kalyan-kawlyan

[kalyan-kawlyan]

notes on my religion and divinity

i guess my religion to me is just kinda what i want it to be. i pick & choose and label it as hinduism, mostly because I grew up with it and sorta identify with it. say i’m cheating, pushing the vegetables to the side of the plate, etc. but i’m not living by rules written by some dude who was around a million years ago who claimed he saw “god” and that “god” told him to write what he did. people forget that drugs existed back then, we just didn’t know that drugs were drugs. i dont think anybody’s invented a widely appreciated religion (not a cult) in the past hundred years, but every 25 year-old white dude who’s ever seen the joe rogan podcast has apparently taken dmt and seen god. take from that what you will. my point is, i can celebrate my heritage without tying myself to a strict set of rules and practices which are probably far more problematic than i’ve been led to believe. i just really love the core of hinduism, or at least how i interpret it based on my experiences, what follows is that: divinity doesn’t obscure itself, its just hard to define what’s infinite. divinity isn’t gendered, divinity doesn’t have race, etc etc etc. yeah, it sounds straight off a bumper sticker on a beat up toyota but it’s true. we can’t pretend we know what divinity is, we know so little. we spend a finite amount of time on this earth, we go a finite number of places, we have a finite number of unique experiences, and we meet a finite number of people. everything about us is finite. who’re we to talk about the infinite? luckily, all of us are a little piece of that boundlessness. we’re all divine and have that in common with everyone and everything that’s ever been or ever will be. and the energy we put out into the divine is what the divine will present us with in return. we all offer what we do to whatever we believe in based on our circumstances, and that’s okay. just like how there isn’t one way to define divinity, there isn’t one way to serve it. its like what marx said, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (i know, i know, quoting marx and spouting a bunch of flowery shit describing a religion that isn’t primarily focused on how god hates your guts, tucker carlson has like a year of material off me). karma obviously isn’t a perfect science but even a clean conscience is an immeasurable reward. and despite having just described all living things as finite, in being divine, we’re all just a little infinite. whenever you were born, you came out the womb made up of fragments of everybody and everything that’s ever existed, debris of 14 trillion years. and that’s not a starry-eyed metaphor either, its just me trying to put the law of the conservation of mass poetically: matter cannot be created nor destroyed, it just changes forms. and so, eventually you’ll die like living things do, and people will weep about how you’re gone (hopefully?). but whether you’re decomposing in a box six feet under, in an urn sitting on a mantel, or frozen in a box at a secret facility in antarctica if you happen to be a rich pedophile, its all just matter at the end of the day. over the course of infinity we’ll all become part of something new, and that something new will become something new, and that something new will become something new ad infinitum (there’s that word again!). obviously the dramatized elements of rebirth you see in bollywood movies, where you suddenly start seeing flashbacks from your past life and stuff like that are a little unrealistic, but in the sense that we take on the knowledge from previous generations and contribute what we learn to the future, and that we’re physically composed of all the crap that’s ever been, we’re undoubtedly the products of rebirth. spirituality is a different thing for everybody, as it should be; we all need to find a way to make the world make sense, and that’s something we figure out on our own. we’ll all have to approach the horrors of existence alone at some point or another, and we all have to learn to make peace in whatever way works for us. for me, it comes down to just trying to make sure the good i do outweighs the bad. thats putting it simply, its either a lot harder than it sounds or i really really suck. but i try. and don’t get me wrong, there are for sure cultural aspects of hinduism that are important to me: i pray everyday, go to temple when i can, and i don’t eat meat (big part of this is environmental and health concerns and also i’m better than you and need to prove it). its not much, but i don’t think even all that is necessary by the god i believe in. i think they just want us to do what we can and what we feel is right, and as long as we do that, the world will keep doing that spinning thing it does. the choices that you make ripple across everything that is divine and your ripple will interact with all the other ripples people make every day, and eventually, your ripple will come back around, one way or another. its like waves in the ocean all crashing into each other until one sinks a boat, or the tide drags some poor guy to his death. or sometimes, a family has a fun day at the beach. the kids play in the waves and manage not to drown. i believe that we have that effect on one another on such an infinite scale precisely because, well, we’re all divine. i think you probably got that by now though.