Horizon.

When I was kid I used to pray every night before I went to sleep. Every morning, before leaving for school, my mom would make me say a small prayer in front of the idols of God and I would kneel down and bow my head in front of these idols. It was a habit. I never asked why I was supposed to do it. As I grew up I noticed how my father never bothered much with prayers and rituals. He would stand by idly when we visited temples. I found the idols strangely beautiful and I found ringing the bell very challenging so I'd do it along with mom. In fact as a kid, I even liked visiting temples. As time passed by I noticed that my mom was religious to a healthy extent. She never had blind faith. She spent an hour chanting prayers, cleaning the idols and even went to get flowers every morning. My dad would just ridicule it all in humor. It was funny, how he would tease mom when she would seriously be chanting during a puja and my sister and I stood by silently. Eventually my sister was the only one who would do as mom says and I would be with dad, being funny with the flowers and teasing mom trying to annoy her. When I started sharing the room with my sister,I would still pray every night. But I started wondering why. I did it then because my sister did too and i was rather scared of her.

In school we learnt about science, big bang, the beginning of the universe. I realized that the stars in the sky are not the souls of the dead watching over us but actually just stars and planets from galaxies that are far from the distance that my mind would ever comprehend. And just like that the beliefs I had as a child, the questions i never asked all of them started to become clear, simultaneously making all concepts of an almighty creator of the universe hazy. I stopped praying every night. I stopped kneeling before God on early mornings. I used to find comfort in my mother slow and silent mumbling of a tiny prayer each time either one of us stepped out the door. I used to find comfort in her worry for us. But by the time I was in high school I started dismissing it. I never told her that I know she prayed for our well being all the time, I just mocked it every time I walked out. I refused to enter temples when she would drag me along. Sometimes it would be to pray for an upcoming exam that i had to give, but i still refused to go. I'd stand outside and mock all the people who entered with hopes and faith, silently inside my head, mumbling to myself. I would even refuse the sweets that came from the pujas and temples every time mom offered them to me. Of course i would eat it later, i just didnt like being told to eat it when i didnt want to.

Lets just say i became an unappreciative ungrateful spoiled brat who didn't respect her parents beliefs.

I grew up in a very open minded household that was balanced by the contrasting characteristics of  my mother and father. Naturally, i was the kind who questioned everything.

Until a few months ago I would have one answer to a commonly asked question.

"Do you believe in God?"

I would say "No, I am an atheist."

Atheist.

Its a strong word. As strong as te word God. Even the sound of it, its the kind of word that can lull conversations in a room full of chatter.

People would often ask me "Atheist or Agnostic?"

For the longest time I have juggled between these two words, never even considering another alternative. After an enlightening lecture by Dan Brown, I walked out of the auditorium with a baffled mind. He had talked about Science, Religion, Faith, the Universe and God. At the end of the event he was asked, "Do you, writer of worlds bestselling scifi novels, believe in god?" His answer was somewhere on the lines of believing in simply complex human bonds and connections. The coincidences that bring souls together which connect in the most surreal of ways. After the seminar, i ran into an old school classmate.

He asked me, "So do you believe in God?"

And for the first time, in a long time I just said "I really don't know". I always thought agnostic people were stuck ups who were trying to be diplomatic and running away from decisions. Obviously, I have questionable opinions.

Since that day I have avoided the question like a plague. Why is it such an important question anyway? Who cares right? Just live your life, who cares if someones watching over?

Yet again, that would be the real plague. To avoid and ignore curiosity so as to live an easier life.

So after 17 years of having a very confused state of mind, here I am today, 3:31am, 5th February,2015, I present a concept of God.

So the universe started, how? Google it and you will find thousands of results, explanations from all kinds of fields. I don't want to go with any of those. Burst of energy, from an endless void of nothingness and boom. You have a universe. I believe there's been many cycles of these booms. That maybe we are not the first universe. Maybe the birth and end of a universe is an ever expanding infinity of circles with a diameter that marks infinite sets of two points, one is the beginning. The other is the end. It goes round and round and round. With no particular end or beginning after all.  And everything within this universe follows the same agenda.

