a tryst with god

dear god, i love you but crowded temples jus ain't it.

i'm sitting in a morning class right now scribbling on my notebook and pretending to understand whatever's being taught as the teacher tries to make eye contact with me.

i can't stop thinking about something since two days and it's pretty philosophical so we're gonna overthink out loud on substack mid my neural networks and deep learning class today (2 tech bros just died)

the episode

i was in goa vacationing the last weekend, it was an impromptu trip, really. when we were getting ready to leave from there, my dad hurried us to leave an hour earlier than we actually had to.

then he tells us that the one hour buffer was so that we could visit a temple before we leave.

i sighed.

i don't hate temples. but i don't understand why we need to visit every single temple of every single god in every single village, town, city and country we visit.

if there's one thing about family vacations, it's that it's very hard to plan them matching everyone's availability. and then when we finally do, the first proposal from my mother is to visit some place attached with religious sentiments.

a trip is never mutually exclusive to turning it into a pilgrimage.

anyways, fearing the wrath of god getting upset upon not wanting to visit every single temple in every single city, i agreed to go with a smile.

as soon as i entered, i wanted to get out instantly, just because of the sheer amount of people being pushed away as they were standing in front of the idol with their hands joint and eyes closed, praying. the temple was crowded and you could barely get a second to pray in front of the idol before you were pushed away instantly to make way for other devotees.

i decided to just stand away from the entire queue and zoned out in a dialogue with my own self. my outer self was overstimulated but in that chaos, i found myself in a spiral of deep thought.

it went something like this :

dear god, why do i have to come and visit you regularly? why can't i just love you and know in my heart that i do.

but again, if i care about my friends or the people in my life, just knowing that i do so in my heart is never enough at all. i have to show up, i have to take effort. i have to show them my love and my devotion to the relationship.

but again they're real humans that conversate and interact with you in real life, and how they feel and react is mostly out of your control, but every time you interact with god, it's all in your head. both. your voice and god's responses.

if you promise something to god and show up and do the things you promised, the only person that's gonna feel hopeful and good is you.

and if you fail, the only person that's gonna feel the guilt is you.

so if each promise i make to god is a promise to myself, and every prayer is ultimately heard by me, am i just worshipping my own self? (self diagnosing narcissism :p)

if worship changes nothing about god, but changes something about the worshipper, then perhaps worship was never primarily for god.

god, for me, is a being of infinity that helps us hold ourselves through situations we would otherwise feel helpless in. it feels great to talk to and believe in an entity much greater than the human existence to magically have all the powers to fix our lives for us.

but at what point does symbolic idol worshipping turn into a just a gesture that acts as a substitute for our inner dialogue?

and at what point does visiting the temple become more significant than what we do and who we are after we leave from there?

to go and pray for the most ambitious goals to be accomplished without actually having to put in the work?

god's not a vending machine, and spirituality cannot be a negotiation that you choose to practice if god does “this” for you.

life is not a perfectly balanced scoreboard where effort and reward are always proportional.

and maybe that's why we feel much safer believing there's someone much greater than us somehow writing what's the best for us.

if you can't trust in yourself to know the best for you, your trust in god is meaningless.

ive always believed that faith is about certainty for human beings. that faith helps you console that the universe has a plan. you know what? maybe it does.

and maybe,

it doesn't.

but faith to me has a renewed definition of being able to move through the uncertainty anyways knowing you'll figure it out.

worship to me is having the courage to take the leap of faith grounded in your own abilities.

because if god exists outside of me, i have no way of knowing exactly where.

but if god exists within me, i can see the evidence everywhere.

in the conscience that makes me feel guilty when i know i’ve done something wrong, in the courage that makes me do something despite being afraid, in the hope that survives despite having no logical reason to, in the discipline that makes me keep going when nobody is watching, in the part of me that wants to become better than i was yesterday.

maybe that is god.

or maybe that's just me.

but perhaps the distinction isn't as important as i once thought.

i can still go and stand in front of an idol, take flowers, incense sticks, coconuts, milk and feel something.

but now, i think i'd rather leave the temple carrying the god with me.

because what good is finding god in a temple if you leave him there?

yours inquisitively,

Nush <3