Religion is Dying... It just doesn’t know it yet. Spirituality, however, is facing a Renaissance.
Our future is shaped by the views, behavior and consciousness of our future generations. Those who are taught to think freely are no longer bound by the tethers that constricted past generations; they intuitively know what is right, and naturally understand what is wrong. “Thy shall not’s” are no longer needed – and in fact harmful – to the liberated mind. And so Organized Religion’s great run – which lasted about 3000 years – is already on its deathbed. In 3-4 generations, at the most, which are nothing in the greater span of human history, it will become merely a reflection of our story as people - one that has defined us as a species, for better or worse.
Spirituality, on the other hand, will prevail. We are spiritual beings. Our vessel is nothing but flesh and bones; our soul does not reside in our limbs, tissues, head or even our hearts – ask a person who went through a heart transplant, he or she will tell you that. Our soul resides in a plane which cannot be accessed, quantified, or computed with the most sophisticated lab equipment; how can a scientist measure a mothers’ love to her child? How can he quantify someones’ fear of the unknown?
“That God does not exist, I cannot deny; that my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”
Jean Paul Sartre
We are all different, living in a subjective reality that can only be truly evaluated by our own unique circumstances. Suffering is subjective; the emotional anguish of a rich man is just as raw as the torment of the poor. Circumstances divide us; emotions unite us. Our grief, anger and fear are universal, and so is unconditional love. That is the only objective truth; everything else is a synthesis of man-made assumptions and the subjective experience of those who made them. In our suffering we cling for control, desperately trying to ensure others will adhere to our perception of reality. For generations, the few have controlled the will of the many, citing their rules as the only mean to avoid chaos and social collapse. That is the very definition of Religion.
It is not, however, the definition of Spirituality, which embraces chaos alongside order. In reality, there is intelligence in the chaos of the universe; that is a truth we know deep down in our hearts. We need not to eliminate it, but learn to appreciate it – the chaos hides the thread that continuously weaves our story as a species. We must learn to trust it, not fight it, like a powerful current in the river of life itself. Whoever – whatever - created this universe had a grand design in mind; it is OK to try and understand it, as long as we are capable to accept that we’ll never be able to do that fully.
“For those who want ‘to change life”, ‘to reinvent love,’ God is nothing but a hindrance.”
Jean Paul Sartre
Every new generation is more intuitive, more emotionally tuned and more conscious than all the previous generations combined. The expansion of Human Consciousness has entered an exponential trajectory. Consider this – it was only 120 years ago when a theory around the subconscious mind was first introduced to the public awareness by a young analyst named Freud. On the grand scale of human existence, our mind is just waking up. We are nothing but infants, learning for the first time in human history that who we thought we were – our ego personality – is nothing but a figure of our imagination, constructed by labels, beliefs and circumstances to which we were exposed since we took our first breath. It is presumptuous of us – and extremely arrogant – to assume we have completed the process.
We are the only species on the planet which has the ability to psycho-analyze itself, that is, expand its own consciousness by self-study. It is not only our privilege, but our individual responsibility as humans. Science has failed to provide us with the answers to life’s most burning questions – who are we, why are we here, and what is our purpose. We are consumed with desire to find out if we are alone in the universe when we have failed to genuinely understand our own inner True Nature. Ancient Wisdoms answer these questions; stripped from dogma, they tell us all we want to know. They tell us that we do not need our physical eyes to see; we see in our dreams just fine, even when our eyes are closed shut. The Truth is within. There is more to life than what can be sensed by our physical vessels.
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
Jean Paul Sartre
It is time for science to recognize that it is deficient – in its desperate attempt to escape the confining shackles of religious dogma it has formed into yet another system of beliefs that cripples our progress as peoples. We must accept that the intellect cannot prevail without the intuition; that logic cannot exist without a hint of faith as well as the acceptance of the unknown. All great discoveries in human history were originated by the power of faith – those who discovered them believed in a reality unproven, in what considered by others to be a delusion.
There is a thread which connects and unites all spiritual systems. Where there is smoke there is fire; they have survived the test of time for a reason. Buddhism. Hinduism. Taoism. Judaism. Christianity. Islam. Mysticism. Occultism. Alchemy. Science. They are all the fruits of the same seed of universal truth, morphed through time into small steps – and often into stumbling blocks - on our road to inner liberation. We must strip them of their own ego personality, and find their unifying thread - it contains secrets we desire to discover, and answers we desperately seek.
Believe nothing. Study everything. Accept no religion, and practice pieces of them all. Adopt only what rings true to you. The hardest battle you’ll ever fight would be against your own prejudice mind, in an effort to dissolve half-truths that you have been fed, and have coagulated into mental barricades on your path to liberation. Make Love your guiding star, your destination, your weapon, your truth and the path on which you walk. All else is irrelevant, or will come in due time.
“Up there [in Heaven], God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.”
Jean Paul Sartre
The above is an except from the podcast Kabbalistic Mystic, Episode 12, by Ovadya Batat