The world of Bypass

The title may sound interesting, but the entire thing that I’m gonna write doesn’t need to be so. Because it is about spirituality. For some, it’s so interesting that their expectations of me would tear the sky apart. And for others, they would just ignore it like it’s another ted talk. Anyway, none of that matters to me at all. It’s my job to put my thoughts without any filters (as long as possible) while maintaining the sensitivity of the topic and emphasizing its importance to people. These days this word has gotten to be so commonly spoken that people are often deceived into believing that if someone’s talking about spirits and stuff, they must have attained Nirvana. And then they just exhibit their following towards one godman, God-figure, and whatnot. Little are they aware that they’re showcasing their stupidity at the most and the worse part is that they’re pulling people who’re otherwise minding their own business into this vicious vortex of modern or post-modern spirituality.

I shall begin this by sharing my experience with you. Two days ago, I went to the temple of Lord Ganesha, and it was a very famous temple because it is one of the eight temples of the god in my state (Maharashtra). It was sudden planning so I didn’t really have any wish to bother him (the god) about it. And, I did not want to shift my focus from enjoying the view (inside and outside) to asking and begging. So, I was moving through the queue with my parents and read the instructions along the way. Suddenly, a couple with their kid passed by us, breaking the queue, and asked the watchman if they are allowed to go directly, bypassing the queue because their kid won’t stop crying. The considerate watchman led them through the shortcut for the same. They met the god before us. I should have been jealous that someone’s getting to see the god faster just because their kids won’t stop crying. Then another couple came in with the same reason and got away with it. I and father thought that we were fools who stood in the queue for so long just to see the idol whose liveliness is getting drained by its ardent devotees who bypass the rules simply because they don’t have enough patience to wait in the queue.

What is wrong with the species these days? Are we so occupied by daily tasks that we fail to realize the value of patience and devotion, a simple act to get closer to the god or ghost we believe in? Many of you might get offended by my question but it doesn’t really matter that much now. Because it is time that we start asking questions that will shake your foundations of false ideas and beliefs.

Do we really deserve to be devotees if we do not have the patience to endure the wait to reach any goal, doesn’t matter if it’s reaching greater heights in spirituality or any otherworldly goals? Because these days, people want to just skip to the best part and don’t want to endure or go through the process and then complain about why there isn’t any life left in things anymore. That is not how things will work all the time. Some people will show you the path and leave you on your own to traverse the path and maybe reach the destination if you’re alive till that moment. But other people like self-proclaimed godmen allow people to come in their specially devised traps and live in the falsehood that their godman will help reach their goals faster than other people through some imagined shortcut.

This debate goes on and on until it gets meaningless. There’s actually no shortcut or the long curve ahead. This is all made up and make-believe. Some things can be done in a smarter way to achieve a certain goal. For others, it has to be hard work, patience, endurance, and other qualities that might take a lifetime to manifest through practice. When I was a kid, my parents and grandparents used to take me to places of worship. Even I was impatient as a kid back then. That’s how you crawl towards patience. But none of them even felt a single time to bypass the process of waiting in line to get things done quicker than the others. Because this one small malpractice is imposed on children’s minds pretty quickly and they learn and do it for the rest of their lives, draining the life out of things by their own hands.

If you get sick, you have to take an entire course of meds for a couple of days, accompanied by rules of eating, drinking, sleeping, etc. Only then can you hope to get better in time and get back to your routine. The same goes for the things in spirituality. I will not claim to have knowledge of all this, but I’m certain that I’m aware of some fundamental things people turn a blind eye to. By reading this, it is not recommended that you reach a conclusion. Because that again is a type of bypassing a thought process that would turn into a reformed and improved behavior in time. Things are complex and they will ever continue to be so. But should that restrict us to be better than what we used to be?

I used to hear this a lot from my father, “Shortcut leads to death”. And I believed him. I’m sure many of you must have heard the same thing from your parent. As a youngster, I used to think of it in a physical and material sense. But later on, I realized that the statement continues to e correct in many senses we can think of- physical and non-physical.

I will not make this one a jargon of philosophy as it is nearly impossible to compress all the arguments regarding spirituality and shortcuts in one single writing. More will surely follow. And the experience I shared here was not even the first one. But as we know, to break a wall, one blow of a hammer may not be sufficient as the wall may be thick or load-bearing. But this experience was the one where I decided to finally break out and reach the open field of understanding. I will leave it up to you to decide the path since it’s proven that if the behavior is concrete, your fate is decided. Blaming the bodies in the space for your fate is not wise and it’s a bypass for acceptance of your own responsibilities. I’ll rest my argument, for now, hoping that it doesn’t suffer the bypass of the thinking abilities of humans.