There is so much room for improvement, for seeing things differently, and for trying to understand the inner self. American poet Walt Whitman and British philosopher Alan Watts demonstrate in their writing how the world around us is in constant flux, how we learn to absorb information and then decide how we will allow it to change us. When I began my first college writing class, I felt as if I was quite the cultured person, but I soon caught on that the people around me and the forum style of the class would allow me to grow a lot more than I imagined. Our many discussions of texts, especially in regard to our identity, gave me an opportunity to reach a higher level of understanding. The variety of my peers’ responses to both Asian and Western appreciations of the spiritual side of life has made me open my eyes to just how much I was unaware of. These glimpses into other lifestyles, priorities and “techniques of the sacred” have allowed me to see things much differently.

Walt Whitman in Section One of “Song of Myself” writes, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume” (Whitman 1.1.1-2).  By Whitman saying I, he speaks about his own person, but he also insinuates a cosmic (or Vedic) self that is not higher or lower than anyone else; rather he asks us to see the self as universal, something we are all a part of: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman 1.1.3). I view this as a brilliant escape from the demanding trap of the ego in which I must create, denounce, and defend a position or a personal identity in order to be comfortable or taken seriously. Whitman knows that we as individuals understand each other better when we are all involved, and that is a huge motivation for young, susceptible individuals trying to make sense of who they are. In Section 24 he calls himself “a kosmos” and adds this moral dimension, “Whoever degrades another, degrades me / And whatever is done or said returns at last to me” (Whitman 1.24. 1; 8-9).  

Indeed, the motive of “Song of Myself” strikes me as an appeal to the reader to think beyond the either/or of our perceptions. As fellow Taking Giant Steps blogger Emily Baksic astutely writes on Leaves of Grass and its relation to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, “The yin and yang accept the flow between one’s life and the universe counteracting together. The yin and yang represent the integration of opposites not merely as polarities, but as complements” (Baksic, Par. 5). Though we may split the universe into good and bad, we need to see how opposites attract and create a larger whole in and of itself. Whitman caused me to recognize that we are all individual entities sharing space in the same universe. No one is anything more, and no one is anything less. To insist otherwise feels like an unnecessary defense against our own urge to grow our souls. When one works with another, dates another, or speaks to a stranger, one can gain so much by putting oneself on the same level as the other. It is not worth putting oneself above or below another, just because one is speaking to an individual of a certain status. One must find oneself in others to truly grasp all the dimensions of one’s identity. As Alan Watts would say, regarding our need to make all these distinctions in status, we are “putting legs on a snake” (Watts, 11). 

       

After reading Chapter One of his The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, I observed that Watts and Whitman are essentially singing the same song, each for their own generation. Watts’s reading of Vedanta, the end of the Vedas (knowledge), makes us as humans wonder if what we know is not what we actually need to know in order to be “in the know” (Watts, 9). Watts suggests that we must dig down deeper---beyond the masks of our personalities and the social conventions we obey without a second thought---into the taboo of the world, search a little in the unknown, and work on figuring out what the others refuse to tell us. Maybe there is “some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell” (Watts, 9).

Watts caused me to consider that life has more meaning than what we just see on the outer surface. We have to interrogate the taboos of our society and run with what the world does not want us to know. Watts states that we are “flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics” (Watts, 39), a “human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns” (Watts, 37). Watts asks us to look at each occurrence that happens in life differently. As he puts it, “Taboos lie within taboos” (Watts, 9), and that is where we need to search in order to find what we are missing. These hush-hush, inflammatory, unpopular, or alternative readings of the world are what students need to learn for themselves. I gratefully entertain the notion that I am not merely a separate self, alienated from others, alone and afraid, but part of the greater whole in which my individual soul (Atman) is none other than the universal soul (Brahman).

Fortunately, I first encountered these two iconoclastic writers in my middle school and high school years. Growing up a sheltered child with a mother who perennially fought health problems, I was not able to explore as much as the other children were, nor was I able to go spend time with friends as much at a young age, due to the fear of contracting an ordinary illness and getting my mother more ill. With chronic illnesses, even the simplest of colds can have severe effects on the immune system. If I did have playdates growing up, I do not remember them clearly. In second grade my thirst for knowledge wound up distancing me from my peers. However, this solitude gave me a kind of freedom. I picked up an encyclopedia in my house one day and began reading it, one book at a time. Reading led to writing, and I learned to analyze material to find deeper meanings, but also to find a larger understanding in every circumstance. I am thankful for the chance to grow my interpretive antennae at such an early age. Fellow blogger Kelsey Picciano was not so lucky: “I learned only that of the history the school chose for me to learn; I read only the literature of which the school wished for me to read; I knew only of the environment that the school wished for me to be in” (Picciano, Par. 3).

       

In middle school, my English teacher realized I had a knack for seeing things differently, so she introduced me to the 52 sections of “Song of Myself.” Whitman’s way of expressing how we as humans are comprised of experiences, ideas, and mental states, as well as a personal spiritual understanding, demonstrated so clearly that each person is part of one universal self in the world. From a young age this point of view is something that I have sought to celebrate. Likewise, in high school, my English teacher, seeing that I needed a challenge, invited me to spend my sophomore year reading Alan Watts. Once again, I found myself in the company of a real seeker willing to question everything around him to get to the bottom of things. With this inside knowledge, I realized that I was no longer going to let anyone dictate who I was becoming. I took the chances I wanted and have never looked back. Because of these self-discoveries in middle and high school, “I no longer find myself with a void sitting inside of me; I no longer solely feel my physical being; I feel my existence as my own unique individual” (Picciano, Par. 7). 

In my first semester of college, I have further realized that in order to continue my path towards a career in journalism, I need to allow my mind to wander into the unknowns of the world, as Watts teaches us, and that I must find myself within others, as Whitman illustrates. My past is no longer going to define my future; rather, my present self is going to be the guide to find out who I will become. As someone who considered herself well cultured, I found that Watts and Whitman truly challenged my homeostasis. Whitman showed me how we are all a part of the same whole, working to figure out what truly works for each of us. Watts opened my eyes to see that what we already know is not all that we need to know. We must be in constant search of what we do not know to acquire what we still need to. I realized that my best strategy as a learner, thinker and evolving writer is to break out of my comfort zone in order to challenge what it is I have yet to learn. 

Works Cited

Baksic, Emily. "Corresponding Ideas of Nature in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass & Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching." Taking Giant Steps, 05 May 2016. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

Picciano, Kelsey. "Forging a Whitmanic, Post-Traditional, Bisexual Identity." Taking Giant Steps. N.p., 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 07 Dec. 2016.

Watts, Alan. “Chapter 1,” The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Share and Discover Knowledge on LinkedIn SlideShare. N.p., 25 Dec. 2015. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself” (1892 Version)| Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.