Random Thoughts Of An Abnormal Teenager

Energy, matter, space, time.

The four things that make up the universe. And yes time also plays a very important role in it. Of course, some say that God governs this, and I’m not trying to offend them, I’m just claiming something that is within my human mind. Because the fact that some huge entity is ruling over our lives is just ridiculous. But today’s idea of scientific mythology is the concept of those four things.

Proving God exists is a crazy man’s game. I mean, think about it. We have conquered the moon, our satellites have reached the borders of the solar systems, our telescopes have found planets that can sustain life, but no sign of it, and we still claim that he exists. I have a prediction and it may seem vague, but in this day and age, vague is enough. My prediction is that when we come in contact with aliens, which I’m sure we will, be it after a thousand years or even tomorrow, our concept of gods and goddesses may just shatter any chance of a stable relationship with the intelligent species. We keep hearing that the universe is so vast, taking the Earth as a tennis ball, our solar system will average as New York city. The Milky Way Galaxy will be as big as the solar system, and the Universe will be as big as the…… Universe. “Goddamn”, was what I said when I read about it. And people still tell me that there is not even a single chance that life cannot exist somewhere else. It is like saying that even if you try to shoot a basket a million times, it still won’t go. They say that aliens existing is ridiculous, I am against that. Aliens not existing is ridiculous, and I say that there are millions of aliens right now that have no clue that we exist. Even they would be thinking that we don’t exist, they would believe in something called god. And it doesn’t stop there, you think your mind is rattled? I’m just starting.

Scientists now say that we may just not be the only universe. Yes, you heard that right, there are other universes. And not only some, there are infinite number of universes, this is something known as the bubble universe theory. Because of this, one more theory emerged, what if in all those universes, one is similar to ours?

The possibilities are limitless, there could be a me that is in the place of Elon Musk, there could be a me that is a beggar on the streets. The thing, is infinite means anything, anywhere, in infinity.

This concept has recently become popular in many media franchises. Marvel, DC, cartoon shows ( I’m looking at you, Rick and Morty) are a few examples that have dwelled into the idea of multiple realities. What role does God play in this now? Are there multiple gods for each reality? Or is there one singular god for all of them? Or is there a specific theme for each reality and their own corresponding god? But since there are an infinite number of realities does that mean there are some gods that are exactly the same? Just like us? The reason I asked so many questions is that religion is equally confusing as this exact same concept. Either we can keep speculating and making our own theories about it or we can accept what it is, an unexplainable phenomenon. Obviously, us being humans don’t like the latter. And us being humans, come up with fascinating stories and adventures that we see today in media. Exactly like that was the concept of god incepted in everyone. People wanted an answer, they needed one, they deserved one. History’s leaders, long years of torment, Millenials of technological advancement have led to this, a teenager spewing random shmuck to satisfy his own unanswered questions about an entity believed by all. As equally confusing as the cartoons and movies that they so dearly watch.

Let’s try to understand religion. Guess what, you can’t.

But that isn’t something you want to hear. You want to hear answers, to questions you don’t understand who and when to ask. Like what religion you should follow, and when to practice it. But as always, you’re stuck between two variants of human interpretation of knowledge- religion and science.

I am not much of a religious person but I am not a heathen either. I am a Hindu. I wouldn’t actually care if I were Muslim or Christian or anything, provided I get the same upbringing as I am getting now. But I also have a very keen interest in religion along with science. I like religion not for its’s beliefs or it’s practices, nor for which god they follow. I like religion for it’s stories. Because god or not, human philosophy is a true science. A science studied in these amazing stories in every aspect imaginable. Though I do want you to note that my source of stories were the Hindu epics, the tales of Prophet Muhammad and the teaching of Buddha. I don’t have much knowledge of the Bible or stories from the Catholics. Much sorry.

