This year I was blessed enough to travel a lot. The compass kept pointing to the East. I knew very well that it was mysticism that took me to Asia as well as what we call: “the cultural gap”, that is, this impossibility of deep understanding – despite one’s struggle – of the eastern “otherness”. I happen to come from a country that despite its people’s pride, it suffers lack of identity definition both because of its geography and past. This might be a curse because it bears pathogeny on the one hand, but also a blessing because people from such countries might be somehow closer to crossing at least some “suspicion” over this impossibility on the other hand. Yet, western ideas about normality would prevail in everyone’s mind when a European: How inhumaine does it seem to the western eye to see someone incinerate their wife and arrange business on the phone at the same time, or how awkward is it to believe in 2.500 deities at the same time, consider cows to be sacred but still have them eat from rubish bins, how impossible to deify humans with such ease, love for the sake of institution and not for the sake of this “significant other”, spend half one’s meager income on offerings to the gods… Yeah, things are different to us: God is only one, love is for the one I love, and my enlightened Ego is the centre of the universe. In any case the west has been struggling to understand who this “stranger” who lives in the Eastern end is (usually ending up with nasty “superiority complex” conclusions) ever since the 19th century (and a lot earlier maybe – but let’s not stick to this) but I’m not sure if this goes the other way round. I don’t believe that the Asians ever got obsessed about discovering the West.
What about all this fuss with the god(s)? The West has long asserted its freedom from darkness by negating the existence of God. Humanity is progressing and science is providing answers to everything. We’ve got statistics to explain the human behaviour, technology to take us to other planets, and if God existed, pain, suffering and ugliness should not exist. Poverty and inequality should not exist either and children in the Third World should not be starving. If God created the world then who created God? Excuse me the language but this is all bollocks. The West has never been that ugly and miserable and the celebrated individual has never suffered that much, no matter how strongly it claims the glory and infinite capacity of the Ego. Yes, people in the East are poor but they are not unhappy. The only stain in their lives comes in the face of Globalisation. People in Cambodia would be a lot happier without the US dollar having invaded their market. Beaches in Vietnam would be a lot cleaner without tons of plastic bottles and plastic bags in their sea and their forests would still remain pristine without those massive skyscrapers, neon fun parks and hotel chains to cover western tourism needs in the middle of the jungle. You see, people there before the dollar had their gods and they are still struggling to keep them alive unless they finally succumb to temptation and turn them into cheap folklore for the tourists to take home. God is still important in Asia. One is faced with the love (S)He is embraced with by the people in the glorious temples rising literally from the chaos and anarchy of big cities, and He (or She) is there to structure and organize little communities in the countryside. God is Hope and faith to life, keeping people smiling and appreciating the very little they have, feeling blessed for another day to pass. But God is also another thing: it is the only resistance against this frenzy of malevolent neo-liberal (and neo-conservative at the same time) globality looming above their heads – ready to devour every trace of dignity that’s left to them when going to the supermarket, having to buy chips for 3,5 dollars a packet (average monthly salary in Cambodia is around 340 US). There’s probably a lesson for the rest of us to learn by the Asians. We kept God and philosophy separate. They didn’t. But we have science, we need no lessons to learn.
There’s probably no message to get across in this article – only a few scattered thoughts to share. I keep bringing Yann Martel – a very favorite author to my mind. In “Life of Pi” the little boy in Pondicherry keeps seeking God in all religions. During a family argument and despite his father’s objections, his mother claims (and forgive me for not reproducing): “Science can give answers about the world around us, but it is religion only that can explain the world within”..
