Hey guys, my name is Rishab. I was born in Bangalore, India but as a child i grew up in Dubai and now I'm studying in States. As a kid , all my religious experiences involved visiting various temples and the various rituals I used to witness there. Perhaps the most profound of my religious experiences were the several pilgrimages I made to Tirupathi as a child and few when I was a little over ten. I still visit temples to this very day everytime I go to India to visit my grandparents there but perhaps the only reason I do go there is because I don't want to offend my family. When I turned ten, I radically changed my views on religion in few years I went from religious, to questioning god, to agnostic to atheist to strictly anti-religious. I'm 18 right now and I'm starting to reconsider my views on religion because I feel like I've lost my way in life or a better way to put it would be I'm trying to find my way in life. I just have a few questions I would like to be answered. I have little knowledge compared to most of you on Hinduism but is it true that god isn't a supernatural being watching us from the skies but our consciousness within us?
Perhaps the biggest reason why I stopped believing in God is because I couldn't get around the idea that they're were supernatural beings in the sky watching over us. It just seemed pretty stupid to me. I believed atheists were so much smarter than everyone else but I also had a doubt in my head how some of the most intelligent people in history were religious and surely the thought must have crossed their mind too yet they still believed in God. What I want to know is, what is God? How do I connect with God? and is the Bhagvad Gita is abstract and symbolic and not true historical representation of an actual event?
and I have also been experimenting with psychedelics like lsd and shrooms in order in have a deeper connection with my consciousness but so far no luck also I have been taking only small doses. Are psychedelics okay to use in order to achieve consciousness?