Pure Brutality

[Leonardo17]

A supreme being that leads us to spiritual enlightenment as if that were a real and definite and singular thing, and as if it were.... we could be lead to it.  I see a king and a soul forge.  You propose the same thing...and isn't this what you're always telling us, really, when you insist that your revisionist histories of the notion and it's great men show that you have a connection to them and that all other faiths validate whatever principles you hold?  

There is no king, there is no soul forge.  Whatever you think the contents of enlightenment are, they can only be harmed by this idea.  Subjugated to the point that you would shiv religion in it's defense, making a fool of yourself in the process.  We will always need religious teachings.  They will always be with us.  Rightly or wrongly, they're how we learn to live our lives in a manner that conforms to whatever makes us a single moral community.  Gods and self help hucksters are free-riders to that good, whatever it is, insomuch as it is, if it is.  They have nothing to tell you about any of it.

Meanwhile, back in mere reality, the main issue of 21st century spirituality is more likely to be which group of fucking warlords god handed a property deed to in some magic book.

   I am going to insist on the fact that you may be missing the whole point. Spiritual growth does not mean a mind-based understanding of an unproven doctrine based on submission to a man-like and quite tyrannical cosmic boss.
 

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   It’s more practical than that. It’s about growing within ourselves of a reality that is always there for us to reach, that we easily understand but tend to be forgetful about.
 
   See Sadhguru was once with is disciples listening to him. He made them purposefully sit under the Indian sun for more than half an hour just to show them how important the shade of a tree can be. It also doesn’t matter how you get in touch with this common denominator. Many great philosophers are pointing to that too.
 
   The issue is not that complicated after all. My lungs are not just my body. Half of it is outside, in the forest, in the oceans. If nature does not exhale oxygen from some places for me, I will not be able to breathe. End of story.
 
   So how does religion contribute to this type of understanding?
 
Short answer: In most cases it doesn’t. Many spiritual persons are becoming what they are despite religious teachings not because of it. But once you get there, you gain this “ability” to understand things better. And that’s when you start really studying parts of what used to be “a magic book”.
 
   You probably saw the movies “Contact” (1997) or Arrival (2016). It’s not that the message is not there. It’s just that it is mostly designed to be understood on a very personal level through the study of symbols and intelligently related stories that are (in most cases) telling a story beyond the most superficial level of that story.
 
   Anyway, I’m not an advocate of that. My activism is related to the fact that we all need to embrace change rather than sticking to the old ways of doing things. Remember the “shade of the tree” example above. We cannot treat everything in a “make more cash” kind of attitude. There has to be a more “Aham Brahmasmi” or “I associate with all the living” kind of approach. This approach is already here and it is growing.
   So as a spiritual person I just want to repeat that many of the “Religious” ideologies in this world are actually empty. I’m not just talking about acts of violence. I am talking about “Why does tis thing divide us instead of unifying us?”. And again: You need to invest some time and effort to get there. That used to be the basis of religious rituals in most religions. In time they became some dogmatic affirmations of unproven beliefs.
 
   This is a time in which the access to Knowledge is more democratic than ever. And I truly believe that if more people took the inner journey on an individual level, we may than turn this ship around and gradually embrace new models of doing things rather than going dtright into the iceberg.
 
   To me this is very real: I’ve got this cookies packaging right in front of me. The cookies were delicious. But this packaging is the problem. It’s paper with a layer of plastic. Because of the plastic it cannot be recycled. Nature might take care of it. But micro plastics take 500 years or so to disintegrate fully. And no one is even noticing.
 

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    Many people are not spiritual, but they are noticing while many others (who may have taken trips to Katmandu) may not even know anything about the subject. So my ideal is actually crazier than “The Kingdom of Heaven” of the Crusaders or even the Communist Revolution of Karl Marx. I believe in a gradual improvement of our energies and our relationship with this world and with one another.
 
   So I get it. Some people will understand my approach, others will not. But I really believe in this kind of stuff because otherwise there is no way forward for us as a specie.
 
   Do you understand?