The thing about Hindu epics is that there is always the same exact premise- evil is born on Earth, good comes to defeat it. And there is always one person who comes to defeat evil- Lord Vishnu, whether he came in the form of an archer or a philosopher, evil never stood a chance. But that is not the topic of interest here, its the knowledge he gave along the way. One of the most renowned philosopher was Krishna, a simple cowherd turned into the defeater of Kansa and the adviser to the greatest. He, unlike the other gods, didn’t talk about why to believe they exist, rather he talked human behavior, which was then compiled into the Bhagavad Gita ( it is an amazing read by the way, I totally recommend it). And this book is the reason I perceive human behavior as I do. I’m not telling you to join Hinduism, I have no right on that at all, but if I can, I will totally advise you to read it. The stories in Indian Epics all interconnect like a huge web. Everybody knows the Marvel Cinematic Universe and their movies, if you multiply the number of their movies by tenfold, forget that, a hundredfold, then you will get the stories in these epics. These stories are not only for fun, they give you life lessons you didn’t know even existed. You have heard a lot of how Indians had already

known many things that were discovered later in modern medicine or philosophy and science, well, these epics are the reason. Let’s now take Buddha, a prince who did not know the suffering of humans until he devoted his life in philosophy, whose ideas are practiced till now. I don’t follow Buddhism, but I have quite a knowledge of his adventures and his stories. All leading to many yet the same thing, that humans are humans.

The whole point of this post is to tell you that human behavior is confusing, it cannot be understood by only one of the two aspects of science and religion. It’s a huge tree of knowledge, with science as its roots and religion as the branches – and the multicolored leaves as the many interpretations of human knowledge.

I once saw a talk show ( I genuinely don’t remember which ) where a celebrity gave his ideas on science. He said, ” If there’s a moment in time when the whole world gets destroyed and a species like ours has to build back up from total scratch, there will be many variations in everyone’s beliefs. Everyone will have different stories for different things but science….oho science will always be there, always ready to present new discoveries and unimaginable things that even religion cannot fathom. Waiting till the end of time to just be discovered and forgotten again, a cursed and blessed cycle all at the same time.” I was perplexed that someone who didn’t even work in either fields of human knowledge had that much context in his mind.

Nevertheless, what he said was very true and you cannot change my mind whatsoever.

Kindness, virtue, heavy words that define human beings; they don’t mean shit. Sorry for the language, but it just shows how much I hate those pseudo qualities of a person. People who don’t follow this are recognized as ‘animals’. Why?

I mean, even if you don’t show whatever people want to be showed, you won’t stop being human, figuratively. Of course, if you follow that path your social standing will drop like a hundred kg bowling ball right to the ground. But there is a catch, there is always a catch. What people say and what people do are as different as Gandhi and Hitler. I talked to many people about what they will do if a person betrays them (mostly my friends) and of course they said that they will give that guy a second chance. But what I did after that was regrettable, and after some practical tests I came to the conclusion that not everyone said what they really want to. As it is depicted by this chart.

Of course, human behavior is something that can be both silly and unpredictable. Science has tried a lot to determine why this happens, and they say that some part of the brain does something and all that yada-yada-yada. But we don’t want to hear that, do we? We want to hear what can we do about it. How to think what the other person is thinking. What to do. What to say. And also take into the fact that we don’t want any philosophical crap, and a simple solution. Well according to me the answer is neither simple nor difficult. It is all experience. And I’m not talking about experience in real life only, I will also mention experience in media.

The media I’m referring to is vast and I mean immensely large. I’m talking about movies, shows, sit-coms, talk shows, dramas, animes, comics, you name it. You must be thinking “this guy is crazy” or some may even say “I understand what he is saying”. But after 10 years of age, I have been a crazy fan of literally every show and movie there is. But again, even if you have that “type” of experience, it doesn’t matter. Real world experience is obviously more important, and you can’t compare that to the fantasy world that you dream of (I’m looking at you, introverts). But pondering upon it, you may realize that if you compare human behavior between fiction and real life, there is not much big of a difference. They all feel hate, love, sadness, happiness and many other things. But every piece of media is directed or made by some different person, who have different experience and opinions on human nature which is depicted in their work. So watching these episodes and movies show how the makers think of the world. And I repeat, this implies to every piece of media. Experience in this field can be very beneficial, but I know people who have taken some time in realizing the difference, including me. I proclaimed myself as a “therapist” in 8th grade, and oh, was I so far off. No matter, I still think I gave some decent advice. I have had a lot of fun in watching many shows but one that I think shows true human nature is a show called “The Mentalist”. Not regarding that it is a murder/mystery show, it gives a very nice description of human behavior and how people can be defined in two ways- personality and character. You see, there is a big gap between these two words, personality is defined when a person is in the presence of other people. Character is the ‘personality’ of that person when he/she is alone. You may have a strong personality but that may not hold true for your character. Any smart person or therapist tap into that character to truly understand you.

