Thursday, December 6, 2018

How we create our spirituality and how it creates us


A few months ago, I went rafting down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Coursing past the vast buttes and peaks of orange and gold, black and red, I was intrigued to learn that the canyon’s oldest rock layers are named after Hindu deities. Vishnu schist, Brahma schist and Rama schist — some 2 billion years old — form the base of the canyon, as if the mile-high walls that lay bare the Earth’s geologic history are held up by the gods themselves.

These Hindu names can be traced to geologist Clarence Dutton, who, in documenting the physical features of the canyon in the late 1800s, concluded that “the most sublime of all earthly spectacles” demanded an appropriately majestic nomenclature, one that denotes the holy Himalayas and the East.

Of course, the Grand Canyon has been sacred to Native Americans for thousands of years, a land imbued with spirituality long before Dutton’s naming. But I was struck by this explicit convergence of geology and religion. It suggests a recognition that no matter how much we codify this place, no matter how far our scientific understanding progresses, it will always hold a kind of underlying mystery, an ineffability that is truer than certainty.

The mystery undergirding lived reality — why we die, why we suffer, why we love — is at the heart of acclaimed historian Elaine Pagels’s new book, “Why Religion?: A Personal Story.” Pagels is a professor at Princeton; winner of the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships; and author of several books, including the National Book Award-winning “The Gnostic Gospels,” about secret texts that support a multifarious and mystical understanding of Christianity, and “Adam, Eve, and the Serpent,” about the creation myth’s effect on Western sexual attitudes. In “Why Religion?,” an intimate, evocative memoir, Pagels turns her tools of analysis inward. She threads her own story of spiritual discovery, love and staggering loss with the subject of her life’s work: how we create religion and how religion, in turn, creates us.

Pagels grew up in mid-20th-century Palo Alto, Calif., a place that “was like living inside a giant marshmallow, the hard edges — race, poverty crime — covered with soft, sugary pillows.” At 15, she stumbles upon the famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham, whose passionate, politically charged sermons shake her to her core. “After living in a world that felt flat, where emotional intensity was suppressed,” she writes, Graham’s potent language “opened up worlds of possibility.” Thus begins a lifelong fascination with the spiritual dimension of human existence.

“Why Religion?” traces Pagels’s journey through graduate school and into the world of academia, where she delves into ancient “heretical” texts that upset Christian orthodoxy and celebrate personal exploration and agency. The sexism she experiences as she succeeds professionally leads her to examine how women in early Christianity pushed back against gender inequality thousands of years ago. Along the way, she marries a charming quantum physicist who was also “hoping to understand something fundamental.” Love, work, the big questions of humanity: It all seems so elegantly intertwined.

But then, her life takes a biblical turn. Her son Mark is born with a fatal heart condition, a reality that shatters normalcy with “dark currents of terror.” As he grows, Mark seems precociously aware of his fate. He dreams of being left at a cemetery. He tells his mother, “I’ll love you all my life, and all my death.” A day later, at age 6, he dies. Pagels recounts this period with clarity and slight detachment, moving swiftly over marital strife and her tendencies toward alcoholism and depression. “I can tell only the husk of the story,” she admits, comparing it to “being burned alive.”

The next year, her husband, an avid hiker, falls to his death from a mountaintop. What follows is bewildering confusion, memory lapses, sleeplessness, friends appearing out of nowhere, hallucinatory encounters with her dead husband and the constant intervening force of reality: At this point she has two small children to raise. Her struggle to climb out of interminable darkness is harrowingly palpable. Eventually, she channels her experience into her work. She probes how grief is often shadowed by guilt and how ancient folk tales have instilled the notion that suffering is a punishment for sin (consider the familiar refrain “What have we done to deserve this?”). Filled with rage at her situation, she examines how Satan was invented as a figure on which to place blame. Religion, she comes to realize, is about engaging the imagination — which, regardless of one’s beliefs, is essential for confronting the starkest of realities.

Pagels briefly acknowledges how religion is used to justify violence, noting, for example, how President George W. Bush’s intelligence briefings would begin with a quote from the Bible to suggest that God had sanctioned the Iraq War. But that isn’t her focus. The title “Why Religion?” may be a misnomer, because the book neither endorses nor indicts spirituality. It’s not even about religion as a set of beliefs or traditions. Rather, it is about how a spiritual sensibility can create space for vital ambiguity, contemplation and gnosis — knowledge of the heart — particularly in the face of that omnipresent human experience, suffering.

