When people first crash into spirituality, meditation, chakras, kundalini, gurus, Indian mysticism, Taoist breathing rituals, it feels like discovering a backstage entrance to reality, as if everyone else has been walking through the lobby while you just found the hidden elevator to the control room of existence, and suddenly you are convinced there is something behind the curtain that you were too blind to see before, some missing fragment that will finally repair your evolution, your relationships, your vague dissatisfaction with being human, so you dive in with appetite, days collapsing into weeks, weeks dissolving into years, you learn the language, you stop saying you are confused and start saying your energy is blocked, you stop being sad and start being “in process,” you upgrade your vocabulary and your posture at the same time, and mostly it does refine you, it sharpens you, makes you more disciplined, more perceptive, and then one day, after years of chanting, breathing, fasting, staring into candle flames and into your own abyss, you land exactly where you started, square one, only this time armed with better metaphors, and you realize the treasure was never hidden, so you want to burn the costumes, drop the gurus, uninstall the chakra software from your nervous system, dismantle the spiritual persona you curated so carefully, and return deliberately to zero, because the paradox is ruthless, you had to go through it to see through it, you had to exhaust transcendence in order not to worship it, and some people never exhaust it, they settle inside it, polish it, accessorize enlightenment, become luminous or become brand ambassadors of the absolute, and in my own plunge into the Kali tantric current I would not erase a second, it became my second bloodstream, I wanted everything, spirits that come when the lights are off and the body is open, entities that lean close when you practice too deeply, chakras not as pastel diagrams but as violent interior galaxies, the sexual voltage of consciousness ripping through bone and muscle, not comfort but exposure, not serenity but combustion, until saturation arrived, not rejection but saturation, when infinity itself becomes repetitive and transcendence loses its exotic glow because you have overdosed on it, and you stand there thinking perhaps I just want to be human again without metaphysical accessories, and from that position the question of God begins to look embarrassingly medieval, not historically medieval but psychologically, because we cannot tolerate that this universe might simply exist without supervision, without a celestial project manager auditing the stars, so we insist someone must have built it, must have signed the paperwork on creation, because the alternative is terrifying, that existence does not owe us a narrative, so we invent a cosmic architect and then we kill for him, we draw borders in his name, we bomb cities for him, we whisper to young soldiers that God is watching, watching what exactly, watching us slaughter each other over brand loyalty to the infinite, and this obsession does not stop at traditional religion, it leaks into modern spirituality too, even those who claim they stand beyond religion still carry their own refined metaphysical dictator in their skull, and if someone asks me whether I believe in God I do not tremble, I say I do not sit around thinking about God, I think about states in which my consciousness dissolves without friction, about energies that feel clean rather than coercive, because maybe belief itself is a crutch, maybe what terrifies us is not godlessness but the possibility that existence does not require authorization, that there is no divine signature at the bottom of the cosmos, and yet we crave certainty that someone assembled this entire spectacle, because chaos without a CEO keeps us awake at night, and then we reduce the unspeakable to a tribal emblem and call it sacred, and if you ask me what God is for me I will speak of the Tree of Life from Kabbalah, not as doctrine but as image, an organic network of consciousness branching through billions of years, a source flowing without beginning, and we are one filament in that vast architecture, the origin both intimate and incomprehensibly distant, so vast that forgetting it becomes inevitable, the roots buried under their own abundance, and perhaps you do not merge with that source like a drop in the ocean, perhaps you move within what I would call the Cosmic Region, not as a place but as a field of awareness that surrounds and penetrates everything, a zone of origin and dissolution that does not need worship but recognition, and still the religions that claim to speak of the same source glare at each other across history and ignite wars, preach salvation and manufacture enemies, which makes navigating this in the brief duration of a human life feel like walking through a theological minefield, and when someone asks whether I believe in life after death I answer honestly that I do not know, but if they ask what I will do after I die I see something anyway, I see a dark blue lake in an interior Tibet, a holographic afterimage of stillness, and I hover above it as consciousness, not alone but waiting for someone I love with irrational loyalty, maybe not just one presence, and in that suspended state we pulse without moving, Nispanda, no motion, Niskriya, no action, an exquisite paralysis of awareness, until desire, kama, punctures the silence again and drags me back into flesh, where I will fall in love with the same dangerous intensity, because pain, longing, birth, death are apparently still worth repeating, and until then I float in that private stillness, and yet even the phrase life after death feels like cheap packaging for something wordless, and when people ask how I perceive religions such as Islam or Buddhism I answer without pretending neutrality, in Buddhist environments I often felt more at ease, yes, but let us not romanticize, there was nationalist violence in Myanmar and monks in Thailand who traded meditation for meth, the robe does not sterilize the nervous system, it only changes the costume, and Islam gave me aesthetic moments that were undeniably powerful, dawn chants vibrating through tropical air, language as sonic architecture, and yet some of my encounters with groups of Arab men in Thailand felt closed, insular, almost aggressively self contained, a kind of tribal bubble that made my stomach tighten and made me leave cafés rather than share the space, not a universal judgment but a bodily reaction, and the theological claim that only one path secures paradise strikes me as metaphysical arrogance whether it comes from a mosque or a cathedral, Catholicism included, which I reacted to early, allergic to the aesthetics, allergic to ritualized guilt, to the spectacle of a child confessing sin before understanding freedom, and yet religion fascinates me precisely because it reveals us, because myth is blueprint and allegory shapes imagination, and I would teach animism, Voodoo, Catholicism, Islam, Bhagavad Gita, Quran, war and poetry side by side in schools if I could, because ignorance about religion is more dangerous than belief in it, and in my years in India, buried in meditation, I entered samadhi states that others might dedicate lifetimes to, and they did not impress me, they felt like memory rather than achievement, as if I had always belonged to that lake of stillness and had lingered there for thousands of years until I could not bear the absence of her eyes any longer and returned out of longing, out of addiction to that gaze, which is why the question of God feels almost insulting to me, because while we wage wars in His name the real metaphysical event is standing in front of another human being and looking into their eyes without armor, and if you truly find those eyes the entire theological argument collapses quietly on its own.