But I think you are wrong there, August. Religion - the systematical effort to believe in something that somebody else has imagined and turned into a cult and a theoretical system, all this added up under the label "belief" - is just one way to answer that fundamental craving of man for meaning. There are many other ways. Some "flee" into excessive consummerism and enjoying material pleasure, calling it hedonism: they may not care for religions. Others may be as atheist as I am, but crucify themselves in a bid to be extremely ego-less and totally altruistic. And others again try to find out for themselves by exploring their mind and the key determining factors and conditions of it, calling that meditation, which is the path that I have used for long time. While all this can be done with varying degrees of passion, even fanatism, it nevertheless does not qualify for the real meaning of the word "religion". Religious cult is a very popular attempt tried by people, yes, because it is the easiest one: you make yourself simply believe that if you follow the rules you will get saved. It takes no courage, no responsibility for checking it out yourself, it takes no self-exploration, and you must not confront your most existential fears and tormenting doubts when staring into the universe's abyss that nevertheless refuses to take note of you, and all responsibility is handed over to the Big Boss in whose eye Christians for example claim to have been build (what does that tell us about this God'S own nature, I ask, and why then could we nevertheless be assumed to be responsible for the choices, errors and flaws of ours ?) . The popularity of religions can be explained. But belief of this kind, is just one strategy amongst many others to meet the craving hunger for sense and meaning. And it has many dangers and risks by itself, has done a lot of harm in the world.
To me, self-experience and self-realisation, realisation of one'S own mind, is empirically more valid, and leaves the responsbility for my choice and fate where it belongs: me. Because to me it makes no sense to just believe in an idol that man just imagines, a just imagined god dies when the mind imagining it dies. What mind actually is and how it functions - from the point of view presented by Christian mysticism, or Zen, or comparable traditions, learning about the illusory nature of the ego and the natural essence of mind and space, and this by my own experience, is an apparently far more precious alternative. At least so far nobody was able to show me a better one.
Because if you consequently, really consequently think it to the end, we never do touch that "world outside". We cannot. We only get sensory feedback by our senses. Neural bioelectrical energies racing down our nerves and stimulating our brain to make something of this endless storm of electrons - electrons that are just empty space in themselves, and so are their particles that form them, and so forth. We do not touch matter in a material way, we cannot, we take the illusion of matter the way we take the illusion of a solid disc when there is a fast rotating propeller. And this leads to only one posssible conclusion: the world as we perceive it, is only our brains conception. The world is an idea. It is not like we believe to see, hear, taste, and feel it. Which leads to the ultimate question of this:
What is this mind holding this idea, forming this conception?
If the world is just a dream, who is the dreamer dreaming the dream? The Hindus's idea of Brahman breathing the universe in and out over unimaginable long eons, is a poetic visualization.
Some people say the brain's activity is the reason for there being a mind. I say its the other way around: because there is mind, so there became a brain. What the brain's activity brings to life, is something different: the ego. And it is up to us how big or small this ego is, whether we allow getting fooled by it and mistaking it for our self, or not. Nevertheless, it is illusory. Like a Fata Morgana, it exists as a phenomenon, but like what the Fata Morgana shows you, it is not real, is unreal, is an illusion.
The ego is our brain's habit of how it forms images about an "outside" world.
And this is the meaning of "spiritual" as I have reached to understand it. Not just believing some hearsay because the elders whisper it, and our forefathers have written it down on scripture, and everybody does it. All that means nothing. Or in the wording of Zen:
Form is space/void, and space/void is form. No trace of holiness.
Quantum physics, anyone?
In India, China, Japan and other regions of Asia, they like to compare to this metaphor: Imagine the empty space, and in it floating an infinite number of soap bubbles. You can see them floating, their spheres' glittering in patterns of vibrant colours and light, and every bubble thinks the space it embraces with its sphere makes it unique, separate, an individual entity, what it embraces of space is its individuality, its ego, and now there is inside and outside space, two kinds of spaces, and there is "me" and there is the "outside world" . But sooner or later the bubble bursts again, and then is gone. What then is left of two different spaces, inside and outside? There is not two kinds of space, and never were, there is just one space and always has been, and there is just one mind, and what the bubbles showed in glitter and colour, was just transitory, unreal, an artificial separation between inside and outside world.
Our idea of our ego - is an illusion. Nevertheless, like any Fata Morgana we take for real, it can lead us into deep confusion, and trouble. We do not suffer because the world is not in order. The world is what it is, is our conception, but we separate ourselves from it as if that would be possible, and we want to make it "real" and everlasting so that we live as long or everlasting as well. But that is a misunderstanding of who we really are. In other words, we do not suffer because the world is not in order, but because
we are not in order. And since we are not in order, so is not the conception of the world we create in our idea and imagining. The world, outside - just mirrors the state of our selves "inside". We project our own ego, and then complain about the world being out of order? Really? Do we...?
And what we really are, can be said in many different ways which all mean the same, I use the words of Meister Eckhart for a closing:
In my eternal birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and all things, and if I had so willed it, I would not have been, and all things would not have been. If I were not, God would not be either. I am the cause of God's being God: if I were not, then God would not be God.
And in another text by him, nevertheless complementing the above:
The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God'S eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love.
Form is space and space is form. No trace of holiness. There is just One.