I suppose religion is good place to start if one wants to live a good life. But there is so much more. They didn’t tell me about that in the first grade. I think that I learned enough to keep me on a straight path. But I’ve been riding my bicycle with training wheels for much, much too long. I have spent years attempting to shake loose from so much of my religious conditioning.
I was conditioned to live in a religious imaginary world from an early age, and it did add to the richness of my life, unreal as it was. I lived a good life out of fear of imaginary hell, or hope of future bliss. I watch my son Nathan and how his world is populated by the imaginary characters of Marvel comics. His imagination is powerful. While he knows these characters are all made up out of someone’s imagination, they are present in his life because he makes it happen.
I suppose that is what has happened for a long time with humans. Our imaginations have filled in the blanks left when experience could only go so far. The picture drawn from experience has always been incomplete, and the roles of gods and goddesses were easily filled. Christians filled the ancient roles with new faces and outfits, but not much else changed.
I have spent so much energy reading texts and solving theological problems, not so much unlike the video games played by my sons. It was a good mental exercise, but in the end so incomplete. I knew nothing more about how the world worked nor how my own mind works. My insight always came back to my own experience, and for many years I have been skeptical of unfounded leaps of faith.
Relying on the experience of others, such as the writers of scriptures, always took me back to a reliance on illusion or imagination. The world is illusory enough without adding on additional layers from someone’s fertile imagination. Even the stories of the experience of mystics have suffered under the veneer of the imaginary world of religion. How else would the stories have survived!
I have to admit that I like the advise of the Buddha: When he taught about his insight, he said don’t take my word for it. Don’t believe me. Rely on your own experience. Here are some guidelines you may want to consider. Try them. See if they work for you.
I don’t need a religion to fill my mind with an imagined, incomplete view of reality. Even if I seem to stumble from time to time, I like finding my own way. It’s a pretty exciting world once I get rid of the stage props and scenery of religion.