Let Me See Them

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    Hinduism has always been of interest to me, for a lot of reasons. Now, granted, I don’t know a lot about it, but it’s always been visually interesting to me. I find the idea of the integration it has into the overall life, surroundings, and culture to be interesting and while I don’t necessarily wish that for a society I live in (or, rather, the society I do live in, since I very much wish religion would kindly remove itself from many places in which it has engrained itself), it’s beautiful and fascinating and interesting all the same. I feel like Eck’s book, and the added lecture from Dr. Tuggy, have not only filled in important context to me, but also made me realize a lot of things about my own faith and experience with faith.

     I was drawn to paganism for many reasons, one of which is that I don’t like or have a lot of emotional investment in many Christian doctrine. I don’t like the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity that punishes their own creation for the traits it was created with. I don’t like the idea of a deity that requires absolute obedience, and in my case with the added obedience to another human being. I feel like Christianity is… arrogant, in a lot of ways, and I feel part of that is connected to idolatry; I’ve never really seen why it was such a bad thing to worship something made my man and intended to represent divine, when the religion requires women to be subservient to men who are subservient to the Christian God. It never made sense.

 

    Now, this lack of making sense may just be me, because I realize I am a special case. My brain doesn’t do the whole mental pictures thing, which can be hard to explain but I’m going to do my best. I do not see things in my mind. If someone asks me to think about things, I just recall what I remember of those things, but I’ll can’t make a version or an image of it in my mind. The only thing I really see anything in my mind is if I close my eyes too hard and start getting like phantom colors, but that’s probably more my eyes than my mind, per say. I feel like this is part of the reason I’m so bad at mindfulness and praying: all my mind can offer me is thoughts, not pictures, so I can’t just shut off the only thing my mind can do that tells me I’m perceiving things.

 

    And maybe that’s partially why I’m drawn to the idea of idols and physical representations of deities? I can’t see them in my mind, cannot create an image of a deity in my mind, but I sure can see one and appreciate the sight. I sure can have a picture representation of a deity of mine, or something I feel represents them, and use that as a substitute for them. I guess in the way that scholars thought needing sensory perception of deities is intellectually simple, I see it as a way to be accessible and welcoming; I do not have to struggle to picture what something looks like based on description, but I can see what it is I’m here to worship and can perceive it in ways that make sense to me.

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