Long Train to Goa

Part II: Arrival/Reflections

Alarms ring out into the eerie black-green world of hanging curtains.

all over the train there are people comfortably sitting in near pitch black darkness a man checks his phone. As he does it phantasmally illuminates his now floating face in a soft blue. All of these points of light are similar floating islands, free of the usual references. He tucks in into his breast pocket giving the illusion that his heart is on fire with a blue flame. Glowing a strange glow this heart back lights moving shadows around him. I have just sat upright and my eyes were a little blury, my head was a little foggy, and my glasses were still in the cup holder.

Perhaps this gave rise to my somewhat mystical first view of the train this morning, But perhaps instead it was that India has gotten in my system a little bit. I mean the part about the blue flaming heart? Could it be the giardia talking? I find myself in one of the most mystical, polytheistic, pantheistic, multicultural, hesitantly westernizing countries in the world...diverse doesn't cut it. The spirituality here has caused a little bit of me to come back alive. The tug of war in me between rational and spiritual is at stand still, and both are worn down horribly because of it. Are creationism and darwinism mutually exclusive? Can I ever possibly believe in the book of Genesis a little bit more loosely and still balance the rest of the bible on such an untested foundation? These questions are not new but have been plaguing me for some time, but are resurfacing in this blog because as you know (from last post) I am reading The Greatest show On Earth by Richard Dawkins, and it is a fine specimen of biological writing.

Now say what you want about his book The God Delusion because I have not read it to defend it, but then again, neither have the most opinionated critics of it. Dawkins is still a phenominal author with an eye for illustrative analogies. I think Dawkins could be to biology what Stephen Hawking has been to physics: a sort of demystifying arbiter bringing the frontier of the field to the public in very delightful ways. This book serves as a delightful overview of the reasoning behind Evolution by Natural Selection, complete with an intimate knowledge of the people who helped shape it. To those who are interested in understanding what evolution and natural selection are all about this book could easily smote even the most fierce misunderstanding of the subject. I should not really presume to speak about my views of evolution being still a humble student of it, but I will say that I find it all too muddled in political and spiritual skews to be talked about without offending someone. I have spent a large amount of money to cross the world and study this very theory, whether very intentionally in a classroom or casually, as I observe all the unique niches which life inhabits. One cannot study biology without starting with evolution and marvel to see it explain vast phenomena.

I first state as I'm sure at least a couple of you must take for granted, I am a believer in Darwin's theory (theory used in the scientific sense, not in a casual sense, see OED), as it is continuously being hammered out by rigorous testing by contemporary scientists. As well, the Earth is not less than 10,000 years old but millions. However, these two statements and theism are not mutually exclusive to me. Whatever you believe spiritually where things remain unprovable scientifically (but not beyond the grasp of reason as I will discuss in a moment) the material world is bound by laws. Things like gravity. That particular constant (consider the meaning of this word) will always be = 6.6726 x 10^-11N-m²/kg² (at least in this universe but it seems physics scholars are thumping their heads about the possibility of more, one will do for this train of thought). And I have to say knowing I will step on toes that I think in 2011, over 150 years after the publishing of On the Origin of Species, I think it is time that the FACT of evolution must be accepted as it is very firmly supported by an irrefutable mass of evidence when taken together or, at the very least, we should be able to teach such a fundamental theory without diversion. Again I cannot argue the subject with the duty it is owed so again I defer to Dr. Dawkins. But where does this tie back to the rational/spiritual tug of war? How does one balance what he knows rationally with what he knows spiritualy?

As my good friends know I have been in a period of extreme and somewhat maddening doubt. The more I doubt God the more manic and somewhat insane I become. This trend is generally given by the function I(B)=B^1. You will notice that even if I have a functional level of belief being mostly doubtful, this greatly reduces my insanity. Somewhat scientifically, I have been examining this relationship over the last couple of years, and to the best of my observation this trend remains true. I have unfortunately tested it again and again knowing intuitively where it will lead. I can therefore reasonably (as I mentioned previously) decide to be a believer in Jesus if I value my mental health. [edit] But I think the goal of faith resides somewhere beyond the reasonable, perhaps even past the intuitive. That a reasonable belief leaves a rather large void between the superficial and what could be called the real value of believing in Christ. My ultimate goal is not sanity (it's a bit unattainable anyway) but my apostasy has definite and observable effects (insanity is only one). And to cut through the dry scientific 'mumbo-jumbo' I have come to miss what I used to see in the person of Christ. I used to read St. Matthew and feel perfection radiating from the page. Whatever the causes I'm ready for this exile to end, and I'm ready to take steps to ensure that it does.

