The Life of Pi

The book "The Life of Pi," was an interesting work written by Yann Martel... Amongst the things I found most interesting lay in the way it was marketed as a book that will "make you believe in God."

Intriguing! It will convince one of the certainty of God? That's a book that I need to read... so I did (don't worry if you haven't read the book or watched the movie, there won't be too many spoilers here).

The book is actually a lovely piece of prose filled with metaphors... and those metaphors deal with belief.

In the novel, fantastic events happen to the protagonist and at the end they are explained in 2 ways, a "realistic way" and the way of "mythos." After reading this novel, most would agree that not knowing the truth of events, we would all wish for mythos over "reality"... and that is the genius within this book.

The metaphors within it act to point out to us that there are multiple ways of interpreting and explaining phenomena we perceive... Our many holy books and scriptures often sound fantastical and "unrealistic" to some, however that does not mean that they are false accounts. Oftentimes, metaphors are needed to explain reality. Sometimes reality is too harsh for the human mind to accept or want to accept, sometimes reality makes less sense than fantastical metaphors, and sometimes we just want to believe in a perspective which allows us to live in our world happily.

If given a choice between believing that we are always loved by a supreme being who has created everything, and believing that the world is an empty place created by random chance, where thoughts, feelings, emotions have no life beyond our own, where there is no true purpose, no true meaning... many would choose to believe in the plan... we are wired to want to do so.

But this wiring points us towards something... Why are we "wired" to want to believe? Is it some psychological flaw in the general human psyche, or is there truly something inside of us that wishes to tell us something deeper exists? What about the spiritual experiences of thousands of years of collective memory where we have had individuals who have "experienced" God?

We can never know the truth with our limited minds, however we can choose to believe in whatever we want to. As in "The Life of Pi," in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I choose to follow what the metaphor of my very existence shouts out to me. I believe!