You may think how all this is related to god. It’s not. It’s rather a defect that I think is not in the full understanding of god. Cause if he did have a more clearer picture of our character, the world should have been a better place a long time ago. But again, even science does not know how to control that. We are all persons of different and unique characters , but in some way or another, we are always influenced by a person, whether he/she is fictional or real. So feel good about yourself in every way possible, because you are you, nothing will change that.

I never got God.

People tell me you can get anything if you pray to him. Supreme is his existence, supreme will be his existence. But if that guy is so freaking supreme, what are the people doing on the streets? Why are there so many corrupt people? And dare I say it, why is there no “world peace”? Because with that much power in his hands, he may just go and kill every evil person on the planet. So why?

I believe the answer is simple. Something even science can approve of. This guy has such great knowledge of the universe and its laws of physics that he can “predict the future”. Okay, the reason I used inverted commas was because, for us humans predicting the future is within our grasp but it is nearly impossible. It’s like trying to understand girls. We are trying to understand but it is simply impossible. Same goes for this, you see, predicting the future is a concept that we know the path to, but trying to implement it is beyond our mini non-god minds. The concept is something studied in the chaos theory.

The chaos theory is the ultimate type of randomness, literally. It is a theory, which in my eyes, tries to tell you that life and everything that is in the universe is so random that we can’t predict it even if we work on it for a thousand years. This revolves around the butterfly effect, something stating that the smallest of events can lead up to something really major. If you don’t understand, think of it like this- you are walking in the park and you spit a chewing gum on the floor, the chewing gum then got stuck on the tire of a person’s bike. He tries to remove it in the middle of the road and he gets hit by a car. The car turns out to be belonging to some very important person. They take this to court, which turns into a big scandal. Due to which people get the idea to change the law system. A civil war takes place and almost half the country is destroyed. Now I’m not trying to be negative but this is possible, it may happen or it may not happen. But the point is that such a small thing can lead up to such a big thing. This is the butterfly effect, it is so versatile and unpredictable that we simple humans just can’t see it coming. The above picture shows that how events can occur in a pattern and can lead to different realities, also showing infinity in the shape of a butterfly(thus the name “butterfly effect”). And it’s not even rocket science, it’s just an event happening that leads to another event that leads to another that leads to another and so on until you can see the effect happening. Change a small thing and the whole process goes for a turn. If the cyclist had not stopped in the middle of the road, this would not have happened and everything would turn out to be something else.

But what does that have to do with God?

You see, I think God has such a complicated and fast mind that he can predict what will happen if he does a small change. The minor occurrences in nature that leads to how we live our daily lives is all just a very carefully planned series of events, and one that is infinite. So infinite that you can’t even imagine what must be going on. But you see, there is a problem, a very big stupid problem – Human Beings. We have developed so much than other flora and fauna, that our very existence has disturbed a process. If you look at it this way, that if we had not developed the thumb and not tried to do stuff with it, we would not be here. If you would go back in time and cut off the first homo-sapience’s thumb, disabling them almost completely, we would not have existed, or some other species may have been ruling over the world. So actually, it is god’s fault that he gave us this thumb, and nature’s suffering for it. I’m not saying that he did a bad thing, it may also be a mistake, or it may, it just may be possible that that even our existence is just a part of something that will happen after a million years or a even a billion. When people say you can change your destiny, they may just go and say that go and spit in god’s beautiful creation. Because them saying this is like an ant saying that it will one day make the Taj Mahal for it’s mate. After reading all this you may seem small, and I will make you feel small in the future a lot. But in the end, life is life and it is a gift, whether it’s a gift from god or not it doesn’t matter, for even being alive proves that you won a race and a race in which a million people participated, if you know what I mean. Make the most of all this time, because in the end, and I don’t mean to be rude, nobody will give a damn to what you may have done after a million years. Of course, unless you become some great person who invents time travelling or something like that, but the chances of even that are pretty slim. So don’t fret over being famous or anything, just enjoy as you always do, read a book, play a video game( not too much, obviously) try to learn something new. And it’s okay to feel small. Feeling small is also pretty small because many people feel the same way. I know, it’s pretty messed up.

