there must be a god.

a friend of mine recently tried to correct me. fortunately or unfortunately, however, i am really quite incorrigible. i come from a long line of very incorrigible people.

in regard to my translation of the bhagavad gita's chapter 5, verse 16, in my posting of last time, you may recall that i loosely translated it as specifically forbidding the use of crack-cocaine or methamphetamine. he insists it should've read: 'those whose ignorance has been destroyed by the knowledge of the self, the knower, the real i, or God, shine like the sun with their realization. they are said to have attained God consciousness or supreme awareness.' some people are sooooo particular. i didn't want to make too fine a point of it at the time, but i am not comfortable with fundamentalists. they make me nervous. they give me the willies.

i was with someone last friday evening in ottawa who wanted to stop at the lcbo. what i saw there, as i waited in the lobby, actually felt shocking to me. it was a sobering experience. the amount of booze flowing out of that government-run establishment was phenomenal, and the average demographic was quite young. so excuse me if i take some small liberties with ancient outdated texts to suit our present-day societal issues.

what is the self anyway? really. what is God consciousness? what, for that matter, is God? i don't know and maybe i won't even be using capital 'G' any more either. i believe in meditation. my personal, direct experience has shown that it's a huge high, a real rush, a ballistic ball-busting buzz. i believe in meditation. i know how prodigious the practice can be, for relaxation, for a sense of over-all well-being. but, let's not get carried away.

meditation does lead to a direct cognition of the all-pervading one life. i get that. it leads to a direct experience of the water permeating all the waves, the sap running through the multitudinous leaves of a tree. i've got that. it's fabulous. but, i still wonder: where does that one life come from? i wonder where the water comes from, where the sap comes from. after so many years of meditation, i still wonder who was the first mother?

i've heard that people shine like the sun after smoking crack, at least for five minutes. of course, then they die early and badly. drunks at least get nice shiny noses on their way to a sad demise. so i am willing to compromise. i am not an unreasonable man. let's agree to translate that important verse this way: 'those whose ignorance has been partially destroyed by the knowledge of something we call the self, the knower, the real i or god, shine like the sun with their incomplete realization. they shine like people on crack or like drunks without any of the loathsome side-effects. they are said to have attained god consciousness or supreme awareness, even though they don't exactly know what that means.

kids' prayers to god, from 'beliefnet.com':
1. dear god; thank you for the baby brother, but what i prayed for was a puppy.
2. dear god; instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don't you just keep the ones you have?
3. dear god; my grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy. how far back do you go?