A Personal Take On God

As we grow up we may start to question the world, the more adaptive ones may not but the idealistic ones who have been brought up in a certain way may do that. I have seen sickness on a personal level and it made me more empathetic as a doctor and as a person but it also opened my eyes to the amount of suffering in the world. The society says that there is a God, and yet when we see the world in its full scope He or She is nowhere to be seen. I know God is a personal matter. Religion is not only opiate of the masses as Marx said, it can also be a medium of personal fulfillment, like many things in the world it also has two sides to it. It can be a control mechanism for masses for the administration and the elite, but it is also the medium through which the common man experiences spirituality. Faith heals, and it has been proven more than often in human experience and religion does the same, it provides faith to the common man. Praying is a form of meditation that allows us to connect to a higher consciousness, connect to something much higher and bigger than ourselves. Personally, I lost my faith in God after my suffering, actually not, the real reason was my sickness opening my eyes to the amount of suffering in the world. It's hard to believe in what I call "the societal God" after that. Believers may say that my faith or belief was weak and I accept that, but I have never been a proponent of blind belief and I think my father being a scientist has something to do with that. My personal belief however is that of a Charvaka, but it is not bounded by strict rules of this philosophy, I also believe in Purusha and Prakriti, and the concept of Shiva and Shakti, the masculine and the feminine and mother goddesses because I think a mother's love is the purest form of energy that there is. I feel that when a faithful person loses faith he searches for it and that's what happened with me. One can believe in a Supreme Being, Parameshwara or God, but often people just believe in Him or Her because they are afraid, which is not a bad thing, one needs faith for emotional support. It's just that our belief of God is way too narcissistic. Just watch Animal Planet and you'd realise that a deer who eats grass and is benign is hunted by a lion. In human society too this analogy can be seen. I would like to believe in the "societal god" but I just don't have enough evidence for it. What I have is evidence for energy, in different forms, an energy that tries to preserve itself, in nature and in humanity. A deer tries to save itself, the lion tries to save itself from hunger, the body tries to save itself from diseases and trauma. As humans we have energy states, I tend to believe gods and goddesses of Indian mythology as energy states too. For example, the Goddess Kali is an energy state of motherly love and wrath, Lord Ram is an energy state of idealism and duty. In homeopathy there is a concept of miasms, the fundamental cause of disease, it portrays three states, disruption in function, creation or accumulation and destruction, although pathological in nature, the concept bears a striking similarity with the Indic trinity of Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, energy states of function, creation and destruction. I personally don't think that God will tell us how to bathe and what clothes we should wear but then tradition, culture and rituals are also important things. A society should preserve its culture, traditions and rituals and thus these things become important. 

I am a scientific minded individual, and so evidence matters to me. But I also know that science is an ongoing process and it will always be an ongoing process. I may go to hell for not believing in the "societal god" but I can take that risk for the sake of truth and science. I don't like going to temples much but there are some places that provide me peace, like the Golden Temple in Amritsar and old South Indian temples, especially in Tamil Nadu. When I say to others "bhagwan/uparwale pe bharosa rakhiye”, I mean the preserving energy that I believe in and hope that uparwala really exists. Despite the philosophy I have spouted above, I am a simple work hard and party hard kind of a person who doesn't think about God much. What I know though, is that truth and love are godly qualities and they have the capacity to elevate us.