For people who believe in solely science for the functioning of the universe, it is all a matter of whether a person or an object follows the laws of physics or not. They do not believe in magic, they do not think that somebody can use the Force with bare will, they proclaim that we are all but a collection of tissues that suck on energy. They call religious people “simple”. They are full-bloomed atheists. God, according to them, is just an excuse for when they are in trouble. Thinking that a superior being is controlling their lives and that offerings, sacrifices are a way to please him. Faith, love, happiness, hate- all are just a bunch of chemicals and electric signals going around in our brain. But I’m neither a believer in God nor do I don’t believe in him.

I go to the temple frequently to pray with my family. But looking at the different types of statues of the eternal beings, I wondered- if Christians believe in one God, if Muslims believe in one God, then why do the Hindus believe in so many? I mean, if God is so powerful, then why do we have different Gods for different things. Brahmá for creation, Vishnu for maintenance and Shiva for destruction- what is the point? And that was just the beginning.

Just thinking would have led me nowhere. So I took a deep interest in reading Hindu mythology, and what I found was eye-opening. I read many books and stories, even ones that were unheard of. Of course, I read the Mahabharat and the Ramayan and have my thoughts on them, but that is a story for another day.

First of all, in Hindu mythology, people do believe in God, but they personify it for story reasons. That means they try to teach moral values and ethics to people, especially children, through these stories. Though at first glance, it may seem as though many stories don’t revolve around moral values, but after some time it starts to make sense. Secondly, when something happens in history, it is usually recorded in scripts and books. But the stories we hear are not recorded, rather passed down generation to generation. And human’s basic nature to exaggerate things come into effect, making additions of magic, holy beings, when in reality, there must have been some logical reason. Thirdly, even after all the talk of Gods and entity’s ruling over people, there is one God who I think is the most logical and motivated guy ever- Krishna.

When I first read the Gita, I was confused. And I’m sure many are like me, with zero clue of what is right and what is wrong. Because during these teenage years, we are maturing mentally, and many small things in life start getting weird for us. We think about popularity, how to look good, self-consciousness is at it’s peak, and we are in a maze of problems. And we shouldn’t be ashamed, a lot of people tell us.

“Don’t worry, it is all just a phase.”

“Don’t worry, it will soon pass away”

But what I heard from the Krishna, was something a scientist would never say;

“Just shut your mouth and do what you think is right.”

Though these are not the exact words. I could sense the meaning with my teenage mind and encrypted it into teenage words. This I think is what people call enlightenment. It didn’t exactly solve all my problems, but rather gave me a nice method to solve them. I recommend reading it if you haven’t yet. But after reading it, I experienced what you would call the perceptive of the primitive man. This is where science jumps back in. In the future, I will talk about how people saw mythology with the eyes of someone who did not have phones and internet to give them a message, but only the medium of stories.

Thanks for joining me! 

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

I once heard a quote – “Humanity is but a thinking”. Upon doing a Google search of this quote nothing relevant came out. For this quote was aimed probably at a person who was mentally unstable and what everyone would call crazy. But it stuck in my mind like glue. I first thought nothing of it, but gradually I gained curiosity. Curiosity of how the writer had written this on a whim, but it is still lingering on my thoughts. So I allowed my thoughts to go amok, and some weird ideas came to my mind.