In that way, the book is also about community. Pagels returns repeatedly to the ancient Christian texts that speak of God not as a remote, overarching entity but something deep inside us all. As goes a saying in the Gospel of Thomas: “Within a person of light, there is light. If illuminated, it lights up the whole world; if not, everything is dark.” In the bleakest of moments, such words helped Pagels “dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God.” This web was made manifest, too, in the many friends who held her through loss, the people who cared for her children, the colleagues who understood her needs. Pagels’s life is lived in communion, and this is what saves her.

Religion as a tool for openness and interconnection: This may sound absurdly naive, given how politicized religion is today, how it seems to be the root of endless bloodshed. But in a sense, Pagels invites a reframing. Perhaps the fundamentals of religion — searching, questioning and reflecting in service of something larger — are precisely what we need now. Because we don’t know all the answers. Fixed assumptions, entrenched opinions: These are getting us nowhere in politics, in policy, in social life. Perhaps, as the Gnostic Gospels suggest, the first step is clear-eyed humility. “Recognize what is before your eyes, and the mysteries will be revealed to you.”

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

A Scholar of Religion Confronts Her Own Grief

WHY RELIGION?

Everyone mourns differently. There is no template for grief. Religions offer frameworks, structures, rituals and prayers — but these, as Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, makes abundantly clear in her new memoir, are no substitute for the inner work that the deaths of our loved ones force on us.

Pagels comes by her knowledge honestly. She lost her first child, born with a hole in his heart, when he was 6, and soon thereafter her 49-year-old husband slipped and fell to his death while hiking, leaving her with two children under the age of 2. A recounting of her personal story has been a long time coming. Her husband and child died more than 30 years ago, and reading about her life, love, work and unimaginable pain, we can feel how difficult it has been for this reserved scholar of early Christianity to enter the black hole of her feelings. Her account has none of the frenzied and claustrophobic madness of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”; nor the wild pain and rushing love of Sonali Deraniyagala’s “Wave,” written in the aftermath of the sudden death of her family in the 2004 tsunami.


This is the story of a woman for whom the refuge of academia and its pursuit of wisdom ultimately offered what she needed to heal her broken heart. Fueled by her intellect, and fortunate to have access to the Gnostic Gospels — 52 first-century or second-century Christian texts unearthed in 1945 by an Egyptian Arab farmer digging for fertilizer an hour’s drive from ancient Thebes — Pagels, bravely, forthrightly and with a characteristic minimum of fuss, cracks herself ajar. This is a minimalist work of great majesty, akin to a shimmering Agnes Martin painting, whose stripped-down aesthetic allows light to pour forth from her canvas.

Pagels sets up her story beautifully. Raised in Palo Alto by an aloof biologist father and a mother who played Chopin on the piano but could offer comfort only when her daughter pretended to be ill, Pagels rebelled by embracing evangelical Christianity when she was 15. Born again, she felt a whiff of the unconditional love long denied her. That was 1958 and her conversion did not last long. By 1960 she had found a renegade tribe of artists, poets and musicians, and, instead of feigning illness, skipped school to drink coffee in Menlo Park with, among others, the young Jerry Garcia, newly discharged from the Army. Her first brush with death came when Garcia and three friends had a deadly car accident, throwing him through the windshield and killing their 16-year-old mutual friend. Garcia credited the accident with giving him purpose — the moniker “Grateful Dead” is said to spring from it — while Pagels began to ask the questions that form the backbone of this book. “Where do the dead go? And how to go on living?”


After graduating from Stanford, Pagels came to New York City to take dance classes with Martha Graham. She was good, but not the best, and was soon on to Harvard Divinity School, where she could be better. Almost as an aside, she tells a devastating story about one of her first professors, a Lutheran minister, who demanded that she babysit for his four children. Returning with his wife at midnight, he coerced her into sleeping on his basement couch. At 2 in the morning he came fumbling for her breasts. Though she managed to fend him off, she was nevertheless compelled to accept him as her adviser for the next five years. She calls him out in this book, admitting that it took her years to do so, and the implications are clear. The best and the brightest women were expected to act as the young Elaine did. “In the morning I pretended everything was normal,” she writes. This default coping strategy, deployed again and again as her traumas mount, is one she eventually explodes.

