On spirituality

I do not believe in God, if the word refers to a super-human who can do magical things, or someone who is controlling everything we do, or someone who deserves to be prayed or worshipped. But at the same time, I do respect the concept of God and worship places like church or temples as places of faith and peace. Great spiritual leaders have used the concept of God as a means of promoting good values among general masses, and I would imagine the world might have been a worse place to live in, had there been no fear of God. I feel that the real God is actually the nature, nothing more and nothing less, and everything follows the simple laws of nature; including the fact that whatever has been created or assembled out of nature will be destroyed or dismantled back into nature, may it be your or me, the WTC towers or the pyramids, the earth or the galaxy. The only constant thing might just be the overall mass+energy (actually only one term if Einstein’s E=mc^2 relation holds) resultant of the whole universe, and the fundamental laws of nature.

The aim of life, I feel is to be happy; happiness I believe comes from satisfaction; and satisfaction may vary with time, with person, with place and with other conditions. When satisfaction, and hence happiness, can come from spending money on various materialistic things, we should do that. But probably there is a saturation level to the satisfaction level that can be achieved through material means. Satisfaction is probably the level of equilibrium between demand and supply; demand is what I want to have, and supply is what I get. And it is generally observed that either demand outpaces supply with time, or the thing becomes so routine that it no longer offer the same levels of satisfaction. Thus one way of being happy, the common way, is to always keep working towards satisfying the new and increasing demands; the other way, the difficult one, is to reduce the demands themselves and have as little needs as possible. A stable and peaceful mind is typically more satisfied, and thus it is also important to keep the mind peaceful.

Bhagwad Gita has suggested the concept of devoting every action and belonging, good or bad, to God. The rationale behnid it, I would imagine, is to provide mental peace and calmness, that is lost when person starts worrying about the results of every action he or she does. I greatly respect Gita and other religious texts, but the problem with these is that their writers have embedded great knowledge in symbolic things like many Gods, rituals etc., probably for the ease of understanding and following by common masses, so I have to sort of decrypt the text while reading.