New Delhi, India: April 8, 2008 – IR Summary -Posted by Federation of God Believers. 3rd  Portion from auto-biography of Vishnu Bhakt Swamy (Dr.) Raj Baldev.What’s God and where is He? Why do we pray to Him? Basically, I have been suffering from a great weakness of forgetfulness right from my childhood; don’t know what disease I could name? Was it a lack of memory or poor memory? Can’t say. It was probably a common type of generalized cerebral atrophy which caused slowing progressive dementia in most parts of my brain, or you can call it a sort of Alzheimer. No, probably I can’t justify it to be Alzheimer.

However, bad memory,  gave me a tough time during my studies and even in normal life, any time I could forget anything, particularly names. Even when I moved from one place to another even in the same room or premises, I would forget what for I had come over there, what to pick…..?

I have never been able to remember even one sentence of prose or poetry during my studies as a normal student and that worried my reverend father, who did his best to get me tuitions and extra coaching but nothing happened to his satisfaction.
I couldn’t remember or learn the names of any person or item or  retain any information in my memory even for a while, I would straightway forget the information, my mind would be just blank. You can say I was orient to time, name, region, place and any conversation or text.

I could not remember school lessons in spite of my best efforts and repetitions, and my teachers used to beat me, which was a common phenomenon of punishing students those days. The unfortunate part was, neither could I explain what that happened, nor anyone nearby made any effort to know what exactly the fault of my brain with my memory was?

I used to forget school lessons, couldn’t remember a sentence or a song or any couplet of any poem, it was my basic and inborn fault or developed in my early childhood. If my mother sent me to bazaar to bring something, I would forget at times, some times I could recall after a pause of pressing my brain hard.

But one thing was peculiar in me; I felt that the disease of forgetfulness was not affecting all areas of my brain, only the remembrance part of it. I had some original grasp of mind, I won’t forget some part of the central idea of the lesson or the subject taught to me or the theme of the picture that I saw. First picture I saw in 1936.

I had a researcher’s mind; I never believed a theory, religious, spiritual or epic,spirit or black magic, unless I was myself convinced by strong reasons and logic based on the scientific line, I had my own reasons, wrong or right, I could not believe anything blindly. But the poor memory could hardly allow me to secure any level of good marks, rather I used to get poor marks, however I managed some schooling with some unusual formula but it was very complex to overcome with short memory like mine.

I used to take part in Ramayana on the stage, a short role and when that subject was staged, I used to have many queries, like how could Hanuman Ji fly with such a heavy mass?  He would have fallen down on the Earth in a normal course of study of gravity taught to me and at the same I thought how could be climb in the air by him? What lifted him?

Similarly, I used to ask myself several questions on stories of Gods, Demi Gods, Magicians, Witchcraft, Ghosts, fairies and breaking stars, being narrated by my respected mother. The most annoying question was “What makes us to live and why are we here ? What’s the purpose? This question used to goad me for an answer? Whenever I learnt some body dead, many questions took birth in my mind and I became unrest.

I used to be lost and spent more time on this puzzle rather than school lessons, where the teachers would punish me for not having done home work and for other negligence. What’s God and where is He?  Why people pray to Him? What would I do after study? I would become a clerk, then thereafter what -  marriage, children, their responsibilities, old age and then death? Similarly, what’s the purpose of animals, reptiles, birds and microbes and small insects?

Why are the trees all around? Why colorful flowers in a garden and why colorful rainbow?  Why do big animal eat small animals, why does a big fish eat small fish? Why a man kills animal, cooks his flesh or so-called meat and eat?

Another question that haunted me why so many stars, they are very far, what for they studded, what’s their real purpose?  Isn’t their existence a waste? Are they only to shine and twinkle at night?  Why clouds, why rain, why birth, why death?
I remember, while my science teacher was teaching me Issac Newton, a great physicist and Mathematician, how he discovered law of gravitation, he asked me a question on gravity and Newton’s discovery.

I stood up and humbly stated that Newton was fifty percent correct. I explained that two objects cannot stay in space unless those objects are connected to anti-gravity or repulsive force or unless some other binding force keeps it in tact. My teacher beat me severely alleging me to ask silly questions, I was discouraged, I decided either to change or leave the school if such a chance permitted, but where was the chance?
Cont’d….