Yoga and Horror

I just spent the weekend at MO*CON, a horror/fantasy writers convention. Why was I there? Hopefully to further my writing skills. While there I just happened to have been chosen to be part of a panel that discussed the use of religion, translates to me as spirituality, in the horror/fantasy genre. My response to the question, "What's your religion?" was, "a Yogi (if only aspiring - between you and me), and a monist." The panel moderator found that intriguing, and I promptly found myself seated on a panel with the likes of a magician, a humanists, a former Presbytarian minister now Jewish authoress, and a self-proclaimed atheists amongst others. A part of our discussion revolved around the idea of faith. Faith, per the atheist, is non-existent, there is only calculated risks. When I suggested that calculated risks is virtually the same as faith, there was a disagreement. All in fun, I was reminded of a conversation that I had with my teacher long ago. I had a strange request then, as did others in my group.

"I want to see god."

He said, "Who told you that? You read that in a book. No one really wants that." I balked, but he made sense, after some explanation.

What you really want," he continued, "is to be free from suffering."

I hadn't really thought about these things as deeply as the sages had in days gone by. The three sources of suffering were 1)what I caused myself, 2) caused by beings around me, 3) caused by unseen forces, not gods or demons per se, but maybe the planets and such. In any case, I never asked about seeing god again because I saw that this just wasn't that practical. My friends on the religion and horror panel thought that was a fair assessment of things. The discussion continued on for some time along other lines, but all in all MO*CON, the conference, was interesting experience for a yogi who writes.