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A search for answers results in more questions

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Manoj Chalam wore a black T-shirt that announced in white print, “I am a spiritual being having a human experience.” That is, in this life anyway. Chalam, a Hindu, believes in reincarnation.

On this weekend afternoon, he and a handful of other humans had been drawn together at the Tree of Life Center near the southwest corner of the intersection of Adams Avenue and Beach Boulevard. That all of us were humans conveyed to Chalam that each of us had acquired a significant sum of enlightenment in previous lives though, I take it, not always human lives.

As he sat in a folding chair chatting with the men and women scattered around him, he looked tranquil and attentive, though his eyes flashed with energy. He was there to speak to us about his passion.

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A scientist with a doctorate in engineering from Cornell University, Chalam worked in corporate America as a research scientist for years. When it came to God, he says, he was agnostic until Lord Ganesh ? a Hindu deity of strength, knowledge and humility ? whacked him on the head with the mace he’s always seen holding in one of his four hands.

Now Chalam owns a business that manufactures and imports handcrafted spiritual art to the United States from villages in India. Here, he sells the artifacts to retreat centers, museums, art aficionados, interior decorators, gift stores and individual spiritual devotees. To him it’s a blessing, a merger of calling and commerce.

With his wife Jyothi he travels the country to reveal how representations of Hindu deities serve their devotees as gateways, affording them passage to an inner journey. It’s a journey toward self-realization, an awareness of what he calls the “witnessing consciousness” that suffuses everything.

Jyothi, who has sung South Indian classical music since she was a 5-year-old girl, weaves prayer throughout her husband’s lectures. She chants slokas, a mix of mantras or invocations, and Sanskrit hymns to individual deities.

By the time we arrived for Manoj’s afternoon talk, he had arranged a display of dozens of statues of deities. They were rendered from various materials, in different colors and many sizes. Whatever the medium, color or size, each was a tapestry of painstaking detail.

With them, on two long tables covered with orange cloths ? orange being a color closely associated with the Supreme Being and enlightenment ? were numerous amulets depicting Om, or Aum, a calligraphic combination of three Sanskrit letters that correspond to English’s “a,” “u” and “m.” Said to be the sound from which the cosmos was made, Aum is the symbol of consciousness and the unity of all things.

I had come to try to get a better grasp of Hinduism, a faith I often find perplexing. According to a 2004 article in “Hinduism Today,” so do some Hindus.

In the spring of 1990, a group of teens from a Chicago temple wrote to the magazine’s publisher asking for “official answers” to nine questions asked by their peers that stumped them ? and their parents. “Hinduism Today” later published answers, provided by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, in at least two of its issues.

As I read them, I began to grasp if not Hinduism, at least my befuddlement with it. A brief response is given to each question the teens’ peers had posed. Each brief response is expanded upon by a “longer answer.” Each longer answer is chased by an even longer “explanation.”

I started at the beginning, with Question One. Hindus often object to the typical Western view of them as polytheists, so it’s not surprising that the first question on the list of was: “Why does Hinduism have so many Gods?”

In measured words, Subramuniyaswami replies, “While acknowledging many Gods, all Hindus believe in one Supreme God who creates and sustains the universe.” Which just didn’t lead me to “Ah hah! Now I get it.”

His longer answer with its explanation didn’t get me there either: “Hindus were never polytheistic,” the Satguru says, at least not in the sense that they believe there are “many equal gods.”

I didn’t know polytheism called for the gods one believes in to be equals. I can’t find one definition of polytheism that does. Didn’t Greek and Roman gods and goddesses knock themselves out getting one up on each other?

But never mind that. Subramuniyaswami says Hinduism is “both monotheistic and henotheistic,” with henotheism better defining its view of a single Supreme God with many other divinities.”

Max Müller, who is often credited with creating the study we call comparative religion, coined the term “henotheistic” in the late 1800s. He defined it as “monotheism in principle and polytheism in fact.” I wonder if anyone’s told the satguru that.

Subramuniyaswami compared Hinduism’s many Gods to “executives in a large corporation” performing various functions “These,” he said, “should not be confused with God. There is one Supreme God only.”

At that point, I had a brain cramp. It was as if I’d arrived back on the doorstep of Question One.

Most of what I’ve read about Hinduism written by practicing Hindus stresses the idea, as does literature from the Hindu American Foundation, that “to be enlightened, one must have personal experience of the Truths set out in the Vedas and other revealed scriptures.”

Personal experience is where Manoj Chalam starts when talking about Hinduism.

Former scientist, former agnostic turned blissed-out believer and Hindu evangelist, he makes it sound, if not easy, well then, blissful. He seems downright tickled to be alive.

What he’s divined since the day elephant-headed, pot-bellied Lord Ganesh thumped him on the noggin he’s ardently sharing ? as much as is possible.

Next week: More on Manoj Chalam’s great adventure with Lord Ganesh and the other Gods.

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