Hello to all of you who, like me, keep their own searches for the truth about our known Universe and also about potential others that might exist and are out of reach for our current senses. I have a published book back in the home land of Brazil. That adventure happened before the wife and I decided in favor of having a second child. Life was reasonably under control with one kid only. Job was not too taxing. I had enough free time and energy that I could devote to this passion of mine, which is not necessarily writing per say, but sharing my thoughts with the other members of my extended family, the human race. Then we got pregnant again. Not only that, but the economical rough times came down on all of us with its entire wrath. We didn't loose our source of income, but now I have to perform the work of four or five. Life at work became complete chaos. Life at home, now with the two kids being more aware of their own individuality, is a delicious uncontrolled chaos. With all that, I have decided to, instead of suppressing my everyday high of writing altogether, start venturing on the uncharted waters of blogging. I'm not even sure if these lines will ever be read by anyone else other than me, however, the simple fact of having the opportunity to express myself is exciting enough to get me going.
This will hopefully be the first of many posts where I will be expressing my thoughts about multiple topics: science, religion, philosophy, psychology, spiritualism; and anything else that you wish to label. I, myself, prefer not to label them since I believe that the simple act of labeling is enough to constrain. I also believe the ongoing constraints we impose upon ourselves are reasons why the members of the human family seem to be so disconnected from each other, so fragmented. Fragmentation that I believe to counter our true nature. Nature such that not only we are one with the Superior Consciousness, or God, or The All Mighty, or however you wish to call the Creative Force that is in all there is; but we are small fractions of Him/Her/It ourselves. I strongly believe that every single one of us is actually an individual expression of the same God, giving different colors to the infinite kaleidoscope that is our collective existence.
Today I will focus on one are of this fragmentation: religion. I've always considered myself a religious being. I was born and raised by a family that chose to adopt the Spiritism religion as its life compass. Being from Brazil myself, it is not an unusual choice for religion the Spiritism. This religion has been growing in a very accelerate pace in the last half of century or so. It does indeed have some concepts that in my view would be rather difficult not to agree with; such as the immortality of the spirit that leads to a natural continuation of existence after death; consequent reincarnation of the spirit on multiple personalities that exist sequentially on different historical periods; and a natural ability of communicating with individualities that are not necessarily incarnated at the same time as ourselves.
I understand I might sound too out there for the ones of you who never really spent too much time reflecting upon topics such as this, or for the ones that have been poisoned by the opportunism of false mediums and psychics who take advantage of the laziness of the unprepared mind to obtain financial or other type of gain. Believe me when I say this, I totally understand your concern and skepticism. In fact, I salute you, free thinker, who don't simply comply with the opinion of others without pushing every incoming idea through the filter of your own reasoning. I believe you should never, ever, take at face value anything that is proposed to you as the only truth. I think this very fact is the main source of fragmentation of our humanity. We have countless different religions, philosophies and ideas that claim they carry the one truth; and they only exist due to the people who fuel them as such.
Let's start our discussion with that last statement in mind. Every different religion claim to carry the one truth. I started noticing that tendency when I decided to really dive into the Spiritism literature. I've got somewhat tired of answers such as: "Well, this is the way it is because it is written in the books." Once I started getting more comfortable with my own individuality, those answers started to really irritate me; so I decided to try and find the answers myself by reading the very books they said contained the answers that nobody seemed to be able to clarify for me. The summary of my investigation is that the so called leaders of that religion were also claiming to carry the only truth themselves; even though the most respected texts didn't mention anything of that regard. On the contrary, the most exciting and inspiring reference material on Spiritism presented the exact contrary notion that the truth has many views. Those leaders took those words and distorted them into something they understood as the truth, and started preaching that no other religion offered the same level of freedom to its adopters as the Spiritism did, and therefore were wrong. Does anyone else see the irony in this?
