What I’m always standing for

This kinda sounds like my views.

I kinda feel like speaking my views today, because sometimes I find my views under atttack, sometimes from my own thoughts.

If you want things to be simple, I’m an individualist, and my prime principle individuality over collectivity, that is the freedom and uniqueness of the individual over conformity to society, government, or any kind of collectivity. Like any good individualist, I value independence and self-reliance, and living your life for yourself, and the way I see, those things are the path to personal freedom. There’s two ways of being free. First is to remove all sources of oppression, the other is to be independent and to have the personal power to stay free. You’ve got to be strong to keep your freedom, don’t let anyone take it away from you, use you or take advantage of you. I value anything that leads to actualization of what I value, leading me to be respectful of anarchism, libertarianism, or anything that values freedom and individuality, or shares my values, but most of the time, I trust my own instincts and my own mind.

Speaking of my values, as I may have mentioned in my very first post when I introduced myself, I value freedom, individuality, personal power, personal responsibility (by at least recognizing that all your actions are your own), and justice. I don’t limit my self by other people’s morals, and carry my own as my sword. Don’t be confused, I can be laid-back, but like having a warrior thing going on. Anyway, I don’t have many morals, but the ones I do have are important, and I keep them as strong as possible. I mainly just expect people to be aware that their actions are their own, and everything that implies. Do whatever you want, but be aware that you are the conductor of your deeds, and don’t expect some of your less than savory actions to go unopposed. This is why I don’t like hypocrites, or people who pretend to hold the values they say they do. I also don’t like those who blindly cling to authorities, gods, dogmas, and saviours as masters of their lives because they don’t have the strength to save them selves, much like why I don’t like religion as a concept.

I also heavily oppose tyrants, and hate them to the bone, along with anything that would go against our freedom and individuality. When it comes to them, all bets are off in my mind. As such, I value any act of opposing them, even the most violent acts of opposing tyrants, after all they should know what their evil actions and their oppression of free will would bring them by know. But I also stress the importance of making sure new tyrants aren’t born. Often times, our weakness, ignorance, and apathy, along a sense of “back to the way things were” or “back to normal”, leads us to fill the void left by the removal of tyrants with just something else to put our faith in, another master, false god, or object of worship to blindly obey. This is an incessant cycle that keeps us from being strong, and it happens because we don’t ask for more. We don’t care that the next oppressor will come along, just so long as this one’s gone. Until most people realize this , they’ll never allow themselves to be free and be strong.

Thank you for listening, and remember to rebel.

Hinduism: A Love Story

The Aum, the primal syllable and sound of creation in Hindu thought.

Hinduism is one of my favourite religions in the world. For a few years I’ve been looking into it, and I’ve liked what I’ve seen.

Shiva, my favorite deity

For starters, Shiva (also known as Rudra, Isana, Mahadeva, Maheshvara, Mahakala etc.), who I sometimes refer to as the greatest god. He is such a rich character. He has such a great aesthetic. He is insanely powerful. He embodies both light and dark qualities. He is associated with fire. He has material and earthly qualities, as well as cosmic, spiritual, and divine qualities. He is fierce, and somewhat laid-back. He is a warrior, and yet somewhat philosophical. He is ferocious in his justice and power, and great in his other virtues. He has intimate connection with creation and destruction, and primal forces. He has access to great pleasure, and is associated with said pleasure. Infinite is his freedom and his free spirit. And as I said in my post The Joy of Chaos, he qualifies as a god of chaos, due to these amazing qualities. With the exception of his ascetic persona, he is everything I could admire. I can relate to him as a being who reminds me of my alter ego. And there are other deities in Hinduism I like, especially goddesses. The Hindu philosophy of god is also quite cool. I’ll try to sum it up without grossly oversimplifying it. There’s the Great Spirit, the Brahman, and it’s a cosmic force or principle that pervades all of existence, and the millions of deities (Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Ganesha, Brahma, Lakshmi, etc.) are different aspects of the Brahman, or ways of worshipping that god, and even worshipping deities is just a different way of being spiritual.

Durga, warrior goddess of power and an aspect of Shiva’s wife, Parvati (or Shakti).

The other source of my admiration is Hinduism’s flexibility. For a while, I thought that, based on the stories, Hinduism was, in some ways, just like the Abrahamic religions. I realize now that I am only partly right. Hinduism, or Hindus, have interacted with Christianity and Islam, and as such have adopted their ideas. British censures have also damaged Hinduism to a considerable degree. I heard from a Hindu friend of mine that the stories in Hindu texts aren’t what matters. They’re not important. They’re just allegories meant to convey various ideas. When I told that my philosophy is heavily based on freedom, personal power, and individual responsibility, and wondered if I could find something in Hinduism that was in sync with it, he told me that not only is it very much in sync, but it is a conclusion of that philosophy. He said “You are in charge of your life of (Karma) making sense of the world that you live in (Dharma), not some God or planet. YOU are the Spirit/God you are searching for in the highest heaven (Advaita Vedanta)”. Hinduism is a religion in which you can do anything you want and follow any spiritual path, in both cases suiting you, and this flexibility is derived from its nature as a pluralistic religion and spiritual philosophy.