Why does God incarnate?

We love the avatars of God, but, really, how much do we understand why they happen?

An avatar is a particular coalescing of the all pervasive spirit/soul called Brahman (for the non-dualist), or Vishnu or Shiva or Shakti (Devi) (for the dualist as per whether they believe whether Vishnu or Shiva or Devi to be the supreme expression of a personal godhead)

An avatar is said to be called into Being by the heartfelt cries of agony of the sadhus, the pious among us. The sadhus plead for an incarnation or manifestation to take place because of the grave danger mankind has placed itself into.

And then the avatar happens: a set of parents are selected, the form of the avatar enters the womb of the mother, the birthing of the avatar happens. The rest is what we read about in the scriptures – about Rama, Krishna and other major avatars, as well as the minor avatars. (Please note: an avatar is the descent of spirit into matter, while an enlightened godman is the raising of a human into the realm of the spirit.)

For the avatar, this descent into matter cannot be a good thing. Pure spirit confines itself into flesh, becoming subject to its limitations and its inherent problems. Granted, the avatar comes with a particularly divine set of his tools of trade – omniscience, great doses of power and prowess and an understanding of things beyond the ken of man. But, he is ‘born’, and he ‘dies’ and is assailed by all those things we mere humans are assailed by, except he appears to handle them with aplomb and dignity, while we weep and wail our fate.

We who benefit from the avatar’s descent cannot imagine the pain of this descent, although some of more enlightened among us have tried to put them in words for our benefit.

These beautiful lines from Sri Aurobindo’s poem A God’s Labour gives a hint to the predicament of an avatar:

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

We generally give praise for an avatar taking ‘birth’ among us and feel ever so grateful that we have breathed the same air as Him. But we give little, if any, thought to what the avatar would be going through – and we are not talking about any apparent distress caused by physical ailment.

Day in, day out the Avatar has to endure a body of flesh, fluid and frailties – eating, excreting, keeping it clean, stop it from dropping dead. He, the pure spirit, has to encompass that spirit in a limited form called as body and suffer the indignities of that same body.

There is another beautiful telling of a devotee of Krishna who wanted to kill Draupadi, Arjun and several others who were close to Krishna. After reading the Mahabharata, he sat sharpening a wicked looking knife and when asked why he was doing it so intently, he answered he wanted to seek out Arjuna, Draupadi and others and kill them.

He said he wanted to kill them because they had caused so much pain to his Lord: Arjuna for making a charioteer out of Krishna and forcing him into the battlefield in that lowly role and Draupadi for calling on Krishna and forcing him to provide great lengths of cloth to cover her when she was being stripped naked in the court.

He goes on to tell of the other ‘indignities’ other people had heaped on Krishna and how he would hunt them down and kill them.

At first reading this appears to be the ravings of sentimental fool, especially since he was from an era in which Krishna, Arjuna and others were long-gone. But the sentiments behind the raving is something to think about. Here was a man who felt deeply for the Avatar, who felt that we should have treated Him as something very precious, to be treasured and loved, and not taken advantage of, which is what he believed Arjuna and Draupadi had done. And he felt these sentiments as if Krishna, Arjuna and Draupadi existed for him at that time – not as if they were just tales in a book.

We take it for granted that the avatar is happy to be with us and we take for granted that He will ‘be there for us’. We hardly think of the great sacrifice undertaken in the ‘birthing’ of an avatar – the taking of a form on Mrityu Loka – the world of death; the limiting of the spirit into a vessel of matter and the bombardment of negativity that he has to suffer during his sojourn on Earth.

Yes, the avatar’s physical form is put together to take on this negativity. Ramakrishna Paramhansa is said to have taken on the negative forces (illness, mental and physical) of those who came to him, so much so that he was a physical wreck by the time he passed away. Shirdi Sai Baba was took on boils, burns, wounds and sickness from those he chose to save, as did Satya Sai Baba.

Again these lines from A God’s Labour (the full poem can be found here http://intyoga.online.fr/labour.htm):

Coercing my godhead I have come down

Here on the sordid earth,

Ignorant, labouring, human grown

Twixt the gates of death and birth.

I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river’s song,

A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night

To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my meed since the world began.

Given that we have the law of karma governing the universe, is there a need for God to incarnate on Earth? The above gives us a hint of why an incarnation takes place.

