Not exactly religion

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“OK, God. Give me money.” The Bronze Age religions were unabashedly Version 2: You gave your gods stuff, like burning the fat of a sheep, and they gave you stuff, like more sheep. The deal made sense since they were more powerful than you, I guess. But if you try this today, within one of the great world religions, you’ll sense a disturbance in the Force. Something has changed, but what?

I want to make it even clearer that what I have written about this past month is not a new religion, or an old religion, or a syncretism of several old religions. Rather, I write about an element that shows up in several great religions, but which is itself (I believe) not exactly religious.

The New Mind, the next major version of the “operating system” for the human brain, changes the way one sees things. It certainly changes the way one sees religion. Religion as seen by the old mindset is a very different thing from what the founders intended, as they had (at the very least) version 3 rather than our version 2. So a person thinking in the old way is actually unable to understand his own religion, even if he is a good person doing good things and very eager in his practice and strong in his faith. These qualities are all worthy of praise, but there are still many things that you can’t understand.

There are things that are simple and obvious once one has glimpsed them through the lens of the New Mind, but which needs elaborate interpretation to seem to make sense under the old mindset. If one tries to simply put the statements from the New Mind into the worldview of the old mindset, the old mind will be unable to contain them and may be destroyed in madness, or else reject the new thoughts entirely. In either case, the content is lost.

Through centuries of relentless theology, the world’s great religions have become completely understandable to the old mindset. Unfortunately, this means that they have become deeply misunderstood.

It bears repeating that the Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tzu by all accounts had no plans of making a religion at all, and yet each of them has become worshiped as a god by a goodly number of their adherents throughout history and even today. Socrates is still known only as a philosopher, but at his time he was sentenced to death on religious grounds.

The “human operating system” or complete mindset is not exactly supernatural, or at least it is not clear that the next version is more supernatural than the one we have today. There is a reason why version 3 has not become a runaway success yet. Version 2 is very well suited for the time we have lived through for the past few ten thousand years. With the center on the individual person, his body and his bloodline, it encourages people to survive and breed even at the cost of others, within reason. In this way, humans have become gradually more plentiful and gradually exerted greater control over their environment. Only now has population density reached a level where the old system is creating problems that threaten our very survival.

And that is why, religion or no religion, we have to prepare for the change. It is change or die. If we after that still has something that can be called religion – and I think so – it will be very different from what most people think of as religion today. That’s probably a good thing, to be honest. Because there is a lot of weird stuff that is accepted as part of religion today, and a lot of people who quite reasonably reject all religion because of the weird mishmash and painfully stretched explanations that come from trying to express Version 3 truths in Version 2 thinking.

I am certainly not an atheist, but I agree with some of the saner atheists on a lot of things. The god they disbelieve in is not the God I believe in, to put it mildly. Someone called it “a faith worse than death”, and that is really apt, because living forever as a minion of a capricious, cruel and spiteful god is more like being a zombie than being saved. But before you make a final decision about what to think about God or Spirit, it is more important to think about yourself and upgrade your own mind. THEN you can look at all things, whether it be religion, politics, food or sex, with new eyes. But if you are happy with how you are now, you will say: “The old is good” and you will want nothing of this.

But I believe you will be happier if you tear down the walls of your mind and let the Light in.

19 thoughts on “Not exactly religion

  1. The experience of evil generally comes about when two free wills collide. People have different perspectives – some have very little understanding of the consequences of what they do – and when they do what they think is best, this collides with what we think is best. In that situation, we will naturally feel that the other person is evil, but this is rarely the case. Except for a few angsty teenagers, almost no one wants to be evil. People simply see the world differently (and in most cases nearsightedly).

    This experience of evil is why bitterness sets in. When we see someone trying to do their best (according to our own perspective) but failing just a little, we think of them as good but not perfect, and we don’t grow bitter, we have sympathy with them. But when the difference in perspective grows too large, we experience their actions and mindset as evil, and bitterness follows from that. We cannot accept these people.

    Changing other people is unfortunately very hard. This leaves you with the options of either changing your situation (moving, changing your career plans etc) or else changing yourself. Or just live with the pain until it ends, as all things do, and usually fairly quickly compared to the length of a normal human lifetime.

    Something I do is learn to understand people. I must admit that I have not felt threatened on a regular basis since I was young, but I have found myself disrespected and seen people working against me. Generally I have studied these people and learned to know them, and their attitude toward me have changed as a result of my change. I am not sure this always works – Jesus understood the pharisees perfectly and they still crucified him – but at least understanding is very nearly the same as forgiving. This gets rid of the bitterness, if nothing else.

  2. Perhaps assess the threat realistically. What is the danger? If you seriously risk being killed, you should get out of there, and alert the authorities, as well as friends and relatives. Pretty much everything else can be fixed given a bit of time. Money and stuff come and go, broken bones mend. Reputations and relationships return to their center as well.

    • I do not think. I am in danger. I do want to be left alone. I have No idea How to achieve this. The situation is odd.

  3. My answer is still the same: Cut out supernatural things until you have developed a solid moral core by living an ordinary life as an ordinary person without any special abilities. Just try to be kind, try to make people happy, try to learn things that are useful to help people in this world. This is what I did when I was young and started to experience psychic phenomena. I actually prayed – for I approached the Higher Reality through a variant of religion – and I cut down on the meditation for many years until my youth was well behind me. Even Jesus Christ did not do anything remarkable from he was 12 till he was around 30. It is a fundamental fact of esoteric tradition that those who stick their head out will be haunted. Strive to live an ordinary life and be good, or at least do no harm.

    • I’ve not progressed beyond simple meditation and chakra manipulation.

      This mess was caused by talking to someone who seemed extremely respectable.

      • Well, at least that reassures me that it wasn’t me!

        Please try to live as normally as possible until conditions become more favorable. Listen to friends and family unless they tell you to engage in crime. Hide in the crowd.

  4. There is no need to avoid people. Humans need human companionship. But I would keep it simple and basic. Don’t share secrets with people who have not proved themselves worthy. Keep your online relationships friendly but not intimate, like the way you relate to a neighbor. Meet people with kind words but don’t lend them money. Take your time, years are fine, before you really trust people. I trust very few, but I am happy to help the many. It is the main reason I am online at all.

    • This immediate situation is bothering me. I have no idea how to contact the police about a situation like this.

      • In most of the world, living without friends or family is simply not humanly possible. Because you need to survive so you can gain the necessary life experience, you need to listen to people even if you think they are wrong, and compromise with them as long as they don’t ask you to commit crimes.

        Being all alone without family and friends is a bit like swimming across the British Channel: Even if a few have survived it, it is not something one should expect to do.

      • You can deal with other people’s attempts to control your mind by dealing with your own desires and hopes.

        Attempts at mind control are very common, although we usually don’t use that name. A woman who is in love with a man will seek to make him desire her. A mother who prays for her son seeks to have him behave in the way she thinks is right. An advertiser trying to sell a product will try to make us spend our money as they will rather than as we will.

        The mechanism is always the same. They appeal to a desire, a wish, a hope, an aspiration that you already have inside you, and connect their goals to it. Therefore, the way to deal with mind control is to control your own desires, wishes, wants and hopes. You cannot live as a human with no wants. If you did not want to eat, you would have died already. But what you can do is make a habit of looking at your desires objectively, as if you were a scientist. Fulfill wants that are good or harmless. A human cannot simply say no to all temptations forever. Find desires that are good or harmless, and enjoy them. This will boost your resistance to impulses that flare up due to the influence of others. Nobody has the power to actually change your will. History shows that no king or pope, not the Devil himself, has that kind of power. Those who watch their own garden will not be overcome by weeds from their neighbor. This is an eternal law.

        Maintain your physical health. Eat right, exercise, sleep when you have the chance. Build habits, rituals, routines in your life that are harmless and where you can rest your mind while doing them. And write down the desires, wants, wishes and impulses that you feel, and look at them objectively, looking for those that are harmless or if possible helpful, so you can give them priority.

  5. Unyielding resistance is nature’s way of telling us to work more on the basics. You will notice that most men who go insane do so between 18 and 23, while most men who accomplish great things do so after the age of 30, despite both groups having had their ideas since youth. Before we can build a tall building, we must dig deep. When we “drive faster than our guardian angel can fly”, events arise to brake us. The faster we go, the harder we are hit.

    • My mind thinks that this situation needs to end before I do anything else. I will do my best to focus on another things.

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