Was that thunder or was it you praying? In a place where you commit blasphemy by merely existing, there’s no need to label me a sinner. Their almighty judges us and our mere breath is sacrilege. Those that worshipped tried to sanctify water, purify fire, occupy lands and colonise minds to justify their righteousness, assert dominance of the lord of heavens – the architect of hell. Every day is a monsoon and we bathe in blood, wipe our souls clean with beliefs at the price of peace and I see you buy that with prayer, out of fear. All we ever craved for is to belong and then we’re provided for. Take me in, my friend, lead me towards the path of the righteous, the pious and the brave. Lead me into the darkness, promise me light and I shall serve the saviour, come what might.
Tag: religion
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2 comments on Sinner’s whimper
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An hour’s struggle, two burn marks and a few scoldings later, I’ve finished making fried potato curry. It smelt amazing, like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. Well, it tasted awful but that’s another story but hey, I get to taste something. That evening, I met a friend of mine who told me about his friend being treated for cancer. The guy was in the final stage with a poor prognosis. He won’t make it.
“Why go through all of that pain knowing it’s useless?” I asked.
“Because he wants to see his parents happy. We gotta try everything we can” He said.
“Is he upset? Anxious? Scared? Is he aware of how bleak his condition is?”
“He knows it’s pointless being scared. Every day he lives is a triumph.”
That struck me. Humans are so obsessed with events larger than life, that they overlook life itself. We live in a world that’s constantly trying to kill us in a million different ways, every second. Anything done during that flicker is worth celebrating. Being alive feels awful most of the time yet we hold on, anticipating the fleeting moments of joy. That adrelaine rush. Pain is a peculiar thing. While dreadful to some, it’s the lifeblood of many. How else do we know what pleasure is? A few seek pleasure in pain, that’s another thing to ponder over. Beauty is an awful entity hiding in the most unexpected corners and so too, in death. Death is enigmatic and the dying too, for they embrace both hope and helplessness. Death has an allure because we’ll never know what it’s like. I’m not saying living ones are awful, though they all are but there’s always a silver lining. And that’s the line we tread every waking hour.
Of all victories, we honour the defeat of death the most. As beings capable of abstract thought, humans have always sought glory in achieving the impossible. This is why we deify those who defied death – from rumoured immortal priests to the son of God himself. Those who claim to understand their purpose and destiny hold a special place in the hearts of mortals. In confronting mortality, we gravitate to the immortal. Our heroes are those who confront death, conquer it and guide us into an eternal life. We all know how that ends, yet we’re unsure of how we will. Probably why religions spread like pandemics.I love long exposure shots. -
There is neither a perfect day to live nor die. Perfection is a myth unless you willfully deceive yourself into buying the delusions of masses. A shared mind might offer refuge from the disconcerting world of darkness that lies unexplored in an individual’s unconscious but in the end, we’re on our own, facing the monsters we failed to tame out of sheer ignorance. From obscurity to an illusion of being something, we lost our way, only spend a lifetime chasing a meaning we may neither find nor understand. We’re stuck in a void, navigating through an abyss that seems to be in perpetual expansion. Borrowed identities encroach the inner landscapes, obliterating the personalities we are born with and build over the span of decades; a genocide we so often take pride in, in the name of being a better human. While lives are plagued by desires, death rids you of them but retains the symptoms of the disease in the collective unconscious of generations to come. Human relationships are mediated by goods and facilitated by services. Sensory experiences are crafted with needs manufactured to justify and glorify greed. Perhaps that’s why we have religion, and the lack of it – with freedom, comes captivity and with control, freedom is bought.
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What if our existence is confined within the walls of someone’s dream and all the gods we venerete are friends, family and acquaintances of the dreamer? The cosmos continues to exist and expand as long as the dreamer slumbers and is obliterated the moment he wakes up. Does our existence hinge on the dreamer’s perception?
What if we’re gods to people that inhabit our minds? Are we divine? In Sanatan mythology, Brahma’s sleep endures for 4.2 billion human years, restarting with an apocalypse upon his awakening. What does this reveal about the nature of death? If we are Brahman, the supreme consciousness, how many universes have we devastated, facilitating new beginnings?
Transitioning from the unconscious to being conscious, from a state of sleep to wakefulness, we traverse two different universes; one we remember, another we forget, switching between two different lives until we die. Insomnia takes 264 hours to kill, and being deceased in one world equates to perishing in the other.
What is reality? What is consciousness in this vast, boundless reality? Sleep often symbolizes death, while wakefulness signifies life, and sometimes, enlightenment. Life is synonymous with awareness, and death, its absence. When you dream, you lack awareness of life, and if you manage to recollect the dream, it’s nothing like being alive. Death itself is a dream.
Brahma is the source of life and existence, as a creator. The reality we inhabit is his artistic creation—a testimony to his craftsmanship—immutable, formless, and ultimate. It could be hypothesized that God only materializes when perceived through one’s consciousness, which unites with the ultimate, Brahman. In this context, the creator metamorphoses into consciousness, merging with both existence and non-existence. Consciousness is divinity. -
The world burns. A wildfire spreads into the minds thirsty for a purpose and a need for salvation. A devil smiles from above, the spark of revenge fueled by an illusion of retribution engulfs the streams of consciousness. Reality is not what it seems. We create individual realities to thrive, and sometimes collectively to our detriment. There will probably come a day when people realise they created hell and called it heaven. Neither are true. What we experience is never immediate, there is a delay in receiving and processing the signals from the sensory organs and hence, the present has already been lost in the past. When existence itself isn’t locally real, what is faith? There is a void inside me that contains a raging insanity. As emotions cloak themselves in indifference, I stroll through the ruins of what they claimed to be home. People swam through delusions like fish, oblivious to other realities. Awakening is sacrilege and so they chose to sleep. The problem isn’t sleep itself but people that snore for those awake are disturbed. Nobody complained of the fire, they relished the burns and scars and wished to burn others alive.
