BE VERY CLEAR

BE VERY CLEAR: Religion and spirituality are all about 1. Belief and 2. Experience.

Belief encompasses ideas about God, the Absolute, Consciousness, the divine, all is Consciousness, all is Brahman, all is Shakti, the Subtle, Causal, and Turiya Bodies, prophets, son-of-God, effectiveness of prayer, existence of heaven and hell.

Experience is all about everyday experiences of the world, sex, eating, seeing, hearing, etc., dreams, consciousness without an object.  It also encompasses all the meditative and pranayama experiences of light, the Void, emptiness, visions, subjectivity versus objectivity, experiencing the divine, God, Shakti, sense of presence, energy body, Kundalini.

Experiences also include experiencing the gray area of astral projection, shadow entities such as demons or angels, other worlds where there is an overlapping of individual internal experiences and the “outer objective” world.

But, experiences mean absolutely nothing until you talk about them and give them meaning, which supports or becomes a belief, which then guides your thinking, behaviors, and eventually your teachings if you become a teacher.

It is very, very difficult for people who experience various spiritual and meditative experiences, NOT to interpret them in terms of existing belief systems, whether of Christianity, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, of God, the divine, the devil, demons, angels, or theories of Consciousness, beingness, the absolute, the witness/witnessed.

After you have seen through the apparent truth of thoughts, beliefs, ideology, religions, etc., you see and understand it is all just talk, entertainment, artificially generating “special” or spiritual experiences through meditation, chanting, and conversion experiences.

All of this happens within an apparent external world of belief systems of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and increasing impacr of Mohammedism.  Then there is the pervasiveness of the ideas and ethics of capitalism. Socialism, Keynsian economics versus monetarism, New Age concepts, Shammanism, feminism, racism, authoritarianism versus democracy, etc.

We are lost in multiple seas of concepts and ever changing experiences.

What to do; what to do?

In the end it all comes down to living your life in a way that when you look back at your life in retrospect, you can do so without too much pain or regret, and when you look forward within the perspective of not experiencing too much regret or guilt in the future, how do I act?  Do I act with integrity, kindness, compassion and loyalty, or do I act in ways to maximize my own happiness in every moment?  Are we giving or greedy?  Are we patient or impulsive?  Do we strive or rest in ourselves?

Then spirituality becomes not a matter of belief or experiences, but of ethics, of becoming the good shepherd, or a wolf, a peacemaker or war monger, a helper or a taker.  Then by our example we affect others rather than by creating or repeating belief systems and spiritual practices.

However, none of this is possible until you have read about belief systems, experienced all kinds of meditations, spiritual experiences, and teachers, to realize all of this is just stimulation, distraction from living life, and just plain old entertainment.