I've went though a very difficult time since that realisation. Being born and raised in the midst of that religion, I new nothing else other than what my parents had thought me about it. My whole belief system was in jeopardy. How far back should I contest? Should I keep going back to the point where I would contest the very existence of God? Or should I stop at contesting what the leaders of the religion were telling me? Intuitively, and added the fact that I am a scientist deep inside, I couldn't really contest the existence of a Superior Organizing Force, responsible for the order of our known Universe. It seemed to me that the beauty of nature could never be devoted to a random combination of events. I couldn't help but keep going back to what Einstein had said: "God doesn't play dice." It was clear to me that I shouldn't confuse religion and God, religion being just the vehicle used by individualities to reach God. With that settled in my mind, I've decided to start contesting religion in itself. The issue was now that I knew close to nothing about any other religion in order to really conduct a valid analysis.
Once I realised that, I started reading material pertaining to other religions. The funny thing is that, at least the way I have interpreted the texts, the prophets of other religions were saying basically the same things! They were saying, maybe utilizing of different archetypes, but none less the message was that free will is the key for finding the truth and that the truth can only be found on the inside of every being. This was in my view, the underlying message behind every religion. There are, obviously, many corollaries to that message, ranging from the identification of suffering through the elimination of it, with many different flavors and paths, but the message was loud and clear. The common denominator of all of them was, in my view, the freedom in the search for the truth and that truth itself is not black and white.
I was pretty happy with that epiphany. Until I was unsatisfied again and started searching for the deeper meaning. I started thinking about this under different lenses. And that very fact struck me. Different lenses! Exactly! Every single individual understands things by looking under different lenses, different vantage points. Remember when you were in school and sometimes you needed to play an association game with specific school material in order to find a metaphor that would help you to better understand the content? That is what I think the role of the different religions is: to provide different vantage points in order to facilitate the understanding of the universe and our role in it. Now, I was satisfied with that realization. It wasn't too long though until I asked the question: "Would there be a common denominator between the religions then?"
I think the answer is one and only: reason. I believe that different religions not only serve different people in their quests for understanding, but also might serve the same person during different phases of her life. The one key point to always keep in focus is reason. I believe the main evolutionary driver for the human spirit is its ability to reasoning information; therefore, the ones that blindly go through the motions of the religious rituals and churchgoing without reasoning why that is needed, they are the ones that miss out on a golden opportunity of finding true happiness. They sleep through their lives, focusing on the things that in fact make them miserable, and guess what? Their lives become miserable. They will be the Sunday churchgoers who don't really understand what the Sermon of the Mountain is really about. They will explode their bodies on suicide bombings without understanding what Jihad really means is not war against Christians or the west, but the internal human struggles against her own demons. They might go through life in meditation trying to reach Nirvana, as if that was the end game in itself. They miss the forest from the trees, mixing the cause with the effect.
Here I will summarize my take on the best religion. I believe the best religion is the one created by each one of us for us. The one that satisfies our current and intrinsic level of curiosity about the meaning of our own existence. The one that combines all the needed information and belief system that will drive us towards a constant state of mind of happiness. Now, please close your eyes and imagine our beautiful world without any religious conflicts, since the lack of religious groups would correspond to the lack of conflicts. Imagine further, a planet populated by individuals who are, for the most part, operating on their daily lives under a state of mind of constant happiness. Now that you pictured that world, answer this question: Is there any space on such world for holly wars and genocide, hunger, social inequality, suffering, racism, fragmentation?
I know that world is probably called Utopia at this stage of our evolution. However, I do believe that the more we fight fragmentation, the closer we will get to that world. The more we will understand that selfishness is nothing but a response from our subconscious mind to the idea we have that our happiness can only be at the cost of somebody else's sadness. Our fortune can only materialize at the expense of someone else's misfortunes. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I see fragmentation as counter intuitive to what we really are as I believe we all are connected on a deeper level that what our physical senses can catch, and the more we fight to keep our distance from each other, just like the swimmer who decides to go against the rapids, the more tired and unhappy we become.
Maybe the first step in that direction is based on tolerance. If we, under our current stage of evolution, can not really accept the merit of different points of view and understand they are nothing but a different vantage point; maybe we should try and condition ourselves to being tolerant with each other. Maybe this conditioning of our minds will turn into the deep understanding that every single one of us see the Universe around us under a particular and different light. Hopefully this tolerance will turn into respect; and in turn, respect will turn into love. The same love that was preached by the great personalities of our history as being not only the most noble of the feelings, but the only true feeling.
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