I Am Here, My Child

Had God really come to visit me? But in my bathroom? That was such a weird place for God to set up our first meet with each other. But I was certain of it. I had just been sitting cross legged on my bed with my eyes closed and hands in the mudra resting on my knees, concentrating really hard on imagining what my God would look like (Matthew McConaughey in a toga), when I heard a sound coming from my bathroom, a click, just like the sound of the Deluminator which Dumbledore uses to vanish the lights. I stared long and hard into the bathroom for a while, then I started turning away while giving one last try, ‘’ARE you there, God??’’

And my heart just very nearly stopped. There was someone in the bathroom with me! It all happened in a flash, I broke out into cold sweats. I dared myself to look up, and then felt like slapping myself. It was just my own reflection in the mirror! I guess I had been listening waaay to much to Deepak Chopra who insists that God is WITHIN me. HAH! What a laugh!

I walked back to my bed and plopped onto my pillow, feeling like a deflated balloon. I guess this was what happens when you start late in life. All the kids at school have been attending Sunday Church, or going to temples since I could remember. I was the only odd one out who never had any weekend religious activities to share about. Which is why I got all panicked when the teacher gave us an assignment on what is God to us last week. That’s when I started my search of god frenzy the moment that I got home from school that day, jumped straight to Google, trying my very best to search for God in there. Is he a man? Or a woman? Or a child??? No,no, God is supposed to be all knowing, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. So it definitely had to be a grown up.

The assignment was due in a few days and I still had not a clue on what or who I thought God was. My parents were not atheists, but they were not very religious either. I have heard others whispering about my parents, referring to them as being ‘’eccentric’’. An aunt once scoffed with her nose high in the air, hissing, ‘’ They claim that they are SPIRITUAL! What is that? They can talk to the spirit world??! Maybe they can find out how Bosco is doing!’’ Bosco was her late pet iguana which had recently died of old age.

Hence the topic of the assignment was finally forcing me to face an area of my life which I had always avoided delving into, as I had very little exposure or knowledge of it. GOD. When I stared at the word for very long, hoping that miraculously the answer would spring out, the only thing that I could think of was that GOD spelled backward was DOG. And immediately an image of a pug in a toga and a halo replaced my god image of Matthew Mc Conaughey.

But HOW COULD my teacher assign us to such a topic. Eventhough I was not an atheist, well not really, but I COULD have been. Well, then that would have been a really insensitive topic to ask me to write about now, wouldn’t’ it? I had chanced a peek at my friend’s completed assignment this morning. He was a Hindu. And he proudly stated that his religion had 33million Gods. THIRTY-THREE MILLION??? I have never even seen one, but he has 33 million? That’s 33 with six zeros! He even included some pictures of the Gods which even had part of the animal kingdom adorned in royal constumes and ornaments and worshipped as Gods! Maybe that’s why my parents became ‘spritual’ instead? Simply because they failed to master all 33 million names of the Gods and they felt that they were an utter disgrace to the religion. They were after all born Hindus.

However, as the days passed, and the deadline of the assignment got nearer and nearer, I started to form an opinion of what I thought God was. And I no longer felt frustrated at my parents for not having a stronger hold of their religion. First and foremost, I believe that the definition of God differs for each individual based on their understanding, interpretation, and perspective of life. I have now come to believe that God is in fact a state of mind, a state of being. And the common saying of many spiritual teachers that say that God is within you simply means that God is our natural state of being once we peel away all the layers of our emotions and conditioned life. That Heavan and Hell are not actually after life one-way ticket destinations, but is in fact the condition of our minds during life, which carries on after death. And the only person stopping us from reaching God (or as I now see it,as the God within us) is only ourselves. The clutter of our mind, the negative emotions we experience fuelled by the opinions of other of us, our need to be in the rat race to show the world that we are the best, the need for power and fame to mask the lack of inner peace and confidence are just the few factors that bring us further away from our natural states of godliness and thus leads to many mental, physical and emotional damage to us.

Since a great many people struggle with this in life, which leads to many forms of illnesses and crises, religion was introduced to bring some form of organization, direction and principles to people’s lives. To give them meaning in life and a way to bring themselves closer to God. However, even two people from the same religion, same sect, same family who are identical in almost every way, can still have a different understanding of God, because each person’s interpretation of their religion is different. Hence, you may be of the same religion, but your religion is only there to guide you. your journey to reaching God is entirely your own effort in harnessing the goodness that life has to offer. PLUS, there are people who have seized the opportunity of being in a position of high worship within their religious sect to misuse their power to mislead the masses and turn religion into a dividing factor, rather than its original intention of unifying with love.

So I think that whatever religion we choose or not, we should have a clear vision of our life, what we want to be, and how we want to feel internally. And by focussing on this, the answers to life will appear to guide us through. And is all fails, I guess I ‘ll have to check in with Bosco,eh?