Real Religion is Ultimately Personal

Real Religion is Ultimately Personal
by Rodger Stevens

Behind all creeds the spirit is One.

–Andrew Lang

Recall the difference between who we really are and who we think we are. Who we really are was never born and will never die. Who we think we are is like the actor who is playing the roles of you and me. That actor doesn’t come into being just when the curtain rises, and does not cease to be when the curtain comes back down, even though his character does. So it is with us. Who we really are is real, eternal, not limited to or confined by the time schedule of the play, and therefore eternally one with the ultimate reality some call God.

Real religion is personal because its intent is to relate and to contrast that part of us which is temporary (the role, the personality, You #2) with that part of us which is eternal (the actor, You #1). We have been talked out of our innate interconnectedness with Life, with Truth, and religion is what we call the process of rediscovering that link. The true Self (Atman, Brahma, the Father, who you really are) needs nothing to link it to what it already is.

Then again, since it deals primarily with the illusory part of us, religion itself can be said to be ultimately illusory; it will have to be different for each of us, because each of us has lost sight of the Self in a different way. The masters all discovered this, but they also realized that their followers didn’t yet get the message, so they made suggestions in order to bring those followers back to their reality. Their advice to their disciples was not of the one size fits all variety, but was individually tailored to the needs and challenges of each disciple. Jesus’ teaching was not given to an editorial panel, but to ordinary people who wanted to experience what he was experiencing; each needed different prompts.

All of us are different; what makes sense to me might not make sense to you. Naturally, our paths are different, so the promptings (and that’s what they must be . . . not orders, but suggestions) we need as to how to follow that path will likewise be different.

But when they became organized, when the original master has passed from the scene and taken his divine insights with him, the religion that formed in his wake lost the ability to innovate, to treat each of us as a special case. The priests who came after the master didn’t have enough soul to fill his sandals, so their only option was a creed, a static set of beliefs which had to be accepted without question, resulting in an intellectual and emotional bullying of the sort to which no master would stoop. The masters said, “Heal!”, but the priests said “Heel!. That’s dogma.

Accepting things on faith was something I had trouble with as a child. I was brought up a Lutheran; I got over it eventually, but until I did I could never rectify two conflicting tenets that were ground into me at a young and impressionable age. The first was that God was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent . . . okay, I could accept that. But the second was that I, as a human being, was sinful, and therefore somehow other. In logical discourse, this is called a non sequitur . . . given that the first statement is true, the second doesn’t follow.

If you start out with a ball of clay, and you make different things out of that clay–a cup, a figurine, a doorstop–these objects all have different appearances and functions, but they are still all made of that same clay. Similarly, if you begin with God and make a universe out of it (recall that, by definition, there was nothing else to work with) then what can that universe, and everything in it, possibly be composed of?

After I shook the dust of organized religion from my sandals, I learned that the link between big ‘ol God and little ‘ol me was no more and no less than consciousness. And each of us, at and as the very center of us, have this same feeling of I Am, for the not-so-obvious reason that each one of us is really God (Brahma) pretending to be each one of us. There is only one I Am, there is only one God, one Brahma, one Tao, one beingness. When I find Me #1, and you find You #1, we both see the same world, because we both are the same world. But we have so cleverly and convincingly hidden ourselves from ourselves that we really believe that we are separate entities. That’s the hide part of hide-and-seek. Humanity has become hide-bound.