body

Somehow, I think I might be able to find a better use for my life than attending lectures during which the prof paraphrases the textbook. Tonight's lecture was a complete waste of an hour-and-a-half of my time. Indeed, I learned more from my reading on the subway.
There was one good thing about the lecture - the last three minutes, during which the beginnings of a discussion were happening. A bunch of people in the first two rows (among whose number I am counted) began talking with the prof about some of the material. I love that sort of thing, where we can all just have a mental tennis match, every sentence beginning with "I think... I think..." But it is natural that I should love such discussions - every sentence begins with my favorite words: "I Think!"

That reading I did on the subway - I've been following through with my Be-A-Better-Vega resolutions, and studying religion again. I've been reading about Sikhism, and I'm getting into it. It is such a beautiful, thoughtful, and enlightened religion, a religion for the modern world. When Guru Nanak had his spiritual realization, the first words he spoke were "There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim." The old divisions of faiths had become obsolete.

As you may be aware, I have very little personal esteem for theistic religions. Indeed, I think that believing in a god is uncivilized, even barbaric. It seems to me like mythology, and that any human being, presented with the scope of knowledge we have of the world, would choose to believe in a deity completely baffles and repulses me. I do no apologize for this view.

Of course, that's just me. I should stress that your karma is your karma, you can believe whatever you want to believe. We're all going to the same place in the end.

But on that personal level of what *I* think is right, Sikhism appeals to me. It's so simple and elegant and clean. There are no moral commandments, just songs of joy. There are no divisions, just community. There are no strangers, only brothers.

I'm sure that it, like every other religion, has been bastardized by its practitioners (Some days I want to vomit, I feel completely sick by what some Hindus do in the name of their "religion," and I find it repugnant that I have chosen a label that clumps me in with people who believe in the caste system, or satee, or the impurity of women, or any of that other superstitious bullshit.) but in this moment, where I am discovering it as for the first time, it seems wonderful.