A certain amount of confusion and incomprehension is to be expected. If you inhabit a monotheistic worldview then mythological perspectives are almost certainly bound to strike one as odd, mystifying. Over the weekend you heard a number of people saying, "Hinduism..is that really a religion..does come across as wildly at odds with any sensible approach to divine matters". I didn't want to argue with that. What would be the point. We have no entry point into another's faith (this is not simply a question of scriptures and languages but of a mentality (or, more accurately, mentalities) that is shaped by a monotheistic outlook.

Of course, that is a gross exaggeration for in reality it seems to me that monotheism is never anything but a rare phenomenon. It is either distorted beyond recognition by the zealots (think: Taleban and ISIS and how infinitely distant they are from a genuine religious sensibility); or it is mixed up with ideas, attachments, and styles of thinking that are more to do with the local culture (land and language, one might say). 

So, we often look to the religions of the east and their "strangeness" as a way of reaffirming our own "pure" approach to religion. So, our lack of understanding is not simply the result of a natural (providential?) barrier, as if to say: after all, no human being can inhabit every possible perspective; it is, rather, that in addition the barrier is a psychological and political limit we construct. 

But if language and thought do not get us across the barrier then what does? To get across does not necessarily mean inhabiting the other 'realm' but it can, at the very least, be a recognition that there is some kind of inexplicable mystery across the border and that one's own position or understanding is not a sealed-off space, as it were. A certain amount of undermining, confusion and incomprehension is to be expected. Don't take one's unbelief too seriously; but do not ignore it either.

Bob would be able to say something about this image. My vague intuition is this: compassion, at the highest state of being, is universal. Nothing goes unnoticed. There is a looking back, not a looking after the self (in the final analysis is the latter only a delusion anyway?). The self is a barrier. Look and look out. The gestures of the hands. What do they mean?  

"Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously."
--K. Barth.

~~

Haven't read Achebe but did come across this:

“Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.” Achebe often used this proverb in discussing his work, and he explained its significance once in an interview: “It means there is no one way to anything….If there is one God, fine, there will be others as well…. If there is one point of view, fine. There will be a second point of view.”