Ever since I returned from India, I have been wrestling with the meaning of going in the first place.
Did I, as Sophie asked, "go to find a religion?", which, I suppose, motivated many of the other single travelers that I encountered. But I don't think that that's the reason I went to India, nor to Israel last year.
Religion, simply put, is complicated.
How far back does the religious impulse go?
Is it possible that the emergence of god-thinking coincides with the emergence of man's humanity?
It's almost as if the Hindus believe that, i.e., that Hinduism had no beginning apart from the beginning of Time.
Even Judaism admits that Jews started with Abraham, a mere 50 centuries ago.
Hindus speak in terms of thousands of centuries, definitely winning the numbers battle.
What with the Universe being considered to be 14 billion years old, and the U.S. debt being considered to be 14 trillion dollars, we are feeling more and more comfortable with very large numbers. In fact, the bigger, the more impressive.
Christianity, at 2000 years, or Islam, at 1300 years, seem puerile.
In India, walking by old men and old women sitting and staring nowhere in particular, nothing might have changed from an age and a half ago.
That "time can heal all wounds" reverberates throughout the Hindu universe, offering hope that even our greatest hurt, the severing of ourselves from our creator, might heal.
How long ago did that happen?
A thousand centuries?
Ten thousand?
When Prometheus stole the Fire?
When we, as apes, entered the ocean and emerged as humans?
Language. It all seems to come back to language.


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