The System.

There are no bad people and no bad things. Only people and things that we have called bad.

We have different values and different understandings. We have made judgments and God doesn't make judgments.

God doesn't forgive anyone. This is because there's nothing to forgive. Forgiveness is only required when someone has been hurt or damaged. We can't hurt or damage God. God is All. There's nothing he needs or wants, nothing he requires to be happy. He doesn't need us to do, or not do, something. He doesn't need us to have, or not have, something. He doesn't need us to worship him, or fear him, or love him.

There's, in fact, nothing he needs from us, hence he doesn't ask anything of us.

Do you think he's up there making up rules for us to follow, regulations for us to adhere to ? We are making those up.

Since He can't be injured in anyway, He has no reason to ever feel angered or upset. Forgiving us for something we have done is unnecessary, because nothing we have done could ever injure Him, and in the absence of injury there's no need for retribution or justice.

He understand why we have done everything we have ever done in our life. He knows what we were thinking and why we did it. Anger is not something God is capable of. The level of his comprehension does not allow it as he knows and understands everything.

We must seek forgiveness from those we have hurt and seek forgiveness from ourselves.

There's no Judgment Book. God is not Santa in the Sky, making a list and checking it twice so that He can find out who is naughty and who is nice.

Our religions have taught us about separation, need, superiority, failure, judgment and condemnation.

But God is not an isolationist, nor an intolerant. God is largely a figment of our collective imaginations. He doesn't condemn anyone for anything.

Heaven isn't a place, but an intimate relationship with God that can be experienced partially on Earth.

God can't be enclosed in Heaven, God hears human prayers, intervenes in human history. Eternal damnation is not a punishment inflicted by God from outside. It's an internal state of separation from God.

Most of our religions believe that there's only One Way to God, and that their Way is this One Way. They believe this - and teach this - so fervently that they feel themselves to be superior in His eyes. They have accepted as real the illusion of superiority.

Many of them also believe that they must convince others to believe as they do, and that in doing this they are meeting their responsibility to God.

Finally, some religions and their followers believe and teach that persons of religions other than their own are His enemies and so must be converted, removed and eliminated.

These thoughts and ideas have produced justifications for ethnic cleansing, religious intolerance and so-called holy wars.

These ideas spring from a belief in an entire set of illusions around which humans have built their understandings of life, their philosophies, their religions, their political systems, and their economic systems.

These illusions are not real, but they have been made to seem very real because of the power that humans have given to them.

The world exists inside of a belief system of fear, insufficiency, and false superiority. Most of our worldwide institutions - not just religions, but politics, economics, education and social constructions of every variety - exist inside this paradigm, operate in this setting.

That's why there are so many wars over who has the right and correct religion, who has the right and correct political system, who has the right and correct economic system, who has the right and correct amount of the things on Earth of which we think there's not enough.

It's the struggle to gather the stuff of which there's not enough - into which category, sadly, we have also put God's love - that produces wars.

Most people believe in one God. Their God. To them, their God is the Only God. And everyone else's God is a false God. Regrettably, this idea has resulted in the killing of a lot of people - in the name of God.

Now, it's natural for people to wish to express themselves in ways that allow them to experience their individuality. The trick here is to see if members of human race can find a way to not let their individual expressions separate them and cause them to feel righteous or superior.

Righteousness and superiority about our expressions of individuality - whether religious or political or philosophical or economical or social or sexual - can lead to insane behavior.

We are all One. Ours is not a better Way, ours is merely another Way.

Religion, as with everything else, plays the role that we give it.

We could give it the role of bringing people closer to God and closer to each other. But religion has done just the opposite.

Nothing has done more to separate people from each other and from God than organized religion.

Religion is an institution and spirituality is an experience.

Religions are institutions built around a particular idea of how things are. When those ideas become hardened and set in stones they are called doctrines and they become largely unchallengeable. We either believe them or we don't.

Spirituality in its freest form doesn't require us to believe anything. Rather it continually invites us to notice our experience.

Our personal experiences become our authority rather than something that someone else has told us.

If we had to belong to a particular religion to find God, it would mean that God has a particular Way or means by which we are required to come to Him.

But the idea that God has only One Way of approaching Him or one particular means of returning to Him, and that this Way and Only this Way will work is a fallout from the illusion of requirement.

Is saying a rosary better than saying a savitu ? Is the practise called bhakti more sacred than the practise called seder ?

No, obviously not.

It's helpful for religions to imagine this because it gives them a tool with which to seek, acquire and retain members - and thus to continue to exist.

We cannot get to heaven. There's no place to go. Yet even if there were and we were looking for dimensions for directions to heaven, religion could be a very confusing place from which to get them.

There are many different religions on Earth, and each one has its own set of directions reflecting its best idea of how God wants it.

But God's ego is not so fragile that he must require humans to bow down to Him in fearful reverence and grovel before Him in earnest supplication, in order to God to find us worthy of receiving blessings.

What kind of God would this be ?

That's the question we must honestly ask ourselves.

We have been told that God has made humans in His image and likeness, yet it's possible that religions have fashioned God in the image and likeness of humans.

There's no place called hell. There's an experience of hell which is separation from God, but we can end that experience whenever we wish.

We no longer have to worry about how or whether we can get back to Him. We no longer have to feel abandoned or afraid. That's because God is here, with us, around us, in us. We no longer have to feel alone when we understand this.

God is You. God is Me. God is Everyone.

The Insufficiency Illusion.

The world is the way it is because that is the way humans have created it. Its not necessary for the world to be this way, but it's necessary for life to reflect our every thought about. The collective thoughts of the human race and its aggregate ideas from the beginning of time until now, are reflected in the world in which we live.

