This week's post is about a thing that will make you (most likely a 30-something) squirm in your ergonomic chair. It is about God.
At the outset, I'll readily admit that writing an essay about God as a 35-year-old potentially cool person feels like wearing socks and open-toed sandals to Delhi Gymkhana Club. It feels unfashionable and risky.
The times feel like an unfunny cosmic joke. There is an endless stream of unspeakably horrible events reported from near and far. And scores of incompetent, bloviating tools in positions of high authority preside over these tragedies.
Even though, on net, this is statistically the best time in history to be alive and all that, there's no question that the human experience continues to hold space for far too much violence and depravity.
Where is God in all of this?
Unsurprisingly, God isn't quite a hot topic, at least in the circles I run in, comprising silently disgruntled policy wonks and adjacents. I routinely use the euphemism for God, "The Universe," which is the subject of much comedy in my friend group. "Gwyneth Paltrow lite!" someone said recently. "Eyy, only white women get to Eat, Pray, Love."
I don't know about you, but I'll readily shove a jade egg up my chakras if it makes any of this make sense.
My parents did not subscribe to the Western notion of holidays, hobbies, and interests. In the 1990s, religion and rigorously calendared rituals filled that void for middle-class Indians.
I distinctly remember being furious when my father took us all to ISKCON temple on New Year's Eve for the millennium new year. While my classmates were likely sipping their first illicit beers, I was chanting "Hare Krishna" and wondering if the Y2K end of civilization might actually have been preferable.
When family friends met, it was for religious events. A ceremony to mark the coming of age of my brother (who I can assure you, had not come of age then), and a ceremony to mark Fridays and full moons. We had a puja for everything.
"Functions," as they were called, came to be times with far too much sensory stimuli. Presiding over the events was a coterie of pot-bellied, stern-faced priests, barking orders at the women and children. "Bring me a coconut!" "Where's the donation?" The air was thick with dung coal smoke that could double as tear gas. And there were always too many people cackling about and so much food that it made you want a stomach pump. My mother would refer to these sensory assaults as "kala-kala" - a quaint Tamil word that roughly translates to 'bustling joy' - but to me, all that was bustling was a desire to escape.
So it is no surprise then that my relationship with this thing we call God is somewhat bereft of these religiosities. All that noise and movement did not lend itself to tranquility, faith, or introspection.
Earlier this year, I started doing breathwork - first through a workshop in Delhi, and later by myself at home, with nothing but a YouTube video and my own breath as a guiding tool.
I'll use a little rapé, and set off into a journey of slowly decalcifying my ego. Sometimes, between breath cycles, I'll have pangs of inspired, uplifting thoughts, seemingly out of nowhere.
"That serenity you feel in nature is you."
"Suffuse your writing and creative endeavors with emotion and they will come alive."
"As you heal, she will heal."
"Focus on spirituality, creativity, comedy, and nature."
It's not that any of the above are exceptional profundities. But they come to me suffused with a feeling of such sublime softness and compassion that I am quite literally moved to tears. It strikes me in these moments that the separation that has come to typify the material world is illusory, and that maybe the omnists are on to something when they profess a single transcendent purpose or cause uniting all things or people.
Only a Jungian archetypist can tell if all that exposure to religion early on suffused a type of subconscious willingness to accept that there may be a force that runs through the world, permeating everything.
What I can say for sure though, is that even brief encounters with this “force” is grounding, softening and expanding. It helps me create with abandon, love fiercely and laugh loudly. And generally remember that nothing is that serious or permanent.
Love you ❤️
You have no falsity. You write from your heart my child