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Date Posted:04:05:43 06/05/04 Sat Author: H - 7 May 2004 Subject: From skepticism to Divinity
I will put here something that I found both amazing and encouraging. Ramdas (1884-1963) was one of the great Bhaktas, and one is inclined to believe such people were of a highly devotional nature right in the beginning. Apparently that holds not true for all.
He wrote the following text late in life, referring to a period of his early life when he was in his early twenties.
H
"At this juncture he came across books published by the Rationalists' Press Association of America. The works of Ernst Haeckel, Grant Allen* and others set his mind ablaze and the faith created and nourished during his childhood vanished at a sweep, and he turned into a sceptic. He felt that whatever he had read or heard from the scriptures about God and His worship, belonged to mental hallucinations. God was merely an idea conceived in the human brain. In reality there was no God; Nature alone caused all movements, and the two had no relationship or connection with each other. Ramdas remembers the expression often used in this regard -- "a fortuitous concourse of atoms". Everything happens by chance and there is no such thing as an immanent and over-ruling power that guides the destinies of all things. The scientific manner in which the Rationalists sought to prove that God did not exist, dashed his faith in God to pieces. He wished to enroll as a member of that Association so that he might be able to read all its latest publications and keep himself up-to-date in the formulation of his thoughts and ideas regarding the scientific viewpoint and outlook advanced by this Association.
It is no doubt easy to slip from faith in God to atheism; the path being downward and slippery, the time taken for the change is short and quick.
His reading of books did not stop at this stage. He went on and on reading more and more books. The Greek philosophers, Roman orators, German and French dramatists, American and English humorists, and books on crime and detection, and the masterly novels of authors of various countries, in the original or in translations, absorbed all his attention during his spare hours. In fact, he devoted only a very small part of his time towards the Institute studies.
When the mind was perfectly arid and the thought of God repellent to it, when peace and equanimity lost their charm for him, in some mysterious way he came upon the works of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Swami Rama Tirtha. The words of Vivekananda, resonant with the throb and thrill of his intimate experience of God-revelation, followed by a loud and insistent call from the darkness of non-belief into the light of living faith, his tremendous renunciation and the great spiritual power which gave him strength to carry the message of Vedanta across the seas to distant lands where he delivered the message of our Rishis in a voice that actually reverberated through the entire world -- all these made Ramdas' heart fertile again, and the faith which had wellnigh become dead and gone, revived again and grew up with such rapidity that there was a total transformation within him from the life of negation to the life of positive assertion with regard to the existence of God. The experience, of course, was not there, but faith took deep root in him and he knew that no blast, however powerful, could any longer uproot and destroy this faith that came to him.
However, he became a radical believer. The ceremonial and ritualistic side of religion failed to appeal to him any longer. His ideal was a spiritual life built upon a sure and pure foundation of a strictly moral life and action. The idea of caste and creed vanished from his mind. He believed in a God who is the father of all members of the human race. God is universal, the divine source of all that exists. His heart bent before such a God.
Henceforth, he concentrated his mind upon the study of Hindu and Christian scriptures. He read the translation of the Bhagavad Gita. This great scripture cast a spell upon him. He could even then get from it flashes that illumined his heart although most parts of it did not reveal their secrets to him."
-- Swami Ramdas, Passage to Divinity
* Ramdas had studied Ernst Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe and Grant Allen's The Evolution of the Idea of God. Haeckel was the foremost German Darwinist of his time, and Allen an infamous agnostic who caused scandal in the Victorian society by advocating free love.
