Finding an answer to whether Hindu gods exist

“Do they exist?” That’s the first thing people usually ask Manoj Chalam about Hinduism’s gods.

There was a time Chalam was an agnostic but now when someone asks him that question, he says, yes, yes, the gods exist. They have power; they have power he has witnessed.

He tells a story of being drawn to a nameless village in India seeking a scroll bearing his name. Along with his name, he’d come to believe, it would contain a record of his life.

The scroll was written by one for whom there is no illusion of time. It was written by one for whom all is of the present, nothing of the future or the past.

Such scrolls, says Chalam, don’t exist for every person on this earth. They exist only for those like him who are destined to go in search of one.

In the unnamed village, a keeper of the scrolls asked, “Is your name ? ?” No, wrong name, Chalam told him. Wrong name.

The man read from one scroll, then another and another. Each time he read, the name was wrong.

Yet finally he looked up from one scroll and asked, “Is your name Manoj Chalam?” And Manoj Chalam could at last tell him, yes, yes, that is my name.

Still, the man confirmed the day and the date and the time Chalam was born. He confirmed the name of his father, too. He confirmed all manner of dates and names and events, every one of them transcribed on Chalam’s scroll.

The scroll disclosed things Chalam did not know. It even revealed the day and the date and the time he would die: the day his soul would leave the body in which it now resides.

“Do the Hindu gods exist?” Since encountering the scroll that bore his name and a full account of his present incarnation, Chalam tells those who ask, yes, yes, they do.

As he spoke at the Tree of Life in Huntington Beach, images of many gods sat on tables alongside him. These gods, though, are not the One God, sometimes called the Supreme Being or the Absolute Reality, in which Hindus say they ultimately believe.

Chalam says they are as manifestations of Prana, of consciousness, in a form we can see. Nothing, he says, truly exists but consciousness.

All of the figures ? some are gods, others goddesses ? are laden with symbolism. For their devotees, they become archetypes. Chalam, who looks to Lord Ganesh, son of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati, as his archetype, says the symbolism helps devotees who the deities are.

One journeys from “the form to formless,” from the apparent to the real. Each deity’s symbols convey something about the nature of Absolute Reality. “Evoking the archetype allows the ordinary to become extraordinary,” Chalam says.

Ganesh is known foremost as the destroyer of obstacles and the lord of success. He is also worshiped as the god of education, knowledge, wisdom and wealth.

His image reminds me why people might ask a question like, “Does he exist?” or “What does he mean?”

He has the head of an elephant and a big-bellied body of a man with four arms and four hands. Ganesh is often portrayed riding a mouse. He’s not everyone’s everyday notion of a god.

As Chalam tells it, this is the story of how a god got an elephant’s head: Goddess Parvati, fed up with her husband disturbing her privacy while she bathed, created a son from the dirt and asked him to guard the door.

As he stood sentry, Lord Shiva came home and demanded to see his wife. Ganesh, still a stranger to his father, turned him away, inciting Lord Shiva to chop off his head.

At this, Goddess Parvati became quite upset. So, Lord Shiva sent some men to procure a new head for his son, whose original head, it seems, had disappeared.

The men returned with the head of an elephant, which Lord Shiva attached to the body of his son. His wife, though, worried about just how much of a shine people might take to worshipping a god with an elephant’s head.

Lord Shiva took care of that, too. He blessed his son, proclaiming that everyone would first worship Ganesh before beginning any endeavor.

Chalam’s wife, Jyothi, offered a sloka, an innovation and hymn, to Ganesh. It sounded surprising familiar to my ear, first honed on Delta folk and Baptist gospel tunes, almost like a tune I know sung in a language I don’t.

While Jyothi sang, the twangs and drones of her accompaniment weren’t rendered on a fiddle or a dulcimer, though. They came from a Radel electronic tambura, whose elaborate housing emulated the body of the actual sitar-like, Indian instrument.

Manoj Chalam talked about a few of Ganesh’s many symbols. The goad he holds in one hand prods worshippers along their path to enlightenment and knocks aside obstacles.

Another hand offers a blessing that says, “Don’t be afraid.”

The mouse represents the human mind, given to falling for illusions. “Obstacles are not really there,” Manoj said. “They are projections of the mind.”

He spoke of three states of being. In the waking state, we perceive with the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. In the dream state, we are unconstrained by the limits we experience while awake. In the deep sleep, even the mind sleeps.

Like the sound of Aum, Ganesh’s trunk represents all of these. Turn the calligraphic symbol for Aum upside down and what you see is the profile of an elephant.

“Who is the real you?” Manoj asked of the three states. There is something constant, he says, in them all.

He calls it the “witnessing consciousness,” the blissful awareness of the Self. “How can you go after this,” he asked, “when you are already this?”

In my college days when transcendental meditation was newly all the rage, we might have responded, “Heavy.” Or maybe, “That’s deep.”

But Manoj Chalam, like the Hindu gods, is playful. He ended his talk with a joke that went something like this:

Lord Shiva, while on a journey sent Goddess Parvati, many e-mails. Yet his wife never answered one. So when Lord Shiva returned home, he asked her why. “Because,” she told him, “our son took the mouse.”