Growth and steps. Tamil Nadu, India..

My exposure to India has been a very important contribution to my outlook on the world, clarifying convictions and acting as a powerful astringent against complacent acceptance of assumptions unquestioned in American culture.  There is a long-standing strain in Hindu thought and philosophy that refuses to separate things into subject and object, human and nature, Creator and creation.  Within this monist view, God cannot be separated from the world itself, which is but a manifestation of that impersonal, underlying order that is merely personified as "God" to facilitate human understanding.  In the ultimate logic of this view, fixation with the separate reality of God is the final obstacle to enlightenment; for only when God himself is understood as metaphor does the underlying, impersonal reality make itself visible.  That which we tend to ascribe to "the divine" comes to lodge in the world itself and in its underlying, ultimately inscrutable structure.