We have not been able to stop the killing and suffering because we have a killing and suffering mentality.

We believed that killing is justified as a means of resolving our disagreements or getting what we want or think we need.

We have also believed that suffering is a normal part of life. Some of us have even said that it is required by God.

It's from these beliefs that the present human experience has arisen. It's out of these understandings that our elders create their everyday reality - and ours.

We can find a way to get along, to be nice to each other, but it would require us to give up these beliefs and that's not something that those who have come before us have been willing to do.

We shouldn't give up hope, we shouldn't even stop trying to change the world, unless we are satisfied with the world the way it is.

People hate each other because they have the wrong ideas about each other. They also have the wrong idea about life and how it is.

These ideas have become beliefs.

People believe that there's not enough money, not enough food, not enough clothing or shelter to go around. They believe that there's not enough of anything to allow everyone to survive and be happy.

Because people believe this, they think that they've to compete with each other in order to get the stuff of which there's not enough. The illusion of insufficiency is a major illusion of human.

We have turned everything into competitions. Our economies is competition, the winners of which get the most money. Our politics is competition, the winners of which get the most power. Our religions are competitions, the winners of which get the most heavenly rewarded.

Some members even think that there's not enough heaven to go around, so they are competing with each other to get in.

All of this is insane, given that there's enough of everything for everyone. We need to step outside this illusion, by rejecting the idea of insufficiency. We need to share and share grandly.

I basically want to seek a newer world, to create a place where there's no more irrelevance, pointlessness, hypocrisy or separation - which means there would be no more anger between us, no more quarreling and fighting, no more wars.

I want a place where we share and share alike and we don't steal from each other because we don't hoard from each other and we don't grab from each other because we don;t withhold from each other and we don't hurt each other because we know that when we do that, we only hurt ourselves.

Introduction.

Over the years, I have been overwhelmed with how many emotions I have felt and how many questions I've found myself asking and the fiery passion by which these questions were fuelled.

I've seen these questions cover the whole spectrum throughout my life - everything from "Who is God and where do I go when I die" .. to "Why am I here" to "Why do I feel so horrible about myself" to "Why wars" and millions of others in between [far too many to list].

I felt many resistances brewing within me toward the answers I am being given in school and from those I was encouraged to look upto. There were many answers that heartened and resonated. There were also answers with the nessage being one of choicelessness, of patriarchy, of there being one singular goal in life toward which our whole lives were to be focused if we wanted to be successful [and answers about what successful itself meant].

There were messages of intolerance and judgement, of exclusion and competition. All of these messages [and many more] were at odds with what I felt somewhere within me. They seemed confusing and misleading, inconsistent. And yet these views were at centre of what I was being taight. I was being sent the message of our being separate, of our being better, or worse than each other, of there not being enough of anything to the point that we had to fight to get what we could, that I was bad if I wanted something that differed from what was percieved as right by my teachers, my community or society as a whole.

These and many other messages were absorbed by me - not without confusion, and certainly not without resistance, but I tried them on for size in moments just the same. Some I tried on for a millisecond and discarded, some I tried on for years, to be discarded later. Some are still being mulled over today.

At that time, I also chose not to revisit the religion I had left behind from the time I was 12 years old for what I perceived to be its hypocritical messages and its rigidity and its exclusivity.

The most difficult part of my leaving it behind was the fact that I had been left with the challenge of establishing an entirely new relationship with God. With my religionlessness, I found myself not knowing where to begin. And while I believed in God, it would be years from the time I said goodbye to the religion before i connected again with my newly defined God in a way that I felt clear and good about.

One day, I sat alone on my terrace, a place I often sit in moments of deep reflection. An inner conflict had arisen out of my feeling both grateful beyond description for my being able to experience all that I had and feeling uncomfortable with, and disillusioned by how isolating and distancing [among many other things] these same experiences were.

I wanted some distance from the pressure I felt to continue performing at breakneck speed. I wanted to reflect and gain as much objectivity on my life as I could.

So I went within myself. While I was not completely unfamiliar with going within, I had never gone quite as deeply as this.

Propelled by a desire to feel a kind of peace I have not yet experienced, I feel a great willingness to truly let go. Of everything. I am willing to let go of every material possession I have, every symbol of status. I feel ready to do anything that I feel is needed to do to break through all the illusion and to find this peace. I am even willing to let go of any desire to express through writing, which is a form of expression in which I have found such comfort from the time I was very young.

All this is to say, I am ruthlessly ready to do what it takes to be peaceful - and I am not sure what it is,

A lot of what I have been doing is not working and I am not feeling the joy that I feel is my birthright [as it turns out, losing everyting is not what is needed to find peace and clarity, but it is the willingness to do what it takes and the openness to grow into very unfamiliar territories that I think plays the biggest role in my eventually experiencing it.]

I feel prepared to let go of any expectations that I or anyone else have of me. Wanting to see who my true friends are, I re-evaluated every friendship. At one point, I remember asking a friend that I wondered whether at this particular time it was time for me to die, because it felt like such a death of sorts. i investigated the voices in my head that played messages of anything other than love and affection.

I want to get clear about what I feel my true purpose in life is: to evolve, to express, to define, accept and love myself and to honour and encourage this in others as best as I can. I bring many of the things I have been taught into the light to see whether they helped serve this purpose. It's a beautiful and terrifying time. I am happy now to feel that level of rebirth when I wake up in the mornings - not all the time - but a lot.

My life didn't change much, ouwardly, as I was fully prepared for it to, but the shifts inside changed my relationships to many things.