Bhaya or Bhakti?

By Shashi Narasimhiah

Once I had the privilege of watching an hour long interactive program on SBS TV Channel with an invited audience. The topic was fear or Bhaya. What is Bhaya and why do we experience it?

Let us take a sneak peek at what Bhaya is. The famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has tried to explain it in his book My Gita:

“Bhaya is a neurological and the first emotion that manifests with the arrival of life. It is essential in the struggle for life. The Bhaya of death evokes hunger and makes organisms seek food. The same Bhaya makes animals collaborate with each other to increase chances of survival and to find food. Bhaya of dying makes us find a mate, reproduce so that at least a part of the creature can outlive death.”

In us humans bhaya is amplified by imagination. We can imagine hunger, predators, death etc. and feel insecure all the time. We can also imagine the Unknown. This amplified Bhaya leads us to invent various physical and social instruments to create excess food, secure it and secure ourselves. However, one of the greatest Bhayas of humans is Validation. We seek meaning – who are we? and what is our role? Out of Bhaya we do not share, we conserve, out of this very Bhaya we pray, we fight with each other. Bhaya is the cause of and at the centre of all of our insecurity.

What does Bhaya do to us? When things haven’t quite worked out the way expected/desired we feel insecure and we often turn deeply religious to overcome this insecurity and indulge in thoughts and actions which are difficult to justify by way of reason (I will not go so far as to say it is all superstition) and I have observed people including some of the nearest and dearest at close quarters doing similar things. Even celebrities – daring and high achieving personalities around the world are no exception.

Let us consider a real-life example – one of my friends (more a soulmate, who I have known for many decades) used to be an atheist and we used to discuss among other things, matters of religion, devotion and belief over our long evening walks – with him arguing against accepting or believing anything which cannot be felt by our senses or reasoned by science. He called it a common sense approach. Unfortunately, he encountered a near-death experience of skull fracture due to a scooter accident (the doctors had given up hope). But, to his and my luck, he recovered fully and over the decades, went on to be a brilliant super-successful IT professional and manager and has lived to fulfil his every aspiration and dream. But that accident changed something in him. Post-accident, his atheism magically disappeared and I was completely taken by surprise by the way he began to fold his hands and bend his head down in front of every temple we went past during our evening walks. I remember him going up to a temple building on the roadside and touching the temple building stone and rising that hand to his eyes in all devotion.

What on earth changed? What happened to his strong atheism? Did my friend develop Bhakti all of a sudden for no apparent reason or did his unfortunate experience resulted in a deep seated Bhaya which he was expressing in the form of Bhakti? Or it is a combination of both? All these years, I have struggled for a conclusive answer to this question.

As I understand, religion is known to be based on the principles of strength. When we stray from our righteous path, it is that Bhaya in us that endeavours to bring us back to the path of righteousness – a deterrent from causing Adharma. Swamy Vivekananda has written in one of his books – “We should love God”. When I mentioned this to my above friend – pre-accident, he had asked me how can we love something as “abstract” as God?” But all that changed….

Here is another angle: In Today’s modern affluent age, the more we have the more we seem to develop Bhaya because we have more to lose. An analogy could be – a person walking on the street doesn’t even realise he/she is moving. When on first floor, still not scared, but still looks down, but when at an open 10^th floor (from where we can see the earth all the way down under our feet and no walls) the Bhaya of height creeps in and we grip the handrails. I have been on a construction site where I had to go on top of a structure (under construction) 53m in height and walked on grating (meaning I can see all the way down) and it is open on the sides (no walls). My heart rate increased and I never loosened my grip on the steel handrail while walking and I started silently praying!! So Bhaya of height? Why did I narrate this story – just to make a point that the higher we climb the socio-economic ladder in life, the more we have to lose and so, the more we experience Bhaya that our respective apple carts may be upset!! And so, more we pray!! The so called religious devotion here – is it pure Bhakti or is it mixed with a large ratio of Bhaya? I have never come across a person who does not have some form of superstitious belief (small or big) and who does not have some form of Bhaya.

During the years gone by, I have been a part of many religious events. It is entirely possible (in fact certain) that Bhaya might have played a role in shaping my own ideology too. I have known people around me who hardly ever took notice of any festivals during their younger years but as they have progressed in life, family and age, majority have turned religious – taking part in Bhajan sessions, Vishnu-Sahasranama, Lalitha-Sahasranama etc. They (we) all devoutly conduct various poojas and havans such as Gowri, Ganesha, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Navaratri, Deepavali, Ugadi, Sankranti etc. etc. in apparent devotion. Why do we do all of this? Do we really do all this for the love of God? Or do we see God as “Unknown” and fearsome in which case are we trying to appease God out of Bhaya? If our conscience is clear and we are not lacking in our mortal duties and responsibilities then why are we experiencing Bhaya of anything?

This is a thought provoking subject and I suspect there is no clear answer. Is it the “The Bhaya of the Unknown”, “The Bhaya of the Future”, “The Bhaya of Survival” or “The Bhaya of hunger” “The Bhaya of Death”, “The Bhaya of Validation”? What drives our Bhaya and how is it connected to Bhakti? Is life like a bird with two wings – one Bhakti and another Bhaya without both of which the bird called life can’t fly? Or is Bhaya like an elephant whose shape the blind are trying to determine? Some food for thought, don’t you think?

BTW, just as a trivia, the third largest religious group after Christianity (33%) and Islam (21%) are – hold your breath – non-believers (16%). Hinduism comes fourth (14%)!! Do the non-believers have some form of Bhaya? I bet they all do.