Pagels married the physicist Heinz Pagels while still in graduate school. She is remarkably circumspect about their 20-year marriage — it sounds perfect except for the one time, after the death of their son, when Heinz, pushing his grief away, talked a little too loudly at a dinner party and made Elaine uncomfortable — but she does offer at least one surprise. Heinz encouraged her to take LSD shortly after they married and she gives one of the most succinct reports about its merits ever written. Expecting a Christian vision, she instead sat for five hours gazing, “ecstatic and speechless,” at her garden, seeing “everything as alive as fire, gloriously intertwined.” “I guess that solves the dying problem,” she remarked when she could finally speak. Reading about her subsequent ordeals, we wish it were that simple.

For decades Pagels avoided her personal pain while coping with what was left of her life. But undertaking this book, and several visits to the enveloping silence of a Trappist monastery, prompted her to look inward. As she did, the secret Gospels began to speak to her. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you,” they counseled. “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” In a sober and measured voice, punctuated by a barely contained fury, Pagels reveals how profound this advice turned out to be.

Several years before his death, Heinz Pagels had a prophetic dream. “I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold,” he wrote at the close of “The Cosmic Code.” “Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.”

Pagels does not quote her husband’s vision. It was not as easy for her as his dream made it seem for him. In fact, in one of the more poignant passages in a book that is full of them, Pagels senses the presence of her deceased husband. “So how do you feel about this?” she asks him. Startled, she receives a reply. “This is fine with me,” he says, “it’s you I’m concerned about now.” Pagels is incensed. “Fine with you? You leave me with two babies and it’s fine with you?” Do husbands never change?

In the end, though, Pagels makes her own peace, not through religious doctrine or mystical experience — although both are vivid in her account — but through a willingness to look squarely at her pain. Suffering happens to everyone, she eventually realizes; it is not a sign of personal failure. Religion helps make suffering sufferable, but so does science. The randomness of the universe explains loss better than the doctrine of original sin. And, miracle of miracles, even if things are still not fine with her, “sometimes hearts do heal, through what I can only call grace.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/books/review/why-religion-elaine-pagels.html

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

What is Spirituality? Why we Need it

Spirituality is a broad concept with room for many perspectives. In general, it includes a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and it typically involves a search for meaning in life. As such, it is a universal human experience—something that touches us all. People may describe a spiritual experience as sacred or transcendent or simply a deep sense of aliveness and interconnectedness.

Relationship between Religion and Spirituality:

While spirituality may incorporate elements of religion, it is generally a broader concept. Religion and spirituality are not the same thing, nor are they entirely distinct from one another.


Religion is based on the outer, objective reality. It is the outward expression of faith. If you belong to a religion, you have a place of worship, a congregation to participate in, hymns and songs to sing, a book to guide you in life, somewhere to introduce new life into the world, and somewhere to take your dead. It gives you an identity; a place in the community and the world.

In spirituality, you cannot conduct experiments to prove your understanding. We have all experienced that fantastic feeling of seeing a beautiful sunset, or the emotions of falling in love, but you cannot even begin to explain the exact feeling to someone else because it is something inside and personal to you. It is the same with trying to explain your spiritual experiences; it cannot be done. Only you can know what you feel.

This doesn’t mean that you cannot prove the experience to yourself. You should always be skeptical and try to discover if the feeling is just your imagination or really a meaningful experience that has actually happened to you. Test yourself and try to re-create the feelings. Test and test again until you are sure that for you the feeling is genuine. If you cannot prove it to yourself, you might still want to keep it because it makes you feel good. Spirituality is all about you.

Spirituality versus emotional health

Spiritual and Emotional are two types of mental behavioral changes in man that show some differences between them. Emotions are nothing but feelings related to worldly life. On the other hand, spiritual are feelings related to unearthly or unworldly life.



You will notice as you read on that many practices recommended for cultivating spirituality are similar to those recommended for improving emotional wellbeing. This is because there is a connection between the two—emotional and spiritual wellbeing influence one another and overlap, as do all aspects of wellbeing.

- Spirituality is about seeking a meaningful connection with something bigger than yourself, which can result in positive emotions, such as peace, awe, contentment, gratitude, and acceptance.

- Emotional health is about cultivating a positive state of mind, which can broaden your outlook to recognize and incorporate a connection to something larger than yourself.

Spiritual Gurus in India: 

If United States is considered the "Land of Opportunity" then India is by default the "Land of Spirituality". Here is a long list of Hindu Gurus who are honored across India & beyond! They are also recognized as Swami (prefix before name). These modern day Gurus are not only popular in media but also possess a lot of wealth through NGO. They influence the lives of many Indians and are worshiped next to God!

There are many gurus like Swami Prabhupada ji, Swami Ramdev Baba, Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. All of them help the people on the path of meditation and inner peace.