Multidimensional food for thought...
“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will have to transcend a personal god and avoid dogma and theology. Encompassing both the natural and the spiritual, it will have to be based on a sense of intelligence arising from the spirit of all things, natural and spiritual, considered as a meaningful unity.” ~Albert Einstein
Man has become a spiritually neutered animal, a subtracted being disconnected from the whole – in mind, body, and soul. What has been cut from him is Nature itself, more specifically, and consequently, his own spiritual nature: his connection with his inner animal – awe and creature -astonishment that has the potential to transcend itself and achieve the numinous, the kind of overwhelming interconnected feeling that can be felt balls to bones, ovaries to marrow, and has the potential to make god-animals/animal-gods of us all.
Alas, the loss of Soul has become untenable. We have forgotten how to speak a language older than words, because we rely far too much on outdated traditions reeking of parochial values grown unhealthy and uncouth. Dogmatic religion is a direct result of this phenomenon. Hegel’s “silent weaving of the spirit” has unraveled into discordant knots of anxiety and neurosis. It is time to counteract dysfunctional religiosity and its dogmatic ideals and antiquated values with an updated spirituality that heals the dissociative split between Cosmos and Psyche, between Nature and the human soul.
Our overly-religious culture can be reborn, but in order to be reborn into a spiritual one it must first learn how to die. It must die a beautiful death, with the mighty seeds of spirituality planted into its rotting corpse. Nietzsche once declared, “God is dead!” But it wasn’t enough. It sent shockwaves of change in patterns of thought, at least for those who actually think, but it was met with a religious cognitive dissonance that absorbed it and continued on.
We simply weren’t ready for God to be dead. We weren’t ready for the end of religion itself. But now, with burgeoning spiritual practices and modes of enlightenment rising all over the planet, each able to see past the Big Con of religion. Now we are ready. We’re ready to ride the wave of the Great Mystery. We’re ready to hold the pain of being mortal creatures living out short lives within an unfathomably ancient cosmos. We’re ready to open up, to release our death anxiety, and to surrender to something greater.
So can we still call it “God?” Sure, why not? But now we’ll finally be able to stare into the vast awe-inspiring cosmos and state, with self-evident and interdependent truth, the following words once spoken by Meister Eckhart, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.”
Dogmatic Religiosity
“There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.” ~Daniel Dennett
What is the hidden function of dogmatic religion? It is the presentation of the inexplicable by the impossible in order to steal the minds of the unthinking.
The fly in the ointment of religious devotion, isn’t just the devotion part. The Achilles heel of religious devotion is that it is blasphemous to question the tenets of the faith. Indeed, it can even be considered “evil” to question one’s faith or to challenge the Gods one has devoted himself to. This leads to woeful ignorance and willful myopia. This makes the devotees all too easy to manipulate and control, whether it’s to the extreme extent of slavery or the covert extent of debt-slavery, people become easily convinced and overly fearful of authority. How else does one explain how Christianity and Islam, two religions originally based on loving tolerance, are now tyrannically intolerant? Alas, they began as spiritual practice, but dissolved into dogmatic religiosity. As Carl Jung Intuited, “The religions of the world suffer from increasing anemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, mountains, and animals, and the God-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious.”
But, as James Joyce stated, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” So all is not lost if you’ve found yourself spiritually bamboozled. Which most of us have. We are all born with the faculty of wonder; it is the duty of the individual not to lose it, or to be distracted by the “monkey-holiness” (Campbell) of the slothful who lean on spoon-fed, hand-me-down religions. But it is not easy. Religious indoctrination, like cultural conditioning, is difficult to overcome. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological hang-up that even the most intelligent of us can easily get hung-up on. But, as P.C. Hodgell said, “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
Religion is tempting because we think it fulfills a purpose. And it means well, but inevitably falls short due to its own shortsightedness. It provides a crutch for the spiritually perplexed, for lost spirits and broken souls. But religion is to a broken soul as a crutch is to a broken leg; whereas spirituality is to healing a soul as science is to mending a broken leg.
Religion puts you in comfortable shackles; spirituality sets you free into painful self-realization. Religion has faith in blindfolds and tells you what to see; spirituality removes the blindfold and teaches you how to see. But What you see can often be terrifying. Religion wants to keep you small, meek, fearful and adaptable to authority. Spirituality wakes you up to how big your smallness really is, which can give you the kind of power that gets power over power itself. It was Rumi who said, “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” Indeed, religion keeps you small and indifferent to the universe; spirituality helps you understand that you are the cosmos and the cosmos is you.
