All of the competing organized religions argue and cajole you into believing that they have the perfect vision of god. And once they have gotten your attention and appealed to the natural “god-sense” within your heart, they start demanding that you participate in weird and unifying rituals to strengthen the spiritual sense of the group.
If they can get you to publicly confess your sins and to weep about them, they have you just where they want you…dependent on the spiritual medicine that they dole out to the true believers.
If a religion is appealing to your ego by saying that you are “chosen” by god, wow, just wow! Of course, I want to participate in rituals that emphasize my unique spiritual character in the eyes of a god. The Jews hold out this promise as do the strict and rigid protestants’ who say that only the “elect” can come to faith in god. So if perchance, you find yourself “unelected” in the world, man oh man, you’re in deep shit in the eyes of god.
And what’s so great for the religious organization is that you have no true way of knowing whether you are either chosen or elected, which means they can lead you around with a chain through your nose. Of course, I want to go to heaven and eat ice cream and not get fat!
Other religions have precepts that you are required to follow in order to become one with god, yet as the practice drones on, first with joy at the belief that you have uncovered true spiritual vision, then out of habit and fear of losing the promise that the religion has offered to you.
So if this is so, maybe we all need to step back a minute and reconsider our belief systems and to test them and try them in the crucible of critical thinking and analysis. When you take this path you will be condemned by most religious organizations, because members are not allowed to question the vision and laws handed from on high. You must trust in faith alone.
So let me ask you a question; what is the basis of your faith?
All religious or spiritual belief is centered within you. If this is the case, and you surely must admit that it is if you meditate just a bit upon it, then you are the center of all religion within yourself.
It is your faith, it is your connection, it is the spirit of God flowing within you which is your religion. So within the microcosm of the One which you truly are, the very substance of God, what flows from you in worship of your Father and Mother, is the most important and efficacious religion that there is because it is only by reaching God within ourselves that we can become truly One with our Father; One with our Source.
Of course, there is a mighty problem with this truth, and it is that in order to worship, adore, and love the One who has created you and the One who upholds you, it is required of you to do the work. It requires a mighty casting down, and a determined toughness and discipline in reaching up.
Religion gives you all the answers, ready made, just like a microwave dinner; no fuss no muss. The priest will tell you what to believe and give you the rites and rituals to find their god.
Yet dwelling within you, God is. And not only that, everything you are passing through is also God. Even if your lips never raise praise to your, Mother or Father, they are upholding you, indwelling you and allowing you to share their power to cast your world.
So if there were to be a religion of yourself, what would it be? First, it would be glorious and ever abiding within your presence; the very substance, the subtleness of self, conscribed by the power and presence of the One. A uniting of the spiritual essence of God with our own.
A uniting of the spiritual essence of God with your own is All of religious faith and you hold it within your grasp at this very moment.
As the Neo-Platonist would say…the path to God is no path, because it is within you and surrounding you at this very moment. You just have to take your spiritual blinders off, and allow you spiritual essence, your subtle body to unite as One with the love and light of God.
Quietude, Love, Gratitude, Empathy and Awe are all tools to unleash the power and light of the One within your own being.
Don’t be afraid to tread your own path; I have it on great authority, that those who attempt to transverse the Way, even if they should fail and come crashing down, are more worthy than those who take the easy way, the way of men.
Stop, be still, and know that you are the very essence of the Living One. There is no need for a catechism. No need for a creed. No need for ritual or mortification.
The only requirement is for you to admit that you are of the very essence and substance of your mother and father. Also, you have to see that all of the Human are of this same form and substance. Once that understanding is conscribed within your heart, the way that you live will change, as your ability to see God in others, will allow you to apprehend God within yourself.
And what joy and light will spring from out of your being as you, your being, your spirit, your subtle nature which is connected with your ethereal body in the Akashic realm; as all of what you are begins to unite with God as One.
Religions hate the individual that treads the direct path to God, because they have no way to chain you to their beliefs. You’re either with us or against us! No skipping and dancing your way to God for you!
Only spiritual nut-jobs, are fearless enough to tread their own path to God, that they have blissfully cast before themselves.
How would the spirituality of the world be lifted up, and the nature of existence change for the better, if each of us used the gift that God has given to us out of love, and we tread our own unique and transcendent path to the One?