Ideas
'God Of Humans', 'God Of Universe' And Savarkar
Aravindan Neelakandan
Feb 26, 2024, 04:20 PM | Updated 04:20 PM IST
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What were Vir Savarkar's ideas about the divine and sacred?
In an essay on god, Savarkar poetically extols the beauty of the world, the grandeur of natural world and the wonders that make human life possible and make it flourish.
How kind and magnificent the god who created all these in such a perfect manner. It is the typical argument for a benevolent omnipotent, omniscient designer:
Really, how kind God must be to his human children for creating such a biochemical process as milk formation! What’s more - God endowed the same dairy cow or buffalo that produces milk with the ability to leave behind her own progeny, a reproduced copy, with the very same miraculous biochemical abilities to turn dry unpalatable inedible grass into sweet, creamy milk before she retires or passes away. A milk-vending machine that vends not just milk but also another milk-vending machine!... How can we humans ever even quantify, leave alone repay, the kindness that God showered on humankind, making arrangements for every aspect of human existence!... Thou truly art both our father and mother and we Thy children. Even the milk our mothers give us is given ultimately by you. O Lord, we are Thy devotees and Thou, the Lord God of humankind, the God of Man! Not just that, Thou art the only God, there can be no other and Thou hath created this world specifically for our peace and prosperity!
But that is a prelude to what Savarkar was intending to deconstruct — the concept of the ‘god of the human beings.’
To Savarkar such a god exists only in the figment of wishful, and somewhat pitiable, imagination of humans. Because if one observes nature beyond such silly sentimentality, it is definitely not designed for humans or for that matter any specific species. Pointing out the fallacy of such a ‘god of the human beings’ he wrote:
Our faith and belief that humankind is the centre of reference for the whole universe and that not just our own planet - the earth with her plentiful resources and life forms - but the whole cosmos was created by God only for humankind, only to favour humankind, only to provide pleasure to humankind and only out of special partisan fondness for humankind, eventually crystallized into belief systems, some open to contrary thought and other times closed to alternative view-points, like unbending dogma unwilling to confront rationalism. We humans even created religious texts of this dogma, selectively only documenting phenomena supportive of our theory that God first manufactures and then employs even stars, planets, comets, black holes, galaxies and constellations exclusively for sustaining human existence, protecting human life, providing fun, pleasure and entertainment to humans and eternally providing resources to human civilization, happiness and prosperity. This blinkered approach has only blinded us to stark, obvious natural phenomena and unpleasant observations of accidents and natural catastrophes endured by humankind that contradict our doctrine of “God’s Creation for human welfare”. We have to free ourselves of the shackles of this dogmatic conditioning to outgrow our primary assumption and adopt the approach of unbiased reasoning and dispassionate analysis to explain observations both pleasant and unpleasant
Had Savarkar just stopped here then he would be just a mechanical rationalist and nothing more. But, he asks us to further look into the mystery of the universe, jettisoning the juvenile conception of ‘god of humans’. Then, he introduces the 'god of the universe'.
In a way, this is an impersonal god of Spinoza and Einstein. But Savarkar does not vouch for the ontological reality of even such a cosmic impersonal god. He writes:
Why, even if this very sun or our very own Milky Way were to vanish, the rest of the cosmos would be probably as affected as the luminosity of daylight is affected by the death of a firefly. Such an unfazed, unperturbed cosmic power that would not elicit even a moment’s mourning by the sudden nemesis of a hundred suns or solar systems even on a daily basis can still be venerated as ‘God’ (to satiate human spiritual hunger) but slightly differently - as the “God of the universe” - certainly not as our older conception of “God of Humankind”.
The genius of Savarkar here is that he did not imply that the ‘god of the humans’ is false and the ‘god of the universe’ is true.
Note that even the phrase, ‘god of the universe,’ is ‘to satiate human spiritual hunger’. It makes one feel at ease with what science reveals.
The vastness of space and time, as revealed by science, can lead a relatively young species with an evolved faculty of contemplation to feel utterly lost in the meaninglessness of existence. Yet human species should survive and hence a sense of religion, a sacredness is built in human species by evolution. In the words ‘to satiate human spiritual hunger’ Savarkar shows the deep understanding of this evolutionary dimension of religion.