But it’s not easy. Love and fear are at constant loggerheads inside us, and sometimes inversely so. The religious man looking to possibly break away from his religion to become a spiritual man will be “afraid” to leave the religion he “loves.” After all, he has almost all of the cognitive biases and logical fallacies inherent within the human condition working against him. As Oscar Wilde famously said, “Experience is the hardest teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.”
But on the other side of the coin there’s reason screaming at us. As Carl Sagan succinctly stated, “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”
The evolution of man itself advances depending upon how often he can exchange outdated, parochial methods of achieving enlightenment with new, more holistic methods. Leaving dogmatic religion behind and evolving toward an adaptable spirituality is precisely such a sacred exchange. But it comes down to a critical choice, and one only the individual can make for herself. As Bill Hicks said, “It’s just a ride… And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.”
Adaptable Spirituality
“Mystery is a place where religion and science meet. Dogma is a place where they part. Awe-based psychology is a place where they can evolve and reunite.” ~Kirk Schneider
If, as Voltaire claimed, “Religion began when the first conman met the first fool,” then spirituality begins when the first soulful skeptic reveals the spiritual bamboozle of the conman, and thus relieves the fool of his ignorance. The conman is then forced to reconcile his guilt, or not. For “when an honest man realizes that he is mistaken, he will either cease being mistaken or cease being honest” (unknown).
Here’s the thing: we need to drop the idea that religion and spirituality are one thing. They are enemies. It is religion that destroys all possibilities. If you feed religion, possibility will be destroyed; if you feed and nourish spirituality, possibility and diversity become manifest. They are not one and the same; they are two separate concepts, and antagonistic to each other.
As such, true spirituality is largely lost in the West due to the ruthless suppression by organized, state-level religions and oppressive ideologies. But spirituality is moral, despite what man-made laws or indoctrinated laws are considered to be gospel. As H. L. Mencken surmised, “Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.” As such, the spiritual person is not averse to becoming amoral if need be. As Arthur C. Clark observed, “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” But the spiritually robust individual, adaptive and self-overcoming, hijacks morality right back from the steely jaws of religion and brings it back into alignment with a healthy/unhealthy mythology, despite parochial notions of good and evil.
What remains then is a moral plasticity that is adaptive to the numinous experience of interdependence. It teaches spiritual humility, human compassion, and eco-centric and egalitarian, as opposed to egocentric and sexist, values. This moral flexibility all at once subsumes all religions under a giant umbrella of spirituality. The spiritually self-actualized individual is thus free to pick and choose the healthy and good from all religions, while discarding what is unhealthy and immoral.
But such spiritual acuity also shines a spotlight on the fallibility of the human condition itself, and upon how easy it is for people to get things wrong. As such, it takes both religious and spiritual proclamations with a grain of salt. For as Mark Twain pinpointed, “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly, teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” Whether we call it spirituality or not, any basket that we are tempted to put all our eggs into must be held suspect and handled with circumspection.
In the end, the adaptive spiritual individual overcomes even her own death anxiety, becoming a mediator of natural terror through her own robust soul-craft. She becomes a facilitator for those trying to bridge the gap between suffering mortal and flourishing mystic. A spiritual person becomes then in art, literature, and religion the extinguisher of death anxiety and the sacred overpass toward a new way to triumph over it. She subsumes the sacred. She frees the human animal to become individuated in ego and self-actualized in soul, despite the petty fears of afterlife pedaled by those still locked within a dogmatic and religious construct.
As Adolfo Quezada said, speaking of lost spirituality:
“God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can’t find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain.”
AsWithin
SoWithout
http://www.zengardner.com/spirituality-vs-dogmatic-religiosity-guide-spiritually-perplexed-2/
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By Design
by Iam Saums
"Nothing is ever as it seems.”
Soul Sacrifice:
Life as we live it is an elaborate illusion devised by the few for the devout acquiescence of the many. Most, if not all of us, don’t want to truly live. We just act like we do. We exist in a vacuum of being, conditioned to fear life as much or more than death. The synthetic comfort of the common median separates us from the power of our choice, focus, purpose and destiny. We allow “life” to tear our heart out of our chest while our spirit languishes in the purgatory of our reluctance and the custody of our self-righteousness. We wager our present moments for the promise of our future to escape the torment of our past.
Smoke and Mirrors:
Nothing we experience in the three dimensional domain is real. The authoritarian imposition of reality we are programed to accept and adopt or our staunch belief in it does not make it genuine. It is a contemporary fairy tale controlled and manipulated to amuse, bewilder, distract, distort, entertain, and ultimately imprison us. It is a colossal, elegant complex network of stimuli strategically timed and articulated to evoke emotional, mental and instinctual reactions. We measure our lives not by our actions, creations or intentions, yet by our responses to totalitarian motivations in the global laboratory of society.
