The Remover of Obstacles

Memory can be whimsical and downright inattentive.  It’s so easy to forget important, even wonderful, things.  It’s easy to be mentally thrown off course by all sorts of distracting trivia. In an age of information overload—and pseudo-information—It’s easy to lose the thread of ourselves.

The above thought was prompted while combing through my book on miracles. I was looking for a reference and I noticed the header for a section, The Remover of Obstacles: A Global Miracle. It came back to me in a second. I looked ahead at a quote from Hinduism Today from 1996: “The milk-miracle may go down in history as the most important event shared by Hindus of this century, if not the last millennium.”

This was a miracle of dematerialization. It began when a man from New Delhi dreamt that the Elephant God Ganesha told him to feed him milk. The man rushed out to the nearest temple with a statue of the popular deity and poured milk into the statue’s cup. As he did so the milk gradually but completely disappeared. This was observed by a group of people who ran off to different temples with milk to perform and witness the same phenomenon.  By the end of the day the story had spread all over India and all over the world wherever Ganesha was worshipped.  I had at the time two Indian students who reported to me in detail their encounter with the phenomenon. Both students were flabbergasted and went twice to replicate their experience they were so astonished.  The phenomenon persisted for one day, leaving India virtually bereft of milk.

I myself witnessed the dematerialization of milk on CNN! A British reporter performed the experiment for all to see. The camera is on the Ganesha figurine and empty container.  The reporter then pours some milk into the container, filling it at least halfway. Immediately, the milk slowly disappears.  No more than ten seconds pass as I watch the milk completely disappear, dematerialize. And so it was happening all over India and elsewhere. It was amusing to read the remarks and comments of people who cried fraud or came up with clumsy efforts to explain away the one-day orgy of milk drank out of existence by a thirsty Ganesha, a Hindu God known as the Remover of Obstacles.

I am tempted to ask, what obstacles were removed by this miraculous display of supernormal power?   My view is simple. The obstacle I would think is removed is a closed mind, a mind contracted by assumptions that stymie the creative imagination and courageous spirit. The spectacle prompted both awe and skepticism, some dismissing it as fraud or trying to explain it away as some trivial event.

My concern here is with the ease in which stories and facts of enormous significance are rapidly swallowed up in the constant stream of so-called news, the endless announcements and ads attempting to grab our consciousness.  Ours is a culture that systematically strives to possess our consciousness, typically for commercial or political purposes.  

 I believe we need to resist that self-incarcerating process. It’s a self-defeating tendency. We need to be shouting. “Leave our minds alone!”  We must guard and pay attention to what we feel is meaningful and to what we need to cultivate and nurture.  Our consumerist ethos couldn’t care less about the world of our intimate values and meanings.  It wants to possess us with its agendas and its ‘miracles.’ It wants to convert us to the religion of consumerism and to its ideologies.

Coming back to the story of Ganesha and the one-day miracle, we need to remember the extraordinary stories that touch and nourish our better angels.  And in fact, stories of miraculous breakthrough, stories that speak to our higher powers, exist in abundance. Materialist science ignores them. My aim and project is to gather and research this mind-blowing data and lay it before anyone with an open mind. We can and must charge our minds with information that can work toward our creative advance.  For more fascinating details about Ganesha and a host of other mind-bending miraculous phenomena, see my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief . (Anomalist Books or Amazon to obtain)