The next great insight from Savarkar is about the harmony of the inner and the outer worlds.
To this day, many in Hindu Right easily gravitate towards pseudo-science because they confuse the inner cartography of the Puranas with the outer reality of the physical universe that science reveals. Savarkar in the following lines gives us an extraordinary insight. The inner universe exists like the outer universe. He writes:
Mentally envisaging the ‘God of the universe’ is merely going logically further in our God-conceptualization exercise. There are two techniques, scientific and spiritual, essentially complementary to each other. Scientifically, we have space shuttles and telescopes augmenting the eye, to note birth of stars or their celestial burial in black holes. Spiritually, ancients reached yogic contemplative planes like Saptapatal, Brahmalok, Vishnulok, Devalok, etc. through meditation augmenting the inner mind. Either way, the universe (or the “God” of the universe) is uninfluenced by prayers, unperturbed by human emotions, unaffected by human birth or death, prosperity or tragedy, too abstract to be affected by anything, partial towards no one, certainly not humans, is equally responsible for both genesis and nemesis.
The authors of our Puranas have long hinted that the Puranas happen in an inner sacred space with liminal points in the outer forming the sacred geometry. Carl Jung would have called it individuation of the deepest kind. Here, Savarkar provides a blueprint for the Hindus to understand their Puranas avoiding the pitfall of literalism and pseudoscience.
Once more, Savarkar's unique approach to deconstructing and reconceptualising god does not reject the idea of the 'god of human beings.' Instead, he recognises the potential danger of monopolistic religious fundamentalism inherent in that conception of god.
A lesser rationalist would have called for the destruction of the conceptions of the ‘god of human beings’. Not Savarkar. He harmonises the ‘god of human beings’ with the ‘god of the universe’:
Whether the devotionally conceived God of Humankind partial to humankind or the intellectually conceptualized God of the Universe partial towards no one, we can treat every conception with respect, since we term the conception “God”.
But can this feeling be directed to ethics as well? It is quite easy to dismiss the ‘god of human beings’ but that is also a source of ethics in the most fundamental way. Yet the shadow of that source of ethics is the belief in a god that dehumanises other sections of humanity in terms of belief system.
Savarkar again shows the way here.
He brings in rationalism. Discover what shall help humanity in the long run and in a sustained way. Abide by the values and ‘laws’ that emanate from those discoveries:
The age and limits of our universe are too big to even be measured - human devotional tantrums do not matter at all. What is rational is that we can study, infer, discover, analyse, comprehend, teach each other and then recode for posterity the laws by which the universe and its components exist, govern themselves and act or interact. We can then try and align ourselves with the laws of the functioning of nature and the universe in ways beneficial to the human race, conducive to our survival. This is the only thing possible for us humans. Thus any act, behaviour or conduct of a human being conducive and helpful to the survival of the whole human race and to our habitat (the earth and “her” environment) in the long term is good, ethical and correct behaviour. On the contrary, any thought or conduct that can make us perish or destroy our own habitat, anything that can adversely affect human survival or can be a deterrent to long-term human survival of our human habitat is bad, unethical and incorrect behaviour.
The brilliance of Savarkar, as highlighted in the paper from which these quotes are drawn, lies in his ability to present one of the most spiritually beautiful conceptions of the divine. This conception appeals simultaneously to intellect, aesthetics, and emotions.
He refrains from arguments for or against the existence of any supernatural deity and the undercurrent of the paper presupposes the absence of any deity. Yet the article is filled with both bhakti and jnana.
Both Spinoza and later Einstein felt the need to transcend the god of humans — a personal god to whom one prays — and move to the impersonal cosmic godhead.
Even as evolution proves the absence of any designer, neurobiology and primate studies show the evolutionary roots of our spirituality. Climate change and ecological crisis necessitate that we acknowledge the earth as a super-system that does not care much about our own existence. This system is called ‘Gaia’.
If there can be a single essay that anticipates and harmonises all these philosophical conceptions and scientific discoveries and developments, then it is this essay by Savarkar. This is an essay that should be translated across languages and included in every curriculum of Indian knowledge systems, for it is the quintessential wisdom of Vedic rishis expressed in the words of Sanghathanacharya Swantantrya Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
You can read the entire essay by Savarkar 'Conceptualising God', translated by Dr Aditya Dhopatkar here.
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