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Someone once said to me: Every soul initially belongs to our community, but after birth, it loses its way. It is our responsibility to bring these souls back and save them from eternal damnation caused by idol worship.
The poor soul felt compelled to share this message due to his faith, as failing to do so would result in his own eternal damnation. However, I questioned the concept of a soul’s burning or experiencing pain since it lacks physical form or sensory organs. Guess what? He found my question stupid.
Why should a religion strive to spread its teachings? And if it should, why resort to coercion, persuasion, deceit, or threatening others to convert? If God is all-powerful, why does He rely on human intervention to disseminate his message and guide people? I understand that people come up with bizzare explanations, but I find them unconvincing and banal.
Lets say I do believe in a higher power. What’s wrong with idol worship? Unlike following the ancestral practice of praying in a random direction to an unseen and unheard being, at least idol worship offers a sense of personal connection. The lack of personalization is what creates a rift between people and a deity that can never truly be theirs—one that they struggle to comprehend or grasp. Embracing a physical representation adds cohesiveness, reinforces faith, and allows for a deeper engagement, as if the divine entity is akin to us, as taught in ancient times when we were considered equals.
Aham Brahmasmi – I am Brahma, the supreme being. In plurality, we practice non duality.
Religion often becomes a detrimental influence, trapping countless minds in mindless, unfounded, blind, and unquestioning beliefs. Some may ask, “If there is no God, why does anything exist?” Yet, if God can simply exist, why can’t the universe? If people attribute harmony to God, they should also acknowledge the chaos that exists when they zoom in and observe closely. Personally, I don’t care if God exists, but it is concerning how readily we submit to answers that lack concrete evidence.
Next time you pray, before asking god, ask yourself. Submission is a nod to voluntary oppression. Faith ends where questions begin.
And yes, peace on you.
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Image Source: Canva Pro Falling off my skin are particles made of sins. Out of love we emerge, or regret; whatever it is, existence has unholy origins. To look for reverence in gutters is the same as having no faith and expecting deliverance. My blood is demonic red, which wets his altar – my bed. […]
Unholy by Bharath Upendra -
Dall-E, baby! For you, I will write songs of my sins, if you let me embrace victimhood in your loving arms of thorny gallows. You shall bathe in blood, washing away the guilt as cries and agony make blissful symphonies to soothe your restless heart.
Set your gaze on me, rid me of my skin; I’m the sacrificial lamb, lead me into your filth.
If you think my titles don’t match, blame AI for it.
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AI generated image – Dall E What I thought has been chasing me all my life, was revealed to me, in a flash, in the face of a trivial calamity that it’s me who’s going toward and shall one day unite with it. It’s not right to call it an ‘it’ or ‘him’ or ‘her’ for that instance; for the elusiveness of its attributes makes it impossible for the plane of dimensions we wander. Is there a shape, though, in the higher levels of existence or at least, consciousness? There may not be or perhaps, cannot. Some call it destiny but it’s a destination for sure; some call it fate and others, liberation. Its connection to a supreme consciousness is undocumented and unwarranted for, but who are we to say, when we have nothing to say? The life we know doesn’t exist where we believe it does; as lifeless as the inanimates look, the very things that made you, made them. Life and consciousness are byproducts, maybe. We can just speculate, theorize and be criticized but it’s impossible not to have an opinion, an idea that helps us derive whatever meaning we crave for, from the being.
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A noose hangs above the line dividing courage and cowardice. One foot on either side, I stand with my head held high and eyes down low. My shoulders are pushed back broadening the chest and back, a little bent. From the left come the echoes of eternity and on the right is a blissful abyss; both equally enchanting.
Torn between what has been done and what should have been, I lie to my heart with all truths and chose to believe neither. There was God in some places and the devil in the other; neither demanded faith, nor was I welcome. There’s always a choice, even if you don’t choose.
My soul hangs in front of me.
It has a smile on its face. -
We’re torn apart as a world.
You don’t need a world war to realise how divided we are, living behind a facade of oneness. It’s a weird society we’ve built; though not particularly similar, the differences are the same.
We’re battling each other, ideologically, in the name of race, religion, economy and skin. There’s solace in religion, and sin in practice.
People own land, money owns people, imaginary values rule the existence itself.
It’s too late to care for each other, we’re used to this way of life. If only earth bled like we do.
Even blood has its worth. -
Hi everyone! I was down with covid, isolated from people and the world, in general! Not that it mattered anyway. But when I have nothing to do, my brain concocts some bizarre ideas to cure my boredom. This time it was to interview someone and His Highness, Bharath, the ‘Ever Chivalrous’ was kind enough to […]
Candid -
I looked for religion in crowded streets.
Streets where people eat, and sometimes, sleep. Or always.
“All the wrong places”, they said, wherever I went. There is a god in faces; what we see is what we believe. But is religion a belief? They killed each other, in the same places they always lived – Some in the name of God, some for what they perceived as God’s.
God is up for sale. You buy him with faith, for when did you go to him? People brought him to you. I walked those busy roads, my feet dirtied by litters of superstition.
There’s a door to heaven. It’s called grave. The same door throws you in hell. Only the rich can buy the keys to the door but they can’t choose.
But you know, it’s a trade, and everything is fair.