I was told I needed to separate my thoughts… yeah… I can barely get my thoughts to slow down long enough to get them typed or on paper, let alone organize them. So, for you my critic, I will attempt to write in decent form and with some type of hierarchy and organization my thoughts and feelings towards today’s Eastern Religions Class. (AND.. I guess I can tab in my paragraphs… but don’t expect too much out of me all at once)

I felt like a little girl in class today. Honestly. I almost walked up to the front of the class, pulled out my green carpet square and sat intently staring up at my professor. I was in tune and just soaking in each word she spoke and hung on them as if they were a treat from the gods themselves. She brought roughly 10 little figurines of porcelain to help narrate and depict the stories of the gods that she would deliciously paint before my eyes. As she delineated each story they seemed to weave in and out of each other almost lulling me to sleep countless times. I was in such euphoria.

Why did the stories in Sunday School never invite me so? I have heard probably thousands of times of how Jonah was swallowed by a whale and lived to tell about it. Shouldn’t that have made me eager to read more… I should have at least wiggled in my seat with some sort of excitement. Well I am sure I did but the thoughts running through my head were probably not of Jonah, but of ‘o, I wonder what snack we will have today.’ ‘Is the big hand supposed to be on the 6 when snack comes or the little hand.’ Or ‘O… for Gump sake, clock would you tick faster.’ Regardless how intriguing the stories were intended to be, they just don’t not seem to scale even close to the excitement brought on by the stories of the Hindu gods. Though, how can one God compete with 330 million Hindu gods and goddess’? Rapture!

Kali. WOAH!!! (blank stare) What a beast! Kali –or- ‘the Dark One’ licked up the blood of all the demons she would slay; for she knew that if the blood touched the ground another demon would manifest itself on the spot. To save the towns folk she slaughtered all of the demons plaguing them and licked up all of their blood before it had a chance to barely breathe oxygen let alone touch the dust of the Earth. But she then got drunk off of the blood that she then went on a killing spree of even the people and wore their skulls as a necklace and their leg and arm bones as a skirt. She did not stop until she was touched by Shiva, her husband. Once her true love touched her she immediately turned back into Parvati.

Kali is a goddess who gets shit done. She will stop at nothing to get things in order and if a few civilians get slaughtered in the way, not a problem. I respect her. I fear her. Who am I kidding, I idolize her.

Destruction in the Hindu faith isn’t always considered negative. It is just part of an ongoing process. Part of Samsara, the cycle of suffering… Of Birth, Death, and Rebirth. Bhag. Gita said, “Just as a person discards old clothes and puts on new ones, once the body is destroyed, the soul simply puts on a new body.” Destruction is not only present it is a necessity. It is life.

Personally, I struggle with this concept. While I understand/comprehend/can write about it, I don’t fully grasp it. Sitting here Agnostic, neither seeking nor being stagnant, I would like to believe we could potentially be reincarnated to be given another chance at Liberation, or Moksha… but I just can’t bring myself to believe it. So.. here is my catch fall… Say I find Moksha. I am Liberated. What happens? I dissolve into nothingness and everything at the same time. I become one with the Force? Is this the concept? I just cannot wrap my mind around what happens next. This is where my understanding ends.

May The Force Be With You

I will be using this image to differentiate my 'The Awakening Project,' my Eastern Religions class journal project, from the other random posts I will add.

Enjoy!

Eastern Religions Journal Project

So for the next 10-15 posts or so I will be turning my blog into a sort of journal-ish reflective tool for my Eastern Religions class. This may be painful to read and probably even more painful for me to write. I know nothing about Eastern Religions; I am ashamed to say I only know about Christianity and probably barely anything there as well. It seems the more you learn the more you realize what you do not know. Therefore the more knowledgeable you are, the dumber you become. So at some point I may have believed I was at least knowledgeable in Christianity or in the Bible but now I just feel as if there are so many things to unravel.

Honestly, I find this Religion class to be a breath of fresh air when lately I have been smuggled out by Christianity and mainly Baptists. I stopped attending church about 6 to 7 months ago, woah I can’t believe it has already been that long, to escape from the bigotry and overall lack of self-knowledge. One of my serious problems of the Christian church is their complete lack of understanding of other cultures and religions; I too was victim to this accusation. Very few people of the congregation would even look beyond their noses to past the bible to the outside world. I have taken this summer to attempt to thoroughly reflect on my life and my aspirations as an individual. I thought a lot of ‘The Awakening’ a novel written by Kate Chopin in the late 1800s and published in the early 1900s, it is a story of a confused woman who seeks to find herself: physically, mentally, sexually, and spiritually. I started to just flip through my copy of the book that I read and completely marked up in my AP English class. I came across a purple highlighted quote, I tried to do some sort of color organization, that spoke to me about how I felt every time I would step foot into the church building itself or even the sanctuary; “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish...like a shadow... a mist passing across her soul's summer day.” (chopin) I did feel trapped. Motionless. I felt like a little marionette moved to do what was expected of me, what people wanted from me. I only started to see myself as a ‘real girl’ when I realized I didn’t just believe what was said behind that clear pulpit. Many times I would break my trained zombie-gaze from the pastor to the rest of congregation and I could faintly make out their marionette strings nod their heads in agreement to statements I knew for a fact they couldn’t possibly have formed their own opinions on the matter. So eventually I cut my stings and my goal for the course of this class is to go through a sort of metamorphosis… a change of heart and hopefully soon I can look through a new set of eyes at the once beautiful world I used to wake up to that is now bleak and cloudy.

“She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.” –Chopin in ‘The Awakening’