The case of Elizabeth Gilbert, a successful writer, and the author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, sums up what the God within belief system is all about. Unhappy with her marriage and career she dives into the “dark night of the soul”, spiritual odysseys, and comes out of one such odyssey one night with convictions that bless all that her heart desires. She trades her husband, career and plans for starting a family for a ‘spiritual’ quest in an Indian ashram.
On her spiritual journey, her discovery of Self as the supreme reality is a caricature of a similar discovery by Sufi mystics. While the Sufi’s journey into the self is a journey to experience the immanence of God without negating His transcendence, Elizabeth’s delusion leads her to the pantheistic belief that all that there is, the creation and the Creator, is but God. It is said that a tree is known by the fruit that it bears. Whereas the true Sufis never forsake traditional morality, Elizabeth’s experience announces to a pleasure seeking culture that you can have your cake and eat it too. That the path to tranquillity, bliss, peace, and internal harmony never leads to filth, and living in rebellion to the laws of God is apparently unknown to such spiritual pilgrims.
As for Elizabeth’s journey to the Indian ashram, it seems that it never occurs to the westerners who go to these places in search of a spiritual experience that if Hindu temples had all the answers for the attainment of spirituality, millions of Hindus’ quest for the same would not have ended up in their converting to other religions.
Ross Douthat’s brilliant comment upon Elizabeth’s experience is worth quoting: “Think of the way Elizabeth Gilbert’s spiritual odyssey plays out. Eat, Pray, Love begins with her throwing away her husband of five years (a man whose devotion and decency she praises to the skies) because she is bored and frustrated and isn’t ready to have kids, and ends with her finding love with a handsome Brazilian in Bali. In the interim, God’s intercession is sought to smooth her divorce proceedings and then to ease her sense of guilt over her own conduct. It’s hard to imagine a better explanation of religion’s role in the post-sexual revolution US — as an enabler of adult desire, whether gluttonous or libidinous, and a source of endless justifications for whatever the heart already prefers to do.”
The God within is an endeavour to achieve internal harmony, tolerance and peace, albeit at the cost of truth. Douthat’s comment that, “A tolerant society is not necessarily a just one” can be extended to the individual as well, meaning that a tolerant individual is not necessarily a just individual, and justice is the key to peace and harmony because without justice there can neither be peace nor harmony.
The creed’s tenets lack in intellectual rigour. Unlike atheism it posits a God, though it often does not admit that it does so, but does not take the argument for God to its logical conclusion. The God within God is one that tolerates evil and injustice with serenity. He neither judges nor rewards nor punishes (for ultimate reward and punishment are only in the Hereafter). That reward and punishment are ultimately predicated upon God’s attribute of justice without which the distinction between God and Satan blurs completely, either misses the benighted souls of the God within creed or is not consonant with their purpose for a God. Hence an amorphous concept of a consolatory Deity that provides comfort from grief and sorrow but does not judge. Any philosophy or creed that postulates a Supreme Being but denies the Hereafter, i.e. the final recompense, has an inbuilt injustice in its belief system. It is neither at peace nor in harmony with the wishes of the real Supreme Being. Incidentally, this attempt to blur the line between good and evil also shows the asininity of attempting to find God through feeling, sentiments and emotions only rather than through feeling plus reason and revelation.
(Concluded)
The writer is a freelance writer and an electrical engineer. He can be reached at [email protected]