Make Your Heart a Temple - Who Do You Worship?

What's the difference between an atheist religion and a cult?

What is the difference between a techno club and a temple? 

I found out that any space can become a temple, or any person can become a God, when you give your energy and devote yourself to it. 

In my search to find balance, I am trying to escape from the dualist mind that often dragged me to think in terms of polarities. I tend to think that things are good or bad by nature, when I found out that, although intention plays a big role here, like the representation of the Yin -Yang, there is light within darkness, and darkness within light. We might find, for example, an abusive leader behind a church, or that one angel in the night who took care of us when we felt sick in a club. And also, isn't the judgment of what's good and what’s bad attached to the eye of the perceiver? 

For a year, I used to go dancing every weekend to the same club. The amount of energy I released there is immense.  Almost without knowing, I would do my spiritual practice. Dancing was a form of meditation, where thoughts would slowly vanish and make space for movement to take over. Where I navigated through physical and mental discomfort, but would keep pushing beyond, letting go of judgments, likes and dislikes, to give space to an oasis of contentment and appreciation,allowing things to be exactly as they were. I would try to lift the last drop of love and compassion towards the heavens, to tell God that I was grateful for my life as I danced. I wanted to be happy in the name of all the suffering being on the planet, hoping I could share with them a piece of it, hoping I could send bliss to every suffering being. But all of this was being done in a dark, stinky, hell-looking club where most people were under the effect of hard drugs.

 This place was like a temple, and not just for me. Here, we would unite every Sunday to devote ourselves, but the question is to what? Is it to music, to drugs, to a certain lifestyle, to our community of strangers who feel like not belonging anywhere else? It did truly feel like it was a diverse group of people from different social, racial, migration backgrounds, from different ages ranges, diverse gender identities and sexual orientation, that we would be merging and coexisting in a strange form of harmony. 

With time, as my yoga practice went deeper and when I understood that the sense of community was builded mostly around consumption, I reached the conclusion that the place where I was spending all that time and energy was devilish and that it was damaging to even step a foot in there. 

I did my Journey to India a year after I quit that ritual, where I met another form of devotion that seems harmless: kirtan. Chanting the holy names of Radhe and Krishna. 

It felt like my energy was finally well directed. That the desires of my heart to share, spread, direct my spirit were fulfilled in the right space. However and funnily, this seemed to cause a lot of controversial reactions from a lot of friends and family members in the west, who seem scared of me getting abducted or brainwashed, who look at me with these warning eyes. Even my parents seemed to be more at peace while they knew I was clubbing every weekend in a city like Berlin. 

When I came back to Berlin to celebrate my 29th birthday and after a short celebration at the park, I refused the idea of my friends to go dancing on that day. Was my father who told me on the phone:  “Don't fall into extremes. Believe everything, believe nothing. Lend everything, buy nothing” and although I don't tend to follow his advice, this little push was enough for me to revisit the place that I considered “devilish”. 

What I found there at the club, was nothing but myself. I was confronted with my thoughts towards the rightness or wrongness of the space, that judgment over others people acts and bodies, and finally that unavoidable need to fall into the cadence of the music, feeling it like a boomerang swinging my body and mind back and forth, feeling the texture of the air and merging into the eyes and movement of the people I danced with. I understood that all that time, it was nothing but myself, glorifying or demonizing the space I was at. But like a knife can be used to take somebody's life or to chop the vegetables that feed you, it is no good or bad by itself. This thought expanded the understanding of the power of our creative being, that can add so much flavor into life. But now I know; what we add on, is not the ultimate truth nor essence, if any. Going deeper on this thought, observing and learning about atheist religions and cult, I had to wonder what is the difference between worshiping a Guru like Osho or worshiping an enlightened being like Lord Buddha, when the admiration comes from the heart of the worshiper? I leave this open question to be answered, and I would be happy to hear your thoughts on this.