On Purpose:
There never were, are or ever will be accidents in reality. Only circumstances and occurrences that string us along enough to ensure our engagement, investment and participation. Where once we sustained social pandemonium with our attention, intelligence and money, now we intravenously enable it with our emotion, energy and soul. We are desperately and hopelessly addicted to the casual rush of our inherently unique drama, lifestyle, opinion, perception and significance. This is the formula that keeps us attached, engrossed and obsessed with the perpetual illusion of ordinary life.
The Human Schism:
Our learned fanaticism with all people and things shiny and bright has become a common psychosis of devotion and vicarious existence. We are mere shadows of the human beings we were destined to be. Before we have the opportunity to identify, develop and experience our personal power and purpose, it is slowly siphoned away from us by a myriad of energetic, social, institutional and professional entities. Our lives were taken from us long before they even began, replaced with the American Dream of “someday, some one, someplace, somehow…” It is a fantasy that isolates us from everything from the universe to ourselves.
Spinning Wheel:
All that we sense in the three dimensional reality is an inversion of perception. Common sense, reason, belief, history, intelligence and meaning in society has been exploited and transposed into a deception of experience. Reality has been spun and projected millions of times and ways over the course of human existence. It is as mutable as public opinion, yet always intended for one sole purpose. To blind the human race from its oblivious enablement and involvement in a relentlessly secret and insidious agenda. For multi-national corporate, executive and financial organizations to accomplish a silent global takeover in the name of elitist conquest.
All the World’s a….
Our involvement in society is a performance. When we are young, we are graded by a system of standardized examinations. It is not to determine our potential from our intelligence and proficiency, but to prepare us for a lifetime of servitude. We are institutionalized to be left-brain dominant drones to best serve the mental matrix. (Please see my article “The Heart of It All.”) As we mature, our grading system is measured in monetary and status criteria as well as our rate of conformity. We are a puppet upon the stage of reality. We perform our part on the bottom of the pyramid never realizing if we walked away, the system of enslavement would fall.
The Grand Illusion:
Reality is not life and life is not reality. These are two very distinct experiences. Yet, they have been collapsed into one for the purpose of generating a more convenient and lucrative mainframe of human existence for the handful of organizations by whom it is controlled. Everything in our experience of reality is altered and manipulated to further the agenda of the few at the cost of the many. The world we see and accept as real is the dark side of the proverbial mirror of life. It is not the truth that has become the greatest threat to humanity, it is reality.
Business as Usual:
Reality is a 24-hour business. It is always open and selling illusion at a tantalizing price most can’t afford. Reality is not bought and sold by us. We become indebted to it with our apathy, compliance, indifference and resignation. We willingly hand over our creativity, intention, love, passion, personal power and trust multiple times a day every day of our lives. This is our true currency we exchange for artificial belonging, comfort, meaning and security. Human reality is enabled with the investment of our attention, energy, fear and obedience. The business of reality is to charm us with an illusion of life to restrict us from our truth.
Remote Control:
Every aspect of reality is controlled and manipulated. Our air, water and food are riddled with chemicals to contaminate us and suppress our consciousness. News networks use fear as a weapon to modify public perception. Social media and the sports and entertainment industries are designed to distract us from and desensitize us to the atrocities, inequalities and tragedies their sponsors commit every day in their quest for profit. Weather patterns are engineered to produce massive storms with an alarming frequency of devastation. Scientists are now discovering that reality is a holographic projection from a distant, unknown origin in the universe.
The Architects:
There has always been a veiled network of elitist individuals whom have held sovereignty over the world for centuries. They have hindered the progression of the automotive, energy, health, medical and technological industries all for the sake of reaping high yields from low investments for global domination. They invented and manipulate the financial marketplace to ensnare their consumers into the slavery of debt. Yet their most devious practice is preying upon human emotion and thought with fear using the media, politics, sports, religion and war to enslave the human race into two-dimensional reality.
Hacking the Ego:
Human control begins and ends in the complexity of the ego. Our programming in this world is inevitable. It is only a question of the degree of our indoctrination. All of us have lived through years of imposed, intense conditioning. As human doings we are defined by the boundaries, circumstances, environments, ethics, laws and standards set by the authoritarian organizations our egos enable. Our false personality receives and sends distorted energetic frequencies to disrupt our intuitive and emotional potential. We are first slaves to our own design well before we become victims to the villains of the world.
