Reflecting on the Nature of Religion and the Religious Concept God
While the term religion is used to refer to any form of spiritual ideology or practice, it evolved over time to refer to a form of organized religion that’s prevalent in the world today. Although we’re still not allowed to express our opinion or point out what is blatantly obvious due to an ongoing threat of public persecution and social isolation, I believe it’s important to point out what can be readily known through our subversive history and what is commonly taught in Sunday school. While religion relies on a false image of purity, goodness, and righteousness, if we simply look at it in a clear and objective manner, we can see that it’s anything but that. While I don’t like to express disdain for any belief system, all of which have both a good and bad side, and I try to remain as detached and objective as possible, when considering just about all forms of institutionalized religion, it can become difficult to do. If you’re a religious person and don’t like to examine your own beliefs with an objective attitude and sense of scrutiny, or form hatred for anyone who doesn’t share your religious or political views, then you may not want to read this article.
One of the most objective ways to look at any organization without resting on what they claim to stand for, is to look instead at their culture and what they consistently produce. This is expressed in the axiom, “you will know them by their deeds”. It’s not what a person or organization says that reveals their true character, it’s what they do, and the culture they consistently produce through their actions and attitude. If we look at religion from a historical point of view, we can realize that it has consistently formed the basis for repression, control, moral judgement, persecution, hatred, and violence. It’s the means through which man is enslaved and taught to obey an imaginary power, usually formed in the image of a man, which is said to rule over us with a heavy heart and eerie sense of vengeance. Every war throughout history, and which we’re witnessing right now, was started over religious beliefs that contrasted each other. There is no clear line between religious institutions and government institutions, which originated as a single entity. The separation between church and state, between religion and government, is an illusion. They’re the same thing under different guises.
In some religions, their version of God promotes and outright demands violence, hatred, and murder of anyone who disagrees with them. The Catholic/Christian religion, along with all other major religions, was designed specifically to control and enslave its followers. The church set down a group of rules that were physically enforced by the church and the state, which originated as one entity. Most religions seek to govern and control the masses, rather than educate and instruct them in their own spiritual nature and soul’s evolution. It’s based on an imaginary (invisible) God, formed in the image of a man, who is set apart from his own creation, and lays down rules for us to obey without questioning, enforcing them with an angry wrath and threats of eternal damnation. Christian Missionaries set out on major campaigns to convert all Native and Peasant people to their religion, enslaving them as a means of building missions, farming, and doing all the physical labor. Psychologically speaking, religion formed the basis for mental illness because it used shame and guilt as a means of controlling people, causing them to repress and deny basic parts of their own inner nature, which became diverted into inappropriate and destructive behaviors.
Religion teaches man to obey rules laid down for them by an invisible governing power, symbolized in the image of a man (Jesus, Mohammad, Krishna, Buddha, etc.). This sets the psychological basis for accepting a human ruler positioned as a king, royalty, or authority figure as a divine being that warrants worship and obedience. They (whoever that may be) make up the rules that we must follow without complaint or stepping out of line, and if we don’t, we face serious repercussions through persecution, imprisonment, and death, with the underlying sentence of eternal damnation. Once the Christian narrative was firmly established through the creation of the Bible, passed off as “the word of God”, even though it was clearly written by a group of people, no one was even allowed to disagree or form their own ideas about the true nature of the divine and their own immortal soul. Study of our own mind and soul and spiritual practices formed through our own ideas about things was not only strictly forbidden, but it was also the basis for arrest, torment, public persecution, and often death. For this reason, all so called pagan beliefs and practices had to go underground, be taught and practiced in secret with no written record and became what was known as occult sciences.
It seems ironic that Jesus (the man) was deified by the very people who trialed and brutally murdered him as a public display of power. Think about the precedence this sets firmly in place. It contradicts itself at every step along the way, and even though it’s completely irrational and lacks a meaningful basis, people still blindly believe it without questioning. It sets the premise that he died for our sins – giving us a free ticket into heaven, regardless of our behavior and deeds, all we have to do is believe, pray to him asking for forgiveness, and worship his slain image hanging on a Calvary cross. The church, which originated as both church and state as a single entity, created a religious doctrine as a belief system and narrative that they also declared as being the only true and correct doctrine, and whoever disagreed with them and failed to obey, was publicly declared a heretic, tormented into a confession, and either imprisoned or brutally murdered as a public display of power and ultimate control. This was done publicly to send the message that “if you defy our rulership, we’ll do this to you too.” If we can kill the son of God without fear of consequences, we’ll kill you without even stirring up a debate.
