Avinash Basu Week 4 SS1

As I read Attack On The Spirit and She Shall Not Be Moved, I felt a strange sense of empathy. Being an ambigously religious minority male, I could intensely empathize with the feelings of being unable to articulate the psychic damage with living in an environment that doesn't seem fit for humans much less a minority. I suppose I'm lucky in that being raised Hindu; there are dogmatic approaches to the religion but the base spirituality is essentially formless. Hindus are as Hindus do.
I also went to a Catholic school and was baptized.My "joke" is that I had to pick up devil worshiping from somewhere. Much less a place in which religion was a graded course and there was a debate whether to even teach evolution or not.
I don't believe there has to be a necessary divide between rationality and spirituality. There are people that die of diseases they thought they had and people cured from things which are physiologically impossible (i.e. Ozzy Osborne). The central truth is that there is so much unknown about the universe that our conceit that we can explain everything with a nice little ribbon on top is pure arrogance. The truly wise man understands that he knows nothing while the idiots clamor believing they have solved the universe using a book of fairy tales or a book of equations. Either system has its room for belief and to devalue one or the other is to throw your own self out of balance.
As far as mental health goes, I can completely empathize with not wanting to engage with the mental health system that seems to mostly exist to devalue people. It may not be its intent to do that but you cannot be open about your mental health without being judged incessantly and opportunists using it to push you down.
Like I said before, this is not a system fit for humans. There is no perfect representation of a person; only people pursuing their idealized image and burning down everyone else's for warmth.
Community and culture are the ways to assuage these wounds but unless it makes a buck then who cares?
And if it does then how much bucks does it make?
And how long until it defeats its original purpose?
Until then, sing your great songs, write your amazing poetry, dance the night aways, paint the demons and gods, and exorcize the eldritch truth haunting you.
What else to do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQK7KSTQfaw

I picked this rather appropriationy song because the lyrics speak about rivers.
It gives me a sense of peace as I wonder about the incommunicable things I will try to put into words here.
Everyone I know and love, everyone in my family, will end up in a river as ashes.
I will join that same river.
I woke up every morning for four years and stared at that river.
I feel it moving wherever I go.
Why do I not just go in now?
Will my disconnect disappear in the river?
Will they drift even farther away?
Its like debating dinner with friends.
Everyone argues for twenty minutes about where to go.
They choose pizza.
But some part of you knew they were always gonna choose pizza but they had to play the conversation anyway.
An exercise in futility.