Ideas

Ideas only exist inside the brain. The only time these ideas exist outside it is when they reside in someone else's brain. The reason most people don't realise that ideas are just mental constructs, is because they live among a group of people with similar ideas. It is quite obvious that if an idea exists in everyone's mind then it must be real. I remember when on our honeymoon we made a stopover at Chamba, a small town in Himachal Pradesh. It is located in a valley and if you ignore the crowd and the chaos, the surrounds and specially the Shiva temple are quite beautiful. While walking back from the temple we stopped over at a shop to buy some shawls for our mothers, and a conversation started with the shop owner who was a lady. She started telling us about how lord Shiva came and resided on the peak near the town once a year and how there was a big fair conducted during this period. Her excitement was quite infectious. Now, no one has ever actually seen lord Shiva sit on that peak and it is just an idea. Even if we consider that lord Shiva represents the cosmic entity not the personified form, then it can be argued that He exists everywhere and not just on that peak. But this idea or folklore was so widely accepted in the town that I believe the woman thought it was real. Even if the woman thought that it was just a myth, the fact that the whole town celebrated the myth shouldn't seem surprising to an outsider.
I once had a discussion with my colleague, who was once a Hindu and has recently adopted Christianity, and as is with any new convert, his beliefs are very strong. Now it is widely accepted that the Bible was written by different people at different times. I just asked him whether it ever occurred to him that the Bible might not actually be God’s own words and be just written by well-intentioned human beings. And he said he believed the Bible is entirely passed on to humans (he uses the word ‘man’) by God himself. Faith and logic are so completely contradictory. Similarly, no one can ever know whether the Koran is Allah's will. And hence the fact that you never see anyone actually sit on the peak, is something no one in the town notices, should not sound out of place even to westerners. After all many of their kin believe that God created light and then He created the sun. The sequence might seem wrong to most people but the belief in a God that takes care of them is so comforting that they choose to ignore these small aberrations.

Pirsig in his book Lila wrote that if we don’t see something it does not just imply that it does not exist, but also that maybe we have never been looking for it. Most people have ideas of how the world is and will only see things that confirm to that idea while totally ignoring things that don't. I have made a journey from being an idealist atheist to a skeptic agnostic who wants to be a believer. Ten years ago I would have dismissed that shop lady as being stupid and superstitious. Today I see her as an equal, just distinct from me. Because I understand that I think in a certain way because I have experienced life in a certain way. Had I been living in that town and selling shawls, maybe I would have thought exactly like that lady. I now understand that what genes we inherit is not in our hands and what experiences we will have is to a large extent beyond our control. In claiming credit for a success or blame for a failure this thought should always be at the back of our mind. And also remember that any idea in our brain is just an idea, how much ever passionate we are about it.