An avatar is a catalyst of change – each time one comes, the world changes significantly. We, who only read about their exploits, take in only a fraction of the full scope of their doings. We are privy only to their recorded exploits.

• Rama took up a war of attrition that devastated a whole civilisation. And Ravan is now a household name equated with wickedness, pride and arrogance, and the futility of great learning without understanding and compassion.
• Krishna brought about a fratricidal war that decimated entire clans, including his own. His exploits range from killing his own uncle to turning his cousins against each other that sees the end of the Dwapar Yuga, and the beginning of the least benevolent of all yugas for mankind (yet, a yuga which is said to be the best placed for as higher understanding of godhead).
• Parashurama cut down the ranks of the kshatriyas 21 times to cool his vengeance. Sometimes he is seen as an example of the wrath of the Brahmin caste – of what they are capable of if they are not treated with respect and awe. It is a tale of the curbing of unbridled arrogance and malpractices associated with the ruling classes.
• The other avatars undertook epic battles against opponents of great courage and strength, sometimes in battles that ranged over time and space, other times using wit to outwit (to stop Bali’s expansion plans into other realms), others battled for the human soul because of their compassion for humans.

Every one of the exploits of our avatars are told from the point of view of a human being – from the point of view of people who reacted with the avatars. There is no standalone narration by the avatars themselves, including the Gita, which is retelling by a third party of a direct conversation between Krishna and Arjuna.

Simply put, our scriptures, especially the bhagavads, the Puranas, are largely someone’s take on a series of incidents that they saw, heard about or were directly involved in with regards to a particular avatar. It is as Sri Aurobindo says of our understanding: “A fragment of Truth is his widest scope”.

And I pose the question once again: Do we really know why God incarnates among us?

If what Rama, Krishna and Parashurama did was the mission of those avatars – then huge chunks of mankind died as a result. And to what end, just to save (or avenge) a few human beings beloved of the avatar?

Let’s look at the last stanza from set of lines from Sri Aurobindo’s poem listed above:

I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night

To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my meed since the world began.

Let’s replace ‘hell’ with Patala – the underworld of our mythology. While we think of patala as the infernal regions, Narada is said to have said that it rivalled and beat Indralok in beauty, and it abound with every kind of luxury and sensual gratification.

So, Patala, far from being a place of darkness and drear, was a place of light and beauty, a place of sense gratification, love for luxury, hedonism, self-indulgence, intemperance, and decadence.

Since the world began, God has been incarnating because he hates hell – all the things associated with the above-listed negative elements that make our character. And human spite – when we hurt others for the sake of seeing them squirm or suffer – is not something God likes.

So, instead of saying: “Whenever evil rears its head, and wickedness prevails, God incarnates to punish evil doers,” would it be more appropriate to say “Whenever hedonism increases, and decadence prevails, God incarnates to pull the rug from under our feet?”

God incarnating is a saving mission, but executed in a painful way. Its purpose is to

take us back to godhead, to divinity - kicking and scratching, if need be.

For man’s mind is the dupe of his animal self;

Hoping its lusts to win,

He harbours within him a grisly Elf

Enamoured of sorrow and sin.

The grey Elf shudders from heaven’s flame

And from all things glad and pure;

Only by pleasure and passion and pain

His drama can endure.

God incarnates to remind us of our origins, our divinity – ‘To bring the fire to man’. We, in our human folly, believe he incarnates to give us happiness and wealth as we pursue our pleasurable lives on Earth. And we worship avatars to that end – begging and pleading for a long life to enjoy our fruits, families and fumblings. So far from the truth.

The Truth of truths men fear and deny,

The Light of lights they refuse;

To ignorant gods they lift their cry

Or a demon altar choose.

Maybe it is time to put aside our kindergarten approach to our avatars. Let’s not raise a ‘demon altar’ and hope a few minutes of obeisance is enough to sway God into our way of thinking; let’s not ‘lift our cries to ignorant gods” and then complain you

have not been heard; let’s not refuse, and fear and deny, what our scriptures have proclaimed for eons – God is Truth, and in Truth lies the real victory.

Instead, seek the ‘Truth of truths’, the Light of lights. Dive deep into your beliefs, and sometime, challenge them, so as to be privy to the truth they hide among their superfluity. The teachings of our ancients may appear superfluous at first attempt but that is only because they have been dumbed down by those who would use them to their own ends.