The church set up a system where we didn’t even have the ability to communicate directly with God and had to rely on the church clergy to forgive us for our sins and do our bidding for us. They formed a system where an imaginary God, completely set apart from Nature and its own creation, who lived up in the sky or out in the cosmos somewhere, watching over us with a judgmental attitude and heavy hand, and who became enraged anytime we disobeyed. The model taught and firmly upheld by the Catholic Church instilled “slave values” where the object was to become meek, docile, compliant, and obedient. All other aspects of our human nature were suppressed or beaten out of us, making it futile to resist or rebel. This is expressed in the saying “and the meek shall inherit the earth”, which isn’t a reward for good behavior, it’s a prison sentence of slavery and forced compliance. Throughout history, right up until modern times, people were forced to comply with the church doctrine, or be ostracized, eliminated, or tortured and violently murdered. During the Great Acquisition, a campaign conducted by the Roman Catholic Church, which up until recent times was also the government, traveled across the world in an attempt to convert people to a one world religion and government, calling anyone who had different religious practices or was considered pagan a witch, sorcerer, heretic, or devil, justifying their right to murder them in an extremely gruesome manner, and wipe out whole sectors of society.
Like all things, religion has both good and bad aspects, beneficial to the safety and well-being of the general populace, promoting the group-herd mentality where everyone follows the same societal patterns of right-conduct, while completely destroying any form of freedom, control over our own destiny, or actively exercising moral sovereignty. Rules are necessary because many people are irrational, emotionally driven with desperate and erratic behavior, and victimize others through a sense of entitlement, superiority, or survival of the fittest, yet, in the most basic sense, we all have a right to think for ourselves, make our own decisions regarding our destiny, and be our own governor. In the highest sense of our divine nature, we’re all responsible for ourselves and capable of self-regulation and sovereignty. We’re all responsible for our own thoughts, attitudes, and actions, as well as the consequences they render. We are all creators in the most basic sense of how our mind functions, and we always become whatever we choose to be in thought and actions.
It’s ironic to realize that what is possibly the only true religion has been labeled “pagan” and portrayed as worshiping Nature, which is a fallacy in and of itself. Nature, and the entire natural world which spans the cosmos, is creation itself in an empirical and knowable form. Pagan practices work by way of natural laws which operate and are self-evident throughout the natural world. They commune with God through the natural world, which is the mind of God. Truth can be known by simply observing the natural processes going on all around us and of which we’re an essential part. God, in the most basic sense, can only be “known” through its own manifestation and outer reflection. God isn’t a superhuman that rules over us, its life itself in all its glory and forms. Everything is of God and contained within the mind of God, just as our reality is contained within our own mind and reflects back to us who we are in the greater sense of being reality itself. God is known and experienced through Its own creation, in the same way we can come to know ourselves through our own creation, which we’re centered within as a fundamental part of it. Everything that we know as the material world is formed through our perception of it, and our perception is a product of our mind and mental model.
There is no “out there” and “in here”, one is an extension and continuation of the other. Separation is an illusion created by our dual mind as a means of experiencing ourselves by being centered within our own outer projection. Our world and reality are a co-creation formed through a dyadic structure of our own dual mind. Duality is a law called polarity which is necessary to construct and maintain a 3-dimensional matrix, and is not an illusion, it’s only our perception of being separated from our own mental matrix that’s an illusion. When we create an idea of God as being separate from Its own creation, we reside in a fundamental illusion of our own making that becomes a personal delusion. What appears to be outside of us is a reflection of what’s inside of us. Not so much in terms of the material elements that make up the outer world, but in terms of how we reshape them through our perception of them as a means of experiencing our model of the world through them.
There is no such thing as “sin” in terms of being a bad person who warrants eternal damnation or judgment that stems from an outside source. We experience the direct consequences of our own thoughts, decisions and actions without exception. What we put out, always comes back to us ten-fold – amplified and expanded into numerous variations. What we do unto others is likewise done unto us by others at some point along the way. These aren’t lofty sayings; they’re designed to teach us about universal principles. They express universal laws, which means they’re always true and operate in a completely automated fashion without exception. We inherit eternally whatever we create ourselves to be. No one, in the spiritual sense, judges us determining our destiny or imposing punishment on us based on judgment. It’s all something we do to ourselves through our own decisions, mental creations, and actions. This is referred to as the Absolute Law of Karma and is not based on a belief. You don’t have to believe in it in order for it to be true. It’s based on intelligent use of our ability to shape ourselves using judgment, discrimination, reasoning, and rational thought in making our decisions and directing our own actions.
