Life without profiting prophets

After a very long time, I ventured to the campus in order to bring home the personal items and valuables from my office.  The office that I have had since 2002, and which will cease being mine a few weeks from now.

There was a white padded, bubble package in my mailbox.  I knew it had to be a personal mail.  Formal, official, business mails do not arrive in that form.

It was a thank-you gift from two students.

They were in the last in-person class that abruptly ended in March 2020 when the plague descended upon us.

I forgot to check the postmark on the package.  In any case, months have passed since the gift arrived.

The gift was a slim book pf puns.  From the class, the student knew well enough my fondness for puns, and had thoughtfully picked out this gift for me.

Such meaningful interactions I will miss.  The thank-you cards are the valuables from my office that I brought home.

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One of the puns in the book was this: Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

For this non-believer, that is a humorous way to frame the way I approach life.  Though, if I were to be strictly intellectual about it, I go about defining myself as an agnostic.  After all, I do not have evidence to convince me of atheism, and it requires a, ahem, leap of faith from agnosticism to atheism ;)

"one of the pleasures of agnosticism—perhaps the greatest pleasure—is that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon."
Well put 👏🏾@Horganism in @sciam:https://t.co/o37iPlarTg

— Sriram K (@congoboy) August 20, 2021

A question that practically everybody on this planet would like to know the answer to is this: where did we, and everything else, come from?

If you are talented and creative enough, and have enough charisma, you can then offer your own narrative and gain a few followers.  If the numbers keep growing, then you gain notoriety as a cult leader.  If your cult manages to survive for a hundred years, which will mean you are dead by then, that cult becomes a religion based on the narrative that you offered.

I grew up with interesting narratives that had survived over the centuries.  But, after a while, the puranas, which are stories about the gods, didn't deliver any meaning whatsoever.  They just seemed like phenomenal soap-operas, with complex subplots.  And, yes, most stories had some element of moral instruction too.

Then there was the fascination with prophets, who turned out to be as clueless as I was--but were master manipulators.

Source

The narratives that appealed to me during the final phase of the religiously agnostic life were whatever I could understand of the vedantic approach.  There were no stories here. No prophets. Only ideas.  Thus, there was no trivial discussion like whether Sita was chaste enough after her time away from Rama, or whether Krishna's rasa lila with the gopis were metaphors to illustrate the deeper points about the soul.

The vedantic ideas were abstractions, and most of it was about how the "i" relates to the cosmos.  It was like dealing with imaginary numbers in math, where, too, it was about "i"! 

In the vedantic stuff, I came across the mahavakyas.  One of the mahavakyas is "तत् त्वम् असि": That thou art.  You are that. 

The sentence, the philosophy, and science work well even without bringing in any creator into the discussions.  If we strip from ourselves all the identifications that we use to define who we are, the "i" is "that." 

We do not need a profiting prophet!