Do not let tradition, or traditionalists, hold you from finding the Truth. Do not let culture bind you to the mire. Expand your mind and see the beauty of the philosophy that has endured millennia, that has endured every kind of influx and still remains true to this day.

Notes

Avatars of Shiva

One lists has the following as the 11 avatars of Shiva

1 KAPAALI

2 PINGAL

3 BHEEM

4 VEERUPAAKSH

5 VILOHIT

6 SHAASTA

7 AJPAAD

8 AHIBURDHANYA

9 SHAMBHU

10 CHAND

11 BHAV

Others put 28 avatars for Shiva

Although Puranic scriptures contain occasional references to avatars of Shiva, the idea is not universally accepted in Saivism. As an avatar requires residence in a womb, Shiva as ayonija (not of a womb) cannot manifest himself as an avatar.

The Linga Purana speaks of twenty-eight forms of Shiva which are sometimes seen as avatars. In the Shiva Purana there is a distinctly Saivite version of a traditional avatar myth: Shiva brings forth Virabhadra, one of his terrifying forms, in order to calm Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu. When that fails, Shiva manifests as the human-lion-bird Sharabha. The story concludes with Narasimha becoming a devotee of Shiva after being bound by Sharabha.[47] However, Vaishnava followers including Dvaita scholars, such as Vijayindra Tirtha (1539–95) refute this Shaivite view of Narasimha based on their reading of Sattvika Puranas and Sruti texts.[48] The monkey-god Hanuman who helped Rama – the Vishnu avatar is considered by some to be the eleventh avatar of Rudra (Shiva). Some regional deities like Khandoba are also believed by some to be avatars of Shiva. Other stated avatars of Shiva, according to some sources, are 8th century non-dualist Vedanta philosopher (Advaita Vedanta) Adi Shankara. He was named "Shankara" after Lord Shiva and is considered by some to have

been an incarnation of the god and Virabhadra who was born when Shiva grabbed a lock of his matted hair and dashed it to the ground. Virabhadra then destroyed Daksha's yajna (fire sacrifice) and severed his head as per Shiva's instructions.

In Dasam Granth, Guru Gobind Singh have mentioned two avtars of Rudra: Dattatreya Avtar and Parasnath Avtar.

Avatars of Devi

Avatars are also observed in Shaktism, the sect dedicated to the worship of the Goddess (Devi), but they do not have universal acceptance in the sect. The Devi Bhagavata Purana describes the descent of Devi avatars to punish the wicked and defend the righteous—much as the Bhagavata Purana does with the avatars of Vishnu. Like Vishnu, his consort Lakshmi incarnates as Sita and Radha – the consorts of Rama and Krishna avatars. Nilakantha, an 18th century commentator on the Devi Bhagavata Purana – which includes the Devi Gita – says that various avatars of the Goddess includes Shakambhari and even the masculine Krishna and Rama – generally thought to be Vishnu's avatars. Lakshmi and Saraswati are also goddesses worshipped as Devi avatars.

PATALA. [Source: Dowson's Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology] The infernal regions, inhabited by Nagas (serpents), Daityas, Danavas, Yakshas, and others. They are seven in number, and their names, according to the Vishna Purana, are Atala, Vitala, Nitala, Gabhastimat, Mahatala, Sutala, and Patala, but these name vary in different authorities. The Padma Purana gives the names of the seven regions and their respective rulers as follow: -- (1.) Atala, subject to Mahamaya; (2.) Vitala, ruled by a form of Siva called Hatakeswara; (3.) Sutala, ruled by Bali ; (4.) Talatala, ruled by Maya; (5.) Mahatala, where reside the great serpents; (6.) Rasatala, where the Daityas and Danavas dwell; (7.) Patala, the lowermost, in which Vasuki reigns over the chief Nagas or snake-gods. In the Siva Purana there are eight: Patala, Tala, Atala, Vitala, Tala, Vidhipatala, Sarkarabhumi, and Vijaya. The sage Narada paid a visit to these regions, and on his return to the skies gave a glowing account of them, declaring them to be far more delightful than Indra's heaven, and abounding with every kind of luxury and sensual gratification.

