The Hindoo Skeptic

THE HINDOO SKEPTIC

I think till I'm weary of thinking,

   Said the sad-eyed Hindoo king,

And I see but shadows around me,

   Illusion in everything.

How knowest thou aught of God,

   Of His favor, or His wrath?

Can the little fish tell what the lion thinks,

   Or map out the eagle's path?

Can the finite the infinite search?

   Did the blind discover the stars?

Is the thought that I think a thought,

   Or the throb of the brain in its bars?

For aught that my eye can discern,

   Your God is what you think good,

Yourself flashed back from the glass

   When the light pours on it in flood.

You preach to me to be just,

   And this is His realm, you say;

Yet the good are dying of hunger,

   And the bad gorge everyday.

You say that He loveth mercy,

   And the famine is not yet gone;

That He hateth the shedder of blood,

   Yet He slayeth us, every one.

You say that my soul shall live,

   That the spirit can never die --

If he were content when I was not,

   Why not when I have passed by?

You say I must have a meaning,

   So must dung, and its meaning is flowers;

What if our lives are but nurture

   For lives that are greater than ours?

When the fish swims out of the water,

   When the birds soar out of the blue,

Man's thoughts may transcend man's knowledge,

   And your God be no reflex of you.

This poem, which I discovered in my teens, was revolutionary for me and remains so.  It was decisive in my rejection of organized religion.  I recall that once Nat, when he was about nine, said that he thought "God" (we didn't promulgate any particular conceptions) was a figure with so many sides that no one could fully see the figure.  Out of the mouths of babes.


The above photograph, by the way, is an authentic  NASA photo depicting the Helix Nebula, described by astronomers as "a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases," at the center of which is a dying star.  The caption noted, "Our own sun may look like this in several billion years."  Practice dying (one of my favorite injunctions) on the cosmic scale.  I suspect death is every bit as beautiful.