Consciousness is no stream. It is a bloody rock.

You can speak honestly only if you speak for yourself.
The problem with our times is that it has become almost impossible to speak for oneself.
There are so many things you have to consider, that having an honest conversation with others is totally not possible in our times because people do not  have the opportunity to talk to themselves, then how can they converse with another?

but having an honest conversation with yourself cannot be compromised with.
Whatever are your ways to have that conversation with yourself, have been taken away in this time.

Here are the agents I believe take away the opportunity to talk with yourself.

1) Denial of god:
If we keep aside every crooked things that have happened with God and religion, we must understand that talking to god is one way of talking to someone you can talk to while looking the entity in the eye.
If you cannot look god in the eye, you know you have failed somehow, and so it is a good check to understand what is going wrong with you.
You really do not need anybody to tell you what is wrong with you.

So when a society as a whole denies god, it is a huge problem.
Plus society offers you many things as solace, so what if you don't have god, it says, look there is superman, look there is your friendly neighbourhood therapist, look, there is your family, ah you don't even want to look that way.
At a point in the individual's life, the lack of honesty will start eating into the person.

I myself deny there is a god,
but i feel that understanding must come upon persons in their own ways.
and all the things that the society does, that you see as a blatant denial of god, are genuinely only forceful ways of telling you, listen, hurry and grow up. Come on up here.
Sometimes the force of it, destabilises you.

That is what is happening to me right now.
I have been destabilised by the understanding that was there in me, from the very beginning. But, I cannot accept it.
I am afraid still that things will go wrong, that is why it has managed to destabilise me.

2) Belief in the existence of god:
This is the one agent that robs you almost entirely of the possibility of having a conversation with yourself.
This belief is something that was instilled in us, early on.
Now, if Hinduism told you from the very beginning that there is no such thing as god, why did you let fear take you towards god?

Why are you fearful, Hindu?

3) The importance of religion
It matters because you can always lean on it as it is a storehouse of knowledge. There is no loss in falling back on knowledge.
Do not fall for the mere sound of barking all around you.
I wondered about the Faustian legend for so long,
why, why is it talking about a person having sold his soul for knowledge as if it were a bad thing?
I would gladly sell my soul for knowledge.

Gladly.

Does the West miss God too as much as we do? Oh dear, I was thinking the West is where reason is. So there is no international court anymore, where I can take my humble petition to. My petition against the concept of god.
I want to fight it out, like my forefathers did, with a healthy debate, which of course has been made impossible. That is why I began writing this thing anyway.