The Das of financial fracas

Published in The IndianWeekender.co.nz - http://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/7/3242/New-Zealand/The-Das-of-financial-fracas
Apologies beforehand to the experts who will probably pick two dollar-sized holes in this article – the finance of commonsense has little research material to back it up. My advice to you would be not to peruse this article with any kind of seriousness.
IT takes a bloody Indian to state the obvious and no-one listens to him, anyway. Satyajit Das (his name could be translated as the servant of victory in truth) has that problem. He has things to say about how we do business, and no one seems to be listening closely.
Now, I have always been leery of the mechanisms that drive the stock market, especially the trading in points of a currency. I mean, the cent is the final basic unit of the dollar but when the stock market start trading in fractions of the cent, there is something wrong.
Most businesses see the benefit – for example, sell fuel at $2.12:97 and the .097 adds up per litre pretty quickly. We humans, on the other hand, can’t even buy anything for the 10 cents we get in change on the $9.90 purchase. Or the one cent or five cent we give away every time we buy something at $9.99 or $9.95. Our loose change, and fractions of loose change, could be making millions of dollars for others. Or maybe
not.
But seriously, it is no longer a case of save a penny towards a pound - for the penny has been sliced into slivers, where these slivers make millions of dollars for any one trading in hundreds of millions of dollars.
And trading on futures and derivatives is a twist on the adage “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush” – where the two birds in the bush are as tangible an asset as the one in your hand, as long as both parties accept it to be so. I mean, WTF: you haven’t planted the crop or mined the gold but you can have the cash up front because someone is willing to take the risk of paying you now in a bid to lock up the commodities market.
And this is not the loan you need to get a venture started, but the actual payment of a crop or mineral that will be produced some time in the future. It is like someone planted a cabbage patch and is paid for the crop in the ground, and the two crops he is still thinking of planting.
Mind you, my understanding of the finance world is limited, and it probably shows here, but commonsense says: plant the crop, mine the gold and then get the cash in hand. “Investing in the future” makes money only for the monied, so they made it legal to do so. And that is why credit is so easily available – your future is locked up just as commodities are.
The finance market thrived on these convoluted mechanism, still does and no one is going to stop them, even after the economic disasters of 2008. But Satyajit Das appears to be to banging his head against this brick and mortared wall hard enough to make a few cracks.
Das’ understanding of derivatives is overwhelmingly high – the likes of me will need to spend a decade trying to fully understand the ins and outs of what he knows.