Courting Consciousness:
The acceptance and application of our consciousness is critical to the transformation of our present experience. There is no place for apathy, cynicism, deception, fear, greed and self-righteousness in our enlightenment. We either allow ourselves to be crippled by the iniquities of our human design or we choose to transcend them and express our true power. It is up to each and every one of us to become the manifestation of our truth, love, purpose and destiny. We are the emanation of all creation. We are the personification of all possibility. Each one of us is the only solution we will ever need.
“I never knew who I could become until I freed myself from who I am.”
Multidimensional food for thought...
The Warrior’s Way – 50 Ways to Open Up to Personal Power
by Alex Vandenberg
“A life so concluded, that God is not robbed of the soul, which yet can with dignity win the world’s favor: that is a worthy work.” ~Wolfram von Eschenbach
When wandering into the wilderness guided by the light of the heart, one embarks on a journey that can be downright taxing, toilsome, and austere. Climbing out of Plato’s Cave entails all sorts of slippery slopes, twists and turns, dead ends, cul de sacs, ominous signposts, hazards, etc. Paradigm shifts are a matter of course as you are essentially unlearning everything you learned so that you can start to learn. Along the way, one inexorably discovers all sorts of little gems that start to add up. If these gems are invested properly they tend to yield a profitable return. Some of them come in the form of little nuggets of wisdom that serve to weaken the hold of the ego as the dominant part of the personality, thereby help us dust off that connecting link to Intent.
While reading through the following, take notice of how some of the sentiments subtly hint at the nature of the Self and the Alchemical Great Work, not to mention the universe which is an energetic expression of the Self. In addition, take notice of how many possess an inherently paradoxical flavor which tends to mirror the definition of the Self put forth by Dr. Carl Jung– a super-ordinate, transcendental, paradoxical third outside of spacetime and yet containing it. Taken together then, it’s almost as if we somehow get closer to God by becoming like God. As if the prescription for opening oneself up to Power is cloaked in contradiction. Which if you think about it makes perfect sense. For how could one become Whole by eliminating half? Is not the iron forged between the hammer and the anvil? Did not the Buddha follow the Middle Way?
In point of fact, the term “oxymoron” (“pointedly foolish” in Greek) is a poetic device commonly found in eastern thought utilized to point past those pairs of opposites to the Castle of the Grail where time and eternity are but one. Examples include the “Manifest-Hidden” of the Upanishads, “the full void” of Zen Buddhism, and the “stone that is no stone” of medieval alchemy. One can’t help but also think here of the wave-particle duality principle of quantum mechanics. Ultimately, this, “and yet,” principle encapsulates the very essence of existence. As Joseph Campbell wrote in Creative Mythology:
“Apparently in every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor – whether as particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain.”
With all that said, and without further ado, let’s now take a look at the warrior’s way:
Be the Word behind words.
Know that you don’t know.
Create and destroy; give and receive.
Sacrifice in order to elevate.
Neither neglect nor worship the body.
See Life as the Lodge.
Practice random acts of kindness.
Embrace Simplicity.
Negate nothing except weakness within yourself.
Do by not-doing.
Assume responsibility for your actions.
Live in the Here and Now.
Accept whatever Life throws your way.
Erase all lines.
Listen to the Voice within.
Disengage while engaging.
Know that Power commands you and yet obeys you.
Act without expectation.
Learn to laugh at yourself.
See calamity as opportunity.
Get rid of imprisoning belief systems.
Go your own way without looking back; follow the pathless path.
Compete by not competing.
Know that surrender lies in the heart of freedom.
Benefit all; harm no one.
Embolden the ego to subdue it.
Love all aspects of Life.
Transcend Doubt and Fear.
Know that Attitude alone can take you to the heights.
Feel more, think less.
Lose yourself in order to find yourself.
Show gratitude and compassion.
Cultivate enthusiasm.
Do not define or show yourself.
See enemies as friends.
Be firm, yet flexible.
Break up routines and habits.
See everything as Thyself.
Live with purpose while taking nothing seriously.
Exude uncanny cheer.
Be proactive as opposed to reactive.
Think by not thinking.
Do not complain.
Trust yourself.
Pursue your passion.
See every experience as Divine.
Take no credit.
Let go of attachments.
Balance work and play.
Embrace Stillness and Silence.
