Words fail us as much as they shape us. Take the word "God" for example. Its meaning ranges from an absolute God to an abstract idea/a metaphor that has widely lost its symbolic status. Starting out as a person who believed in an all encompassing entity or agency as God but not too particular about the religious practices around it, my journey has taken me to being someone who no longer believes in the agency of a God separate from the self (and is comfortable with the randomness) but has extreme curiosity and appreciation of the evolution of the religious practices and rituals. Religious practices may have started out as steps towards more balanced and motivated ways of living. Sunday church/ pooja rituals are absolute means to socialize in harmony. Many ablutions and prayer steps help with consistent stretches of the body. Lighting a lamp in the evening could be that break you take to reflect on the day before...
"Humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a god, he would've given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, "Why are we here?" You wanna know what I think your purpose is? It's obvious. You're here, along with the rest of us, to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We're maggots eating a corpse" - Quote from the HBO series, West World I find the above interpretation of who we are a lot more humbling, liberating and "real" as opposed to all the meaning, purpose and grandeur that we tend to give to human life. This is the basic message I took away from the book "The Courage to be Disliked". Yet another lif...