But man, can he express what he knows effectively. He says things that the economist, the financier and probably the accountant think is blasphemy.
Das was recently in New Zealand to speak to the New Zealand Initiative, an independent public policy think tank supported by chief executives of major New Zealand businesses. He has some things to say:
On growth - that erudite mechanism that pushes us each quarter to do better than before - he says in his latest paper: “Today, growth has come to the end. The global economy has stalled.”
That is the last thing a CEO would want to hear. The whole economy is judged by its growth and any stalling in growth is seen as death looming. No body in their right mind is going to listen to that, not when the very future of your economy is based around having growth.
In a NZ Listener interview, Das pointed out how he is welcomed by many who seldom re-invite him to anything again once he has said his piece. In other word, he is a border-line pariah but there is no going past the fact of the matter that Das speaks on.
He puts the housing market on par with a belief in God: it is a blind faith exercised by people who have put a value to a basic need, dependent on the vagaries of zoning change and interest rates, and the skewered perception of a market artificially bolstered by “experts”. He used the word “rigged” to describe the housing market.
The retirement nest egg is a fallacy – you get to sell your house, live off the benefits in meaner dwellings and wait to die, after having lived so well in your prime.
And he sees no harm in NOT having a growth in the economy. That is pure sacrilege for the economists, who follow whatever school of economics which is presently in favour with them. Das laments the past 30 years, where growth has come from speculation, borrowed money and the unsustainable use of non-renewable resources.
To quote him in the NZ Listener interview: “I went to a place the other day that had five large plasma TVs – one in every room, including the bathroom, which was quite disconcerting.” Three people lived there. New Zealand, Das repeatedly stressed while he was here, was in a better position than many countries because it was a food producer. The problem of feeding the world, along with the problems of clean energy,
water conservation and even logistics – the fact that a lot of stuff is wasted before it can get to market – means there is scope for future growth to come from innovation and productivity gains, rather than being simply debt-fuelled growth. But he worries we have created an artificial demand for growth at any cost, without clear evidence that it makes us happier.”
Not only an artificial demand, but a twisted supply situation too. Big food producers keep demanding higher food production from their vassals but are not beyond destroying excess produce, for example, thousands of litres of milk on a regular basis, just to keep food prices where they want it. It is a skewered sort of free market when you have to destroy produce to curtail supply – not a true supply-demand mechanism at all.
And adding to the financial fiasco is the reliance on debt-driven consumption to generate economic growth. All of the situations above, according to Das, are fallacies of the highest order.
Given the resource constraints, unbridled consumerism and the keening after growth in all sectors, Das sees mayhem in our near future. Mayhem far greater than we have experienced in this generation. Imagine the Great Depression and multiply by a factor of four – four because of the present population is quadruple that of 1923; for resources that will probably last four months if all production were to halt immediately and for four months/defaults until debts are called in, leading to the collapse of the credit sector. And for four years in which the world could revert to post-WWII conditions once economies collapse when/if we have “great” depression.
All of which is on the radar of modern economists but only as worst-case scenarios which can be averted ‘easily’ by any amount of Plan Bs to combat any disparities their calculation can throw up.
In other words, all is good, all is been taken care of and people like Das are “doomsters” which, Das readily admits, is what he is. All is good because there is a calculation out that will befuddle enough people and allow the financiers to carry on what they were doing – robbing Paul to pay Peter who will pay Simon who pays them so they can buy a future which doesn’t exist presently.
So, here is a former banker, who hobnobs in with top-notch financiers and cabinet ministers, who has a message of doom and gloom for world governments, with so much weight behind his message but who is tolerated only because he has an alternative spin: “It is good to hear the other side, only because it shows how we are doing great with what is already in place.”
Even the NZ Listener article - which was well-written - dwelt more on Das the character and what makes him tick, than on his actual message, proving again that even financial articles in magazines need that spin to sell copy. And that spin is easily provided by eccentric characters like Das (and if you play enough on the eccentricities, you can make good copy).
Das is presently somewhat of a lone voice in the wilderness, with messages which makes good copy for financial magazines looking for the alternative angle, who has garnered a small but solid band of adherents (count me in) but has little effect on arrogant financiers and/or the finance industry.
In the NZ Listener interview, Das pulled no punches in describing financiers: “Finance has become more important than it ever has in the last 30 years. I often see finance as a supporting function to the real economy. Unfortunately, that has been flipped.”… “They (financiers) think they are actually better than they are and, more importantly, they think they are outside the rules because they are the only
people who can make the world work; they understand this stuff and nobody else does.”
Then, we must be grateful that there is someone out there willing to swim against the current, who is willing to take up the cudgel against the monetary mammoths, the fiscal fossils and the artful artifices that is the finance industry.
Only thing: he is a bloody Indian and no one’s going to really listen to him, are they?
* Satyajit Das blogs here: http://www.economonitor.com/blog/author/sdas3/

The God Particle: Higgs Boson is God?

The Higgs Boson walks into a bar wearing a t-shirt saying “God Particle”.

“Wass that?” asks the barman.

The Higgs Boson almost blinks off. “Where have you been? I am the God Particle. The world is agog with my discovery.”

“Eh?”

“You moron. I am the basis of the universe. I am the goddam base that gives substance to everything else.”

“Substance to what; base what?” The barman is genuinely puzzled. For all he sees is the t-shirt hanging on a black framework of subdued ethereal glow that threatens to go out and leave the t-shirt hanging in mid air.

The Higgs Boson sputters, pouts a pout that cannot be seen and orders a round of drinks for all the elements of the period table. The poor barmen is bamboozled and threats to resign from life.

The jokes edition of the ‘discovery’ of the Higgs Boson is making its rounds on the internet and the laughs are a plenty. Yet, for all the merriment – starting with the discovery announcement being heralded in Comic Sans font – the seriousness of this discovery cannot be understated. (The Higgs Bososn: Jokes edition can be found here - http://storify.com/notscientific/higgs-boson-the-jokes-edition)

Here is a particle, predicted over 40 years ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, that particle physics says is the basis of the universe. Its entrapment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN gives us a glimpse on how the universe works. It is called the God Particle, although scientists themselves would prefer to call it the ‘goddamned particle’ – for the obvious reason that it is the most elusive of any sub-atomic particle that they have any specific knowledge of.