( ( ( NewDayDawning247 ) ) )
...Well Thx Stick.....Im In.....Awe.........<3
~Thanks for dropping by, Andromedan. First & foremost... everyone has to have their experience. This includes, of course, what 'one' ultimately believes. Nevertheless, we stand at a spiritual crossroads, where there is a clarion call to deconstruct religious dogma that has been specifically designed to keep humanity in mental bondage. So from that perspective, not only is it our right, but it is our prerogative to share the means & ways the shitstem is meant to keep the individual from truly honoring & trusting their own experience & intuition. The true heart of the emerging paradigm is experiential... it's not dependent on dated, patriarchal interpretations of God that simply don't serve what is being revealed... what is being remembered about who & what we really are. I don't mean to imply that there isn't great value in religious doctrine... there is... but it can only be truly accessed by those willing decode the Alchemical Gold from the utter bullshite. It can take a bit more effort, but from where I stand, it's worth the work. A simple example would be the pressing issue of the 'Second Coming.' When removed from Archontic works that would have masses of people believing in a 'Judgement Day' where a vengeful god will return to wreck havoc on Humanity for our wicked ways... we can look at inward at knowledge that point to Jesus, & countless other 'Christed' beings who have graced the Gaian-Matrix with the message of Unity-Consciousness, as harbingers of our latent abilities. Brethren & Sistren to be acknowledged eye to eye, not on bended knee. So, the Second Coming isn't really about the return of one Christed Yogi... far from it... it's about return of Christ-Consciousness to us all. It's about the reclamation of our birthright as Spiritually-Sovereign beings, not bound by anyone else experience but our own. Then again... maybe it's all a dream? ;-) ~InLight555
AsViewed
SoPerceived
Some consider that the New Age is simply another religion, yet initially we can state that in fact a new age occurs with the passing, or waning of an earlier one, and Aquarius is one of multiple past new ages....We can say that Jesus spoke for his "new age" period, in which the Piscean cosmic dispensation, was coming in, with it's signature characteristics, upon the aethers, of devotion, sacrifice and martyrdom....Themes, which some today cling to, for they cling to the past "new" age and not so the KNOW and current event.....Aquarius is coloured by magick...by ritual...by organisation......It moves humanity from a state of ideals sought, to a state of magickal sciences, made manifest.....
Noting, as ever the law of correspondences, which allow an understanding of this factor, as the 6th ray pisces is based upon the glamour of the astral ideal....an ideal based upon, for example, the "Holy Grail." which is sought, quested for, suffered for, BUT never made manifest upon the physical plane...As it remains, mirage like, a glamourous sight never to touch...
And many priests, monks, knights and bishops have voluntarily suffered in that hapless quest for it...
Now, in contrast, the Aquarian age is one of knowing the magickal sciences and not only holding our grail in our grasp, but also, drinking from our grail and bearing within it, the waters (energies) of higher sciences and higher consciousness...based upon a more unified humanity, than ever before...Aquarius bears the waters of magickal science made manifest upon the 7th plane..the physical realm...
To harness the energies of Aquarius and to attain freedom from ignorance, is what Aquarius offers all.....I have found this to be true in my life...You will too, at some stage...
A new age is an astronomical and astrological truism...and repeated 12 times in a 26,000 years cycle...
A lot of truth in this......And there is a very big difference between an esoteric truism on the one hand and a religious dogma, on the other....Sometimes the human languages do not suffice to convey meaning, if an attempt to teach esoteric sciences and truths, is made......I will say that English is a relatively successful international language and, just as Latin did in centuries past, may be utilised to convey a limited amount of truth in literature.....HOWEVER, this is necessary because most people are not telepaths, nor sufficiently furnished with the means to connect to self, as yet....Albeit, that evolution is a work in process, within each incarnated human....The art of SELF-REALISATION is actually what the Ascended Masters seek to teach us...How to become yourself....Your true self, while in the flesh...There is no one size fits all approach, as offered by religions...Each person must know thy rays....It is the best way to make progress......It is not a religion, though something to certainly learn, yet without eclipsing any other of life's experiences, in the process of learning....
That Einstein quote has much merit....There are indeed spiritual laws to learn...Yet these are not dogmas, as religion would have us believe...They are simply esoteric truisms to be learned and applied in lives...
For example, the Church of Rome made the "doctrine" of re-incarnation anathema, at the 5th ecumenical council of Nicea, 5th century...against the Pope's wishes, but as stipulated by Roman Emperor Justinian......
Of course, this is as absurd as making sex illegal, or dancing on a Sunday, a civic crime...It flies in the face of nature and reason...But then, that is the Roman church, in a nutshell.... :-)
So the modern Churches have excluded an occult truism, of the human spiritual condition, under the law of return....and all at the behest of a power crazed Roman emperor.....And most do not even know it...
Of course, in no way does that impact upon the law of return and karma, as nature and spirit cannot be contained by any church authority figures...
~Good stuff, Drekx... thanks for sharing your experience. ~TemetNosce247