The God of religion, nearly always represented as a man-like figure, is our higher self and the Son (Sun) of our true creator, an androgynous being born into the world as twins, one masculine and one feminine, the Daimon and Demiurge that shape and maintain the material world. It’s an archetype that forms a basic part of our divine nature. We are our own judge, jury, and prosecutor. Not through a conscious and deliberate process, but through an unconscious process that operates faithfully without our direct awareness. It’s the true creative power of our psyche and conscience, always creating and transforming us, and the inner voice that teaches and guides us and is ultimately both our redeemer and savior. We are the savior we’re praying for. No one or no other power intervenes on our behalf and does it for us. We do it for ourselves by realizing our true higher nature as a creative and sovereign being, and by utilizing the higher capacity of our mind to correct our own perceptual and moral errors. We “are” the very source we’ve been taught to worship, and we are the savior we’re waiting for to redeem us of our errors in judgment.
All truth is only known through a direct response to what we perceive as being outside of us. We only know and experience our essential self through our relationship with our own perception of the outer world. This is the grand paradox of life that makes even the most basic aspects seem illusory and uncertain. There is no out there or in here, because it’s all the same thing being perceived from different perspectives and through different aspects of our own mind. We’re located within the center of our own mental sphere and mental projection perceiving ourselves through what appears to be an outer reality that’s set apart from us. Yet we’re the one creating all of it. We’re both the inside and the outside, the physical substance and outer field or waveform (the particle and wave) at the same time. We’re both our physical body and the reality correlated with our body. We’re the experience and the experiencer at the same time. We’re the author, director, producer, stage designer, and main star of our own movie. We are God having an experience of Itself as a unique possibility.
We come into the material world as a self-created archetype, and through a process of adapting to a specific set of circumstances and conditions that impose distinct limitations on us, we grow ourselves into a unique possibility for acquiring a particular type of experience. All self-expression comes by way of a dynamic set of limitations. We are all archetypal beings, which means our basic nature and character is a “universal prototype” capable of producing an infinite number of possibilities for the same idea as a life-theme or personal myth. Adam of the Bible wasn’t a man; he was an archetype of man that was used for producing mankind as an entire species. Adam Kadmon is the archetypal man as an idea-pattern used to make numerous variations of human beings, all of which follow the same general pattern while forming a unique personality based on the formula of attributes and qualities that make up their character. The term “man” isn’t referring to the male gender, it’s referring to mankind as a species of human beings. An archetype operates according to the fundamental law of “the One and the Many”, where a single prototype as a universal pattern-model produces many different types of the same species and the many form One as a universal theme that connects them all.
What separates us from other species of the Earth, which are all archetypes of the plant and animal kingdoms, is we are a hybrid species, both terrestrial and of the animal kingdom, and celestial, of the divine kingdom of beings known as gods. We’re both god and animal, bestowed with two aspects of the mind – a conscious and subconscious mind, and a higher and lower nature. Our divine mind and soul are comprised of the planetary archetypes of the Zodiac, which combine into a single archetype of our own making (many form One), and our animal soul and subconscious mind is formed out of the archetypes of the animal kingdom, commonly referred to as animal powers and nature spirits, another word for instinctual (blind) forces. Unlike all animals species born of the Earth’s archetypal essence and memory, all of which only possess the single subconscious aspect of the mind, we’re a genetically designed species, formed as a combination of both divine and animal genes. Humans have two aspects of the mind, a subconscious and conscious mind, which are complementary and function as a single unit, along with two souls and selves, which also combine into a single archetype. We’re the only species on Earth with two aspects of the mind, soul, and self, and that are capable of creating, growing, and transforming ourselves.
It’s the divine, conscious aspect of our mind that gives us the ability to be self-aware and intentionally create ourselves through our awareness. Our conscious mind is what makes us intelligent and capable of innovating. This is also the only part of us that’s eternal and immortal, capable of rising on the inner planes of pure mind and being drawn back into the heavenly realm of our origin after separating from our earth-bound body. When we die physically, our lower, animal nature and unconscious existence is absorbed back into the Earth’s astral field (atmosphere) of memory and instinct of the human species, and we lose our individuality as a divine being of our own making. We’re also the only beings of the earthly realm that are both mortal (physical) and immortal (mental) at the same time.
Our lower mind and earthly existence are a part of the herd or group mentality that lacks any form of self-awareness as an individual, and stays within the earth’s atmosphere, decomposing along with the physical body. It’s only our higher mind which creates itself as an individual of our own making that’s celestial and maintains its individuality after death of the earth-bound body. It’s only our higher mind and celestial, divine soul that returns to the heavenly realms of its origin. Whatever part of our nature we identify with and use to shape ourselves through the experiences generated and integrated into memory of ourselves (only our higher mind creates and retains memory of ourselves), determines our destiny as either a mortal or immortal being. We’re not guaranteed immortality in terms of residing eternally in a self-aware state where we perceive ourselves as an individual of our own making, we’re both mortal and immortal, and become one or the other through our perception and how we identify with our own experiences. What’s of the Earth stays within the Earths atmosphere, and what’s of the heavens, stays within the heavenly realm.
Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher
