Do research of various peoples (at least 20, preferably all from different continents) following the same algorithm.
Do research of family histories of various dynasties those you know personally or not. At least 20.
Do research of various approaches to management at least 10.
Do research of various approaches to parenting at least 15.
Do research of various approaches to family relations at least 15.
What else are you interested in?
What choice will you now make in faith and religion, in political movements?
What will you now think of those of a different opinion? Of those who make different choices and act differently?
Key points
It would be great to attend a school where all religions and beliefs are studied in one and the same careful manner.
The One who created such a riot of species, forms of life, and civilizations actually had the trouble to provide people with plenty of paths and opportunities to come to Him.
The trick is not in finding out whos right. We just need to accept that all the paths have one and the same source and lead us to one and the same home, however differently
Those who rejoice at being a part of the «elite» dont even realize that they are not the exception, that they are being controlled too. They understand it much later than those who arent in the «elite».
It is indeed time-consuming and complicated, from the point of view of our mortal coil. We always want to achieve a quick result and we dont care that aggressive methods are deprived of faith and dont take into consideration the lives of those who were created by the most divine being or beings. Its not much, as far as our soul is concerned. But this is a much more careful and gentle way.
You should propagate your ideas not through violence. But by way of example. Sincerely! Because it is really good, because you like it. Because you do it out of love not only towards yourself and your ideas but to those around you!
The challenge is to see beauty and wisdom in the generous diversity and learn how to make your own choices while respecting the choices of others.
Surprisingly enough, having one and the same path for everyone is a way to self-annihilation of the system in general.
Put aside the myth of the single path in religion, politics, and the question of nations. Put aside the conflict of duality (either this or that) in all other matters. Then the excuse for wars will just disappear. But there is yet another problem. Those who want to have wars will come up with new myths and new excuses. It will go and on until the masses realize it!
In order to get beyond limitations you should first acknowledge the abundance of diversity and take interest in it
The myth in a nutshell
There are many paths to God. Each person or a group of people has their own path. In different periods of time, there are different paths too. In different periods of time, there come different people who create certain paths.
A Soul Prayer for PEACE
Thou art the one who has many names and forms
To whom many paths lead
The one who lives in everything and yet everything lives inside thee
Who guides and always endows with freedom of choice
Help me understand thy intentions and lessons.
I am the one that remains eternal among the perishable
The one that stays real among illusions
The one that stays unchanged among all the changes
The one that is called to serve thee while being true to oneself.
Help me find peace and awareness.
Thou art the creator and true master of everything, so help me
Serve thee and take care of thy creations
In freedom from fears, passions, attachments, and sins
On the path of knowledge, gaining reason and goodness
In the revelation of love and compassion
In unity therewith, and therefore, with everything thou created.
2. The Myth of the Need to Forget about Your Body, Emotions, and Mind on Your Way to God
Your experience
How well do you know your body? And how well do doctors know human body?
How well do you know the bodies of other creatures that inhabit our planet? How well do scientists and researchers know them?
How well do you know bodies in general? How well do scientists and physicists know them?
And what does it mean to know a body? What do you think about bodies? About your own? About the bodies of other people? About the bodies of various species inhabiting this planet?
And what do you feel about your body and the bodies of other creatures?
And what do you know (just like in previous questions) about emotions and mind? About your own feelings and thoughts? Do you recognize them? And what about feelings and thoughts of other people?
What do you know about shapes and forms?
What do you know about essence and content?
About the myth
Lets discuss it using the example of Christianity (or any other religion). God made man. In flesh and blood. And what was done to man by fellow man in the Middle Ages? What was done to the divine creation allegedly in the name of faith? What was done to it later in the age of colonization?
Was it a declaration of the will of God? Or was it just a cover to conceal the pursuit of power, riches, and keeping them no matter the cost?
And suppressing the wonder of fleshliness, the brilliance of emotions. Suppressing the genius of thought, destroying others! By double standards, among other things (when some people are allowed something and others are not).
Why thrust your nose into someones bedroom and dictate what they should do, in which position, and how many times? Why have such limitations and control?
Why pry into someones private life? Why forbid feeling something and allow only a tiny part of the wide range of feelings?
Why force something so violently and aggressively, telling what one can think and what one cannot?
There are powerful historic examples behind all these questions. Powerful and yet tragic! For not only books were burnt but people too. Talented. Beautiful.
Who gave them that talent? Who bestowed upon them sensuality? And intuition? And minds eye? Who bestowed upon them intelligence in all its forms? And beauty? Oh, right. There is the Devil. And yet we were made and endowed with gifts by God. In any case, this is a divine creation, we dont have any right to control it. However, some people conceited themselves to be near as great as God and began to pride themselves. Others understood the simple truth and yet were not able to abandon power and its gifts. Suppression, control, jealousy, neglect (devaluing), and destruction wont bring you to God Neither will pridefulness and pursuit of power. Ignorance and clinging to ones passions. In this regard, maybe we should study the works of various spiritual teachers and Eastern masters of various religions to get a deeper understanding and analysis?
Perhaps, instead of making fires for the wrong books and people, we should have taken a different path. The one that is fast in terms of our soul but long and tiresome for those who are attached to worldly passion. The path of decent examples, discussions, learning, stories, reflection, mentorship, etc.? Meaning the path of the freedom of agreement, acceptance, and choice. The path of the creation of beauty and comfort (thats it!), creativity and art instead of violence and fear, destruction and hate, instead of strangling the potential of the Great Creation We should have taken the path of freedom (freedom from our own ignorance, our fears, power, riches, pridefulness, arrogance, vanity, etc.).
Oh, how much the church opposed progress (not all the clergy really serve the Almighty, since some people choose to serve their own or someone elses interests by way of religion). How much it opposed paganism that provided, perhaps, even more opportunities for harmony with ourselves and the world around us or probably just interfered with the goals of certain people. Those in power dont like to share and they will never support those who can potentially overthrow them or provide a competition. But Christianity is not the only example. How about killing of infidel even though they were made by Allah? Otherwise, where did they come from? Were they made by someone else? And does it mean that Allah is not alone? That is somehow contradictory, wouldnt you agree? Alright, we wont kill them. But we also wont let our children be happy, we wont let them and their loved ones be together. Well, thats an option. How much there was told, written, and sung about this! How many dramas and broken human lives. Why not cancel God at all (you never know, right?) and make a political and economic system our top priority, acquiring the right to do whatever we want?
But let us get back to body and faith. Maybe the secret is simple. Maybe those who launched and maintained all those movements didnt aim at helping people find God (anything else). Surely, some of them were genuinely mistaken and are still under a delusion. But there are also those who acutely understand: People should be lured away from God, Allah, Krishna, Buddha, or any kind of enlightenment (no matter what name it bears). It doesnt matter what deities different people (Asian and American Indians, Egyptians, and Aryans) believed in. The crucial thing here is to lure people away from them. How can that be done?
Thats pretty simple! Equivocation and prevarication! Instead of protecting our bodies, taking care of this greatest gift, this tool of manifesting our consciousness into the world, instead of paying heed to our emotions, being in tune with our feelings and understanding what is happening to us, learning how to express our feelings properly and appropriately, instead of treating intelligence as the greatest treasure bestowed upon us by God Almighty (choose whatever name you like) we are doing exactly the opposite! Instead of improving it all, we declared our bodies to be vessels of sin! Touching your own or someone elses body is a sin! Sex is a sin! You shouldnt even wash your body (read some historic works). And should a person die because of that, we consider it great, for they are going to meet God! Its so convenient. You can ignore the development of medicine and science or deny everybody or someone (women or slaves, for example) medical treatment. That is the will of X (substitute X for any name you like). We can always shift the responsibility for our own actions to a deity. The worldly life is nothing. Naught. We have forgotten who created it and why.
But if the worldly life is naught, then why put so much effort into its creation? And why make it so complex and diverse as well? The worldly life is a way to our soul, to God. We forgot about it and began to pride ourselves again. Lets take our mind and feelings under control. And blame all our misfortunes on them But how? Well, we can always announce that one shall not feel anger, one must exercise patience One shall not rejoice at ones success, one must be modest. One shall not hold grudges, one must be obedient!
One must be a stupid, filthy, patient, and obedient slave, sickly of body and mind. So that no lucid idea could be conceived. Our mind is so lively, nimble, inquisitive, enquiring Oh no, no. Those truly enlightened dont think But then how did great ecclesiastical works appear? Thanks to what? Obviously not due to the fact that their authors rejected their own intelligence an essential step towards enlightenment. Thats for sure. Equivocation and prevarication again. We do need reason, we do need mind. But in order to calm your mind, you have to learn how to be patient. We do need our emotions and bodies too. But balance is important here. Our body, emotions, and mind are a good help. When we tip the balance, they become our masters. In order not to tip the balance, we need reason.
But body is also about life. If you want to depreciate a human life, depreciate their body first, as well as their bodily needs of water, home, warmth, comfort, touching, and caressing. Or influence their freedom of expressing themselves since one was born. Babies used to be swaddled up tightly, and there was a pretty odd excuse for that: It was supposed to help them stop being afraid of themselves. Communism used the same approach, by the way! And not only Communism. Just look at what is going on in the Western world in respect of children. Though they are supposed to have democracy there. Again healthy expression of love is prohibited under a pretext of genuine care.
You should be humble, obedient, and patient. Once confronted with a choice faith or someone you love you should be very careful. Which means you should choose faith. And not love Once confronted with a question of expressing your talents, you should be modest. Once confronted with the need to protect yourself and your loved ones, you should be humble and turn the other cheek. But dont constant silence and failure to take action create even more evil? Is humbleness really about that? And what does it mean to remain silent in this case? Does it bring even more evil? All right, so you have to be a martyr, a victim. By no means should you be a master of your own life. Your life doesnt belong to you. It doesnt even belong to God Almighty (call him whatever you like) because your life belongs to those who really control it. To your master. Humble, obedient, patient people deprived of intelligence and contact with their own bodies, emotions, and thoughts. People who are willing to countenance. Who are they? Slaves. Slaves by nature. By their psychology! Even though they are not clapped in irons. Why put them in irons if you can always use other kind of chains? Why put them in irons when you can always shackle an enquiring mind, feelings that function as inner eyes and ears, as shining beacons? When you can always trivialize and distort them? All you need to do is set up attention focuses and determine the right and wrong ways of thinking! And, as a lesson to everyone else, to prevent them from taking interest in wrong things, we can impose censorship, disregard, reprobation, and punishments even to the point of a death sentence to you or your loved ones! To the third or even seventh generation! This kind of scourge exists not only in religion. It exists in politics too. It became so ingrained in our everyday life that we apply the same principle to all unusual children or adult people, trying to force them into the frame of common and familiar things. We try to cure them instead of curing ourselves. We call our path right and their path wrong, though their only fault is that they are different. And they may even have a much stronger connection with their bodies, emotions, and minds.
What does it have to do with faith? With gods? Nothing! It is a matter of power and finding excuses for those in power! It is a matter of foolishness, lack of education, and general ignorance. It is a matter of aggression that puts even faith into the position of its servant.
Think about it and start loving your body and taking care of it as much as possible. Start enjoying it! To continue your way of spiritual development, you need to have a healthy body. To make the best out of your life, you need to take care of your body.
Allow yourself to experience and enjoy the full spectrum of your feelings, discovering talents youve never even thought of!
Think, analyze, ask questions. Have your ears and eyes open, study the world.
Question everything! Even my words, by all means! Especially my words!!
Train your brain by studying and analyzing various paths, decisions, and views! Take nothing for granted! Question everything! Ask tough and disadvantageous questions! In this case, you wont place blind faith in anything. You will know!
Tips
How would you treat your body, feelings, and mind (reason) if you knew that they have the untold potential for your development, improving the quality of your life, and manuring your soul and spirit? If you knew that they are an essential and valuable tool of spiritual development? That they are the creation and energy of the very God?
Start treating them like this here and now. Notice what changes there will be in your life.
How do you think, are mind and reason pretty much the same thing?
Or are they two different concepts?