I am not religious. I don’t know if I’d even be considered spiritual, though for many years that was a relatively safe and amorphous, untouchable philosophical temple to exist and operate from. The term “spiritual” is rather ambiguous and loaded, unclear and purposefully deflecting, harkening back to the “new age” deception, akin to the idea of love, meaning everything, and yet meaning something different to each and every one of us.
I am a conscious observer, and because I have yet to learn how to hear the still, small voice from within, I rely upon external inputs and research. It’s what I’ve done for the better part of 30 years, so it’s well ingrained and stubborn. I listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts, presentations, or interviews to glean a few intersecting ideas and commonalities, synthesizing what was there all along if I’d only paused for long enough to let it surface from my original substance and guiding essence. It’s that energy we all sense at one time or another, try to give it a name or to qualify or quantify it, pray to or ask forgiveness of, and fail because ritual and language and interpretation and translation dilute the fullness of whatever “it” is, never quite getting you all the way to what and where unfettered sensing and knowing is beyond our practiced mind’s capacity. Deep truth isn’t marketable and cannot be written down or shared. It is summoned, though even that idea is loaded with aspects of negativity and darkness, isn’t it?
I do not ascribe to the tenets of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Judaism, nor any of their hundreds of derivatives, nor do I have the time nor interest in learning more about them. When everyone believes that their calendar is the right calendar, their faith is the right faith, their church is the real church, and their heart is the only place wherein God resides, then, clearly, nobody is right, and very little that they believe in is based on truth nor derived from any genuine connection to nature or freedom of thought. It’s based on rote repetition, inculcated fear, and perhaps even a little misplaced paranoia. It allows for some kind of vengeful or jealous god, which is utter nonsense. And the simple reality that one may “convert” to another faith at any given moment when the wind changes direction clearly indicates to me that one never believed in the first place and will no doubt be converted again if threatened, coerced, cajoled, and convinced of a better option.
Whatever divides you does so both within your spirit and within the human collective. And it’s easy to suggest that all are welcome and that we should and must accommodate all faiths, colors, and creeds, but that is simply a coward’s excuse for engaging in political theater and, in reality, signaling virtue yet standing for nothing. You’re a liar. It’s not about accepting and including all. It’s about understanding that a construct is a construct, a fabrication, a story, and most likely a barrier between you and a fundamental truth. But you probably won’t go there because being isolated and pursuing a solitary path is terrifying and lonely. The animal side of you, still very much in the forefront of our general human expression, says that means certain death.
To me, it makes no sense whatsoever to conform to any religion or nationality because the truth must exist and eternally persist in the space between, where they all meet, where they can all agree, all the time, without question. That’s where I would endeavor to operate. Therefore, one would have to be willing to shirk nearly all dogma, doctrine, and ritual in order to even approach the simplest of the simple, the purest of the pure. The world today that exists in this strange realm only divides and dissuades us from our calm and knowing center, but it foments madness and chaos where none would otherwise exist. It injects, forcefully, values and priorities with ad campaigns and propaganda and mind control, forever leading one in a hundred different directions for a hundred different motivations and reasonings — all seemingly and convincingly rational and believable — to anywhere and everywhere but home.
You don’t need to be a patriot to stand for what is right and just. Canadians are just as proud of their cultural roots as Americans, Russians, French, British, Sudanese, Japanese, and Australians. Saying “Russian” is a remarkably reductive and misleading notion. Russia alone has 190 nationalities, which is to be expected in the largest country of the realm. Within that single federation are the most modern technocratic and political structures and expressions that exist, as well as the most ancient and traditional. The same, no doubt, exists in many other nations as well. Africa is a massive continent of many varied cultures, languages, and human expressions. Indigenous cultures still exist amid many Western societies, yet we rarely ask about who was living, existing, and thriving there before them. The evidence is all around us and under our feet that humanity has aspired to and achieved far greater heights in the forgotten, buried, censored, and systematically erased past. This is important because if we are convinced of nonsensical notions such as evolution and millions and billions of years of entirely theoretical and utterly ridiculous timelines, along with many other fallacious entrapments and dead ends of modern science and academia, we will forever be ignorant and enslaved by the many misleading stories and false narratives they perpetuate.
Today, there are places such as the religiously revered Silicon Valley wherein they believe, in their amusing trillion-dollar bubble realities, to be leaders of technological and human advancement (which is ridiculous and nonsensical hubris at best), while in obscure jungle habitats you would still find tribes untouched and isolated from anything allegedly modern and advanced. We believe ourselves to be superior in every way, yet they’d look at all of us, dressed in strange colors and chemically-treated clothing, carrying around and staring mindlessly at our “stupid rectangles,” as The Greek calls them, thinking we’ve lost our damn minds and that we’re possessed. And they’d be right.
This relates to what I wrote about uniformity and conformity across the realm. Having access to a medium such as YouTube, without having to travel to these places in person, you are able discover after a time that regardless of the language or location, the same underlying values and priorities persist across all cultures, religions, nations, and continents. So, too, do the same worries and fears. It is perhaps too reductive to say that we are all one, but, based on my observations, the evidence is clear. Infinite variations exist, but they all play out within a very recognizable spectrum of reality expression.
Within that concept lie the foundations of our persistent and uncomfortable internal conflict. We want to be recognized as unique individuals and that we can contribute and be of service in a way that is our own — and at the same time, we do not want to be separate from the tribe or the crowd. We need to belong, to fit in, in one way or another. We need love, acceptance, understanding, open communication, and communion.
We need to be beautifully and fully human, whatever that means to you. Though it may at times seem otherwise, no one is alone (ie. original, unique, special) in their struggles, and whether they’re in the room right next to you or in a yurt 10,000 kilometers away, they all want the same things out of this life.
Solvitur ambulando