How do we go about approaching what we know and what we believe?

Someone once told me that before you can move forward with what you believe, you have to hold what you believe to be true.  To be honest, I somewhat disagree with this point of view. This goes back to the idea that one religion is “right” while others aren’t.  For example, should faith be guided by historical accuracy? Should we try to prove which religious texts are accurate, and in effect, follow them? Should we try to prove a monotheistic or pantheistic view of the world? Should we question whether the mythology of Krishna and Arjuna and Shiva and Parvati really occurred, and should the answer influence our belief in God?

I think back to the story of Narada, a devotee who asks Vishnu to show him the truth of Vishnu’s maya.  Vishnu instructs Narada to jump into a pond, from which Narada emerges as a princess named Sushila.  Sushila is married and bears children, but when her father and husband break out in a bloody feud, resulting in her son’s death, she throws herself upon the funeral pyre from her grief.  Narada wakes up in his previous form, but when Vishnu asks him what was the name of the child who died, Narada cannot answer.

This story tells us that the world surrounding us is maya, an illusion that we construct to perhaps assign false meaning to our lives.  Hinduism teaches that it is through the goodness of our deeds and actions that we are liberated from our maya, so our current lives are certainly not useless or completely insignificant. However, using the “truths” we extract from the world (maya) around us to guide our beliefs in a higher power can be a faulty method.  For all we know, we could very well be like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in Narnia, or like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot… or like Sushila, currently stuck in a pond of ignorance, with Vishnu, symbolizing the reality of the supreme, divine, and infinite, waiting to pull us out.

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