Begin, live, end, begin again.

We all begin from a point on this circle. Everything abides by the pi.

And we all end. Become the point and start all over again. This i say under the concept of "we are all energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed". Yet another begin-end-begin again.

So after eons of time passing by, which also never stops, it goes on, starting no where in particular and ending no where all the same, {Notice the pattern} milky way the galaxy we call home shows up. Stars are born, systems are formed, our Sun included in this mesh.

I dont know much about birth of stars. I remind you, these are just thoughts clogged in the mind of a confused 17 year old. They have nothing to do with science and facts. Mere theories.

So sun begins to exist, a ball of heat, hydrogen and helium[?]. Its existence leads to formation of  a solar system consisting of what are remains of the being born process i.e planets. One happens to be Earth.

Earth takes its time to get its shit together and cool down and over the years it has the perfectly balanced and correct materials and elements to harbor life. So it starts again, a cycle within a cycle within another. A single celled organism blooms and years later it becomes multi-celled giving rise to plants, animals, mammals, fishes, reptiles, dinosaurs, etc etc.

Also humans.

So from a rather long and complicated procedure we are born out of other humans after being part of them for 9 months, Just like the sun was part of the universe as a whole until it got its own identity and then earth became its own and began from within sun.

So basically lets just limit ourselves to earth[to keep it simple]. You and I are made up of a million cells that were once just part of the earths surface. We learn to walk, talk communicate, connect and we grow up as the earth ages. We take our planet for granted and get involved in our selves, making an identity of our own. Becoming person from people and an Ankita Dhal from a long line of Dhals as a whole.

We go through pain, happiness, sadness, dejection, despair, difficulties and adventures and live a long life. Some of us get to experience love and heartbreak while most of us discover bonds of friendship. We grow and we keep growing until our circle ends. We die. Eventuallly every person you ever knew dies and all your remaining shreds die too.

Theres two ways to go from here, either you burn and become ashes[like earth was from the suns beginning], you fly around for a while, in grey particles as small as dry skin cells, every part of you in a different area of Earth, all of it will eventually settle down and become once again a part of the surface.  OR, you are buried which means decomposition and quite literally becoming a part of the earth.

So one way or another, You begin from Earth and you End there. Maybe after that you become a plant that gives flowers and pollinates and etc etc etc.

MY POINT, after this terribly long blabber session, is that, dont you think its incredible and too coincidental that all these patterns exist?

As a human, no matter how badly I treat my earth, Earth will still take me in just the way it let me out. There remains no concept of heaven or hell. We all end up here. I think karma will get to you during the limited time you have on this planet and even if its the last few breaths of desperation and guilt that surround you during death, you will know what your re-pension for all your sins will be. We never know the pain anyone goes through so you don't actually ever know if anyone is paying for their actions or not. But the fact that we all end up in the same place tells me that this one life that i have, that I am conscious of, will be enough for all the good and the bad.

We all harbor our demons and angels, just like that we live through our heaven and hell until we have done it all and finally we all come to an end.

i.e, Earth, for now I will stick to that. These patterns, these circles. These weird coincidences and an endless spin-cycle of life is what I think God is.

Why should God mean an almighty who created us. Why cant it be the creation and everything within that creation itself?

I see God everywhere, i feel it in the connections i share with the universe and the beyond. I fell it in smiles that strangers give, I feel it in love, in family, in undying bonds of friendship, in the smell of rain, in the sunshine that hurts my eyes sometimes and in the morning dew.

What we don't get is that we are not separate entities. we are not living or non living, matter an anti matter, day and night, sun and moon, we are not darkness and light because for me they all end and begin the same place.

They begin and end somewhere. This somewhere is the intersected region of the venn diagram that is all of is in our entirety,

Today I have created a new question to which i hope to find the answer.

I hope to find this somewhere within all of us that connects everything and nothingness. The answer might be God. I believe this somewhere is within us all.

Kinda like the horizon, a definite of the indefinite. An ending that seems like a beginning.