When the Gods of Heaven Burned to Ashes-I

"This essay is not an attack on faith, but an exploration of its evolution. It moves from moral protest to metaphysical dissolution. Read slowly"

If evil exists, and the devil too, and if God exists, then evil cannot stand outside His will, because nothing can.

If that is so, then on the grounds of intent and rationality, and without any trace of hypocrisy, I find myself placing human beings far superior to God in moral courage. For a human being, though flawed and fragile, still wrestles with the devil within and resists the darkness in the outer world.

This is not rebellion. It is moral inquiry, the refusal to silence a question merely because tradition has grown comfortable with its absence, and a rejection of the blind conditioning that turns learners into schooled parrots.

At the level of lived experience, this idea is relatable. Yet it is difficult to accept, for centuries of societal institutionalisation, almost perennially chronic, have conditioned us to treat certain questions as irreverent when they are, in truth, anything but insincere.

But pause.

If this line of reasoning produces discomfort, perhaps the invitation is not to defend inherited belief, but to rise slightly above the level of consciousness from which the question is being asked.

The moment one examines the very structure of the idea of God as a separate, external entity standing apart from one’s own awareness, whether imagined in distant heavens or projected into metaphysical authority, that idea begins to collapse. What remains is not an abandoned heaven, but consciousness itself, not a distant ruler permitting evil, but the field in which both ignorance and awakening unfold.

When it is recognised that what we call Brahman, or God, is not other than a higher expression of consciousness itself, the earlier moral comparison collapses. The debate about whether humans are morally superior to God loses its ground, because comparison presupposes duality, and duality no longer stands.

At that point, the language of superiority and inferiority appears misplaced. Different beings, different species, different forms of life operate at different depths of self-awareness. They do not occupy moral ranks in an absolute hierarchy; they function according to the level of consciousness available to them.

What first appeared as an accusation against God transforms into a shift in perception. The God who burned to ashes was the externalised, anthropomorphic construct. What survives the fire is awareness itself.

This is the quiet culmination of Vedanta, particularly Advaita, where the seeker and the sought are not two, where the battlefield of moral comparison gives way to the stillness of recognition. In that recognition, the framework of accusation, defence, superiority, and inferiority dissolves.

The gods burned.

Consciousness remained.

Now let us see what survives when even consciousness turns to ashes.....