gods & gurus

the simplest way to express my feelings on religions/cults/philosophies (including those “anti-religious” paths of science/politics/sociology/etc) is that i don’t worship anything. you could call that my “belief system” i suppose…the belief that absolutely nothing, no matter how wicked or wonderful, is worth my mindless and utter devotion. and why isn’t it? well, i see no justification for denying myself to give it all to something a) that’s just like me or b) that isn’t like me. nothing in existence, known or unknown, could ever prove to me that it needed me to belittle myself for it. really, if i was some omniscient, omnipotent being i certainly wouldn’t be going around begging other beings to bow down to me. that kind of desire seems to only come from some weird need for a power/ego-trip…which if you truly were so omniscient/etc, i don’t think you would need. (so, why was yahweh so jealous of all those other “gods”……hmmm? remember, he was only “god of the mountain.”)

granted, some people may just be in that kind of mental/emotional state of development where they actually have some need to blindly devote themselves to something seen or unseen–perhaps to learn that they really don’t need to be doing that. it just seems to me that worship & devotion of any nature makes you completely forget yourself. at that moment, you stop developing. you as a person no longer exist nor can you grow because you have traded yourself for the worship of another being. i prefer to keep the freedom of my own being. to be able to discern life without the colored glasses of any one set of dogma. some might find that selfish i suppose, that the whole point of life is to deny yourself–to “altruistically” give of yourself. but i think if you take a good look, you’ll see that most of the time there is no actual “altruism” occurring….and if you’re giving yourself away just because that’s what someone else or some book told you to do, well…remember, you can’t help anyone else until you’ve helped yourself. your issues don’t just disappear because you’ve devoted yourself to someone/something….in fact, they tend to come back quite a bit more powerful and problematic because you denied yourself for your object of worship.

then there is always the struggle to unlearn social conditioning…to cease merely reacting to everything because that’s how your family/peers/society does it. so many people nowadays speak about a global worldview, but i do not find the concept possible if we are all simply reacting to everything because that’s how the generation before us reacted. i myself am not immune from reaction. i’m much better at recognizing it than 10 years ago and, albeit not as often as i would like, better at consciously choosing an action. i don’t find it an easy to task to undo the conditioned aspects of oneself, but in the long run it’s the only way to global improvement–and that global worldview. how can one respect another and coexist peacefully if we all are just reactive creatures, with little actual thinking and slaves to our emotions/beliefs/gods/gurus? and i’m an emotive person too! i’m all for recognizing a feeling, but you really need to combine some mental thought with all that emotional reasoning to come up with an action and not just a reaction. i will have to admit that the balance of daoism has something going for it. (and no, buddhism is not an answer. it forces a lot of denial/repression especially in westerners, and has had quite a violent history. to me it’s no different than any other religion as much as they try to say it’s not.)

so, i don’t worship anything. even the trees i love so much, even the earth, the forces of the universe….nope, nothing. doesn’t mean i won’t hand out some respect where it’s deserved, but i won’t grovel before anything. i’ll shake hands, look it in the eyes (if it has either of those), but i won’t kiss its feet. and it better not try to kiss mine. that’s so annoying!