The obvious point to be made by skeptics is that 'religion makes you feel good, true or not.' To this I give a resounding yes. In my periods of deepest doubt I have felt, pardon my harsh terms, like shit; and whether I am right about there being a God or not? I still doubt. I still doubt mostly even. While I admit that these times of doubt are necessary for any believer to experience, I choose actively now to swim in the stream of this belief as opposed to being continually swept under. [end edit]

Some skeptics might call me a coward but I respond to them thus: In my days of severest doubt I drifted from “faith to faith;” some of you can remember my attempt at Orthodoxy. While impassioned about what I had found in this faith, I used it as a shield, even as wedge between those me and those who loved me. When who loved me enough to overlook this wedge, to refuse it it's 'wedginess,' to chase after a fleeing Grant that they both knew and loved, moved to something more extreme. I became quite interested in Sufi Islam even uttering to some of you that conversion had crossed my mind I continued this pattern whit several other somewhat spiritual separatist beliefs afraid to believe anything for too long, afraid that I might actually have to act upon these beliefs. Now I pose the question, who is the coward? The man running from his loved ones too afraid that he cannot fulfill his side of the arrangement, or the man who knowingly admits that he cannot fulfill these commitments but would like to try hoping that God will “forgive him his debts, as he forgives his debtors.” But resting somewhat certainly in the unending mercies of a loving God spends the majority of his life begging forgiveness from those who love him for the many ways he might have hurt them.

Therefore forgive me all you who I have neglected in the recent years, months, weeks, or days.

Leave a name, because I miss you all and I wish to be with you when I come back to Tulsa this summer.

Long Train to Goa

Part I: Transit

I crunch and munch on my masala dinner, a strange mixture of puffed serials and dried vegetables. Squeezed, all five feet & eleven inches of me into a bed which can barely accommodate five feet and six. I didn't expect anymore that's for sure. I am beginning to feel at home in a bed that might see me as a challenge. This particular bed is headed northwest at a rapid rate. I'm on a train for Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka. I'm in the “A/C Sleeper,” a car which I foresee will be too much of the first and not enough of the second. Like most places in South India the attitude towards air-conditioning seems to be to get it while the getting is good, and get as much as possible. Walking into an A/C dining room at a fancy restaurant you will notice goosebumps on everyone's arms as their body temperature drops dangerously low. Blue lips are soon to come, followed by numbness in their extremities. The train is quite like The Dharjeeling Limited complete with subtle snips at co-passengers. Thankfully, no cobra has been purchased, though we haven't had the oppurtunity.

All my old standards of cleanlinees have changed. Things like wearing the same shirt five times doesn't bother me as long as it has had a day of rest, or a few hours in the sun. I still brush my teeth every morning. I wash my hands before meals, actually with more attention to detail than before, but that's because I use the left hand and a mug of water to finish off the less sanitary of human duties. The towel I brought from home, once somewhat white is now a faint orange, but the red dirt is impossible to be rid of.

I eat with my hands (just the right one). In fact Indian meals seem to have been designed for the express purpose of not needing utensils. The best way to explain a normal South Indian is that you get rice, something to soggy that rice, and something to scoop that soggy rice with. Normally the rice is spiced with clove and bay leaves, the soggy stuff is dahl and curd, and the scooping item is a few freshly cooked chappathi. The meals we have eaten never stray from this regimen far. At breakfast often you will get dosa--which is much like a very thin crispy pancake--which mostly scoops Sambar—a soupy yellow substance which to me is indistinguishable from dahl. Of course there are many other types of breakfast foods, but they all must scoop Sambar in the end. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day, and on Pulicat Lake almost always included very freshly caught crab, or prawn. Which makes more sense to me than the Big American Dinner because I assume it doesn't take that much food just to sleep until breakfast. Tonight my dinner on the train to Goa was vegetable biryani which, not surprisingly, is mostly just rice, as well as a small package of rice soaked with curd. Both contain “pickle” which is not pickled cucumber. This pickle still contains vinegar but the object of this pickling is usually a piece of lime or mango and a bunch of chili pepper.

Now I didn't think it would bother me, but here I sit a little disgusted and hesitant to swallow. I have found myself chewing mushy rice, in no dire need for any mastication whatsoever, for minutes at a time always hoping that it might turn into something more nutritious through some unseen magic between my molars. Then the substance which you worked so hard to eat until you were satiated, despite all the protest of the smooth muscle in your esophagous, seems to evaporate out of your stomach in a matter of minutes like you had actually just been eating the dreams of a steak dinner. However to complain about rice in Southeast Asia is as futile as counting grains of sand. Most cultures here have a whole deity appointed to rice, and apparently the prayers to them are very fruitful. One particular goddess, whose name and origin escapes me, was said in times of deep famine to squeeze her breast to feed mankind, the white rain filled up rice grains, even showing the passion to squeeze until she bled accounting for red and brown rice. Rice is quite a precious thing over here, and I'm sure has been welcome food for starving poor more times than a corn/wheat eater like myself could understand.

Without the satiation of divine lactate only an hour after eating dinner I am hungry again. But the only food I have is Richard Dawkins most recent book The Greatest Show On Earth. While about as nutritious as the rice-cake I snacked on earlier, it is a bit more expensive and more valuable to me still bound and legible. I find it quite enjoyable. And I read it far too long tonight because I must wake up at 5:15 to get off the train in Goa.