The elemental Stephen Hawking actually bet $100 that the Higgs Boson would never be trapped, so sure he was of its non-existence. This month he conceded defeat and paid up to Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan.

All and good in the rarefied fields of science but what does it mean for the man on the street? Zilch.

The world, or in this case, the universe goes on as before. What scientists have done is tap in another set of information about the way things work – putting firmly in place a structure of better understanding the processes of the universe. They have come just a little bit closer to understanding why almost all of the universe is beyond the observations of the likes of you and me.

What this means is:
1. The Universe is a gridwork of mass – 90 percent of which we cannot observe. The little we observe actually forms a minute part of the great mass.
2. Something is forming the base for this huge mass of planets, galaxies, stars and other heavenly bodies and the Higgs Boson could be it.
3. The universe is made of particles which by rights should be free-agents zipping all over the place. Yet something gives them mass and the culprit is seen as the Higgs Boson.
4. The Higgs Boson has a short life – we are not talking mayflies here. It lasts for one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Apparently this is the reason it is so goddamned hard to trap. Evidence of its existence is seen by what it leaves behind in the collider rather than its actual capture.
5. The Higgs field theory explains why some elementary particles have mass – suggesting that a unseen field permeates all of space and the Higgs Boson is the smallest possible activity in that field.

It is easier to understand that an unseen field permeates space – or is it? I just hark back to what the ancients say of this and it makes perfect sense to me.

In explaining the universe, Hindus first talk of its vastness. The root ‘Brh’ means to swell, expand or enlarge. Brahman, accepted by Hindus as the actuality of godhead, the ultimate reality, the absolute, is the basis of the universe. It is the force/power/energy that permeates the universe, giving it its form and energy.

Originally – when science had just discovered the atom – Brahman was denoted as the vastest of the vast and smallest of the small, in this case the atom.

With the discovery of sub atomic elements and particles, the smallest of the small becomes the sub atomic particles. Now with the discovery of the

Right – so I am riding the crest of scientific discovery and adopting it as part of my religion. So, sue me. Big deal.

The fact remains that the ancients knew of the existence of this unseen field upon which the rest of the universe carries out its works.

This from the Upanishads.

1. Brahman is the one Absolute Reality behind the changing appearances of the universe.
2. Brahamis the universal substrate from which material things originate and to which they return after dissolution.
3. Sarvam khalv idam brahma - Brahman is everything, and all we see are His different energies — material or spiritual
4. Brahman contains within it the potentiality and archetypes behind all possible manifest phenomenal forms.
5. Brahman is the reality behind everything in this universe, the cause which sustains the effect.
6. Brahman is the ultimate essence of material phenomena

So, what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? Again, zilch.

Brahman cannot be worshipped, only understood. Its workings are beyond the ken of man – just like the Higgs Boson. As science strives to understand the Higgs Boson, the followers of Brahman try to do the same. The only difference is that one is material striving, the other spiritual.

Science now appears to know of this particle that imbues others with some potential and is seeking to understand it more. I can’t wait for more. It just validates what I have learnt as a follower of the religions.

But most religions are getting defensive over the discovery – finger pointing about science setting out to destroy religion is happening all over the world.

The only thing I can say to that is: “Why would God – the omnipresent, the omniscient and the omnipotent – require to be defended? Especially by the likes of puny humans.”

Leave be – get on with your faith, and leave the faith of science alone. They have done great in making the lives of human better – why not allow them a little fun in making a discovery any Hindu (with a little thinking) already knows?

Or maybe it is just an over-reaction to the nickname. Some see the Higgs Boson’s nickname as the God Particle as a direct attack on faith in God.

If the particle had been nicknamed Nick, it may not have aroused so much antipathy amongst the religious.

So, Nick walks into the bar and says “I am Higgs Boson.”. The Barman would probably say: “What are you having, Mr Boson?”

An analogy:

For decades, experts have been trying to come up with analogies to illustrate how the Higgs mechanism works. One of the best-known was proposed in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London. Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and Bieber is like a massive Z boson