Step One: Remove the Wrapper

Following religious protocols without doing serious personal inner inquiry, on one's own, is like eating a piece of candy without removing wrapper. The accoutrements are only the surface skin and have no substantial flavor or value by themselves. They are there to entice us into trying the goodies inside. I don't know if the fact that this truth gets lost is more a result of institutional or personal short comings. I suspect both.

It's difficult to describe fresh air to someone who's never been out of the big city. It's even harder for them to imagine it. It's the same with spiritual, or non personal, experiences. There's a way of being that is open, expansive, all inclusive, loving and compassionate. There is no sense of identity when there, only the experience of being. It doesn't translate to the mundane mind. We can try to explain it using words and terms familiar to the ordinary mind. But the words are inaccurate as they leave our mouths, and become even more so, when the listener hears them using their own definitions, and needing to fit such ethereal notions into their existing fixed conceptions.

“The “you” that you think of and feel as being your self, doesn't really exist as an enduring entity.” How can people long removed from the experience of untainted awareness receive these words? Methinks they can't. Square peg, round hole. “What do you mean? I can feel my emotions and hear my thoughts. I assure you, they're quite real.” Yes, the thoughts and feelings are real. But the assumption that they constitute individual beings is misguided.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Thoughts and feelings are merely inner actions. They don't define us in any concrete way. They don't determine who we'll be in the future. And they don't just happen to us.

We commonly preform outer actions without conscious guidance. Think, tying your shoes, petting the dog, scratching an itch, flushing the toilet, gazing out the window, saying “Thank you. Have a nice day”, etc. Even driving a car. Whether it's due to daydreaming, talking, rehashing a recent conversation or whatever, while driving. Often the body is left to drive on its own, as the mind frolics elsewhere.

After years of letting the mind run amok, it seems obvious that, that's just the way it works. Further more, it typically seems like these thoughts and feelings happen to us, which is fairly funny, when paired with the assumption that they are us.

So, after peeling off the wrapper of religious facades, we find that we then need to peel off our own wrappers of mental activity and learn to watch and guide from our rightful roost, outside of those processes.

Life is sweet, when you get down to it.