Religion

The religious, spiritual or mindful instinct comes before organized religion. It can be hard to resist its call, and yet it's terrifying. Is it real or imaginary? What if we're wrong? What if we're right? What's it all about? What's the point?

Transcript

Hello,

Everybody.

Welcome to Mindfulness Live.

This is the beginning of a new week and we're talking about religion.

Might be a little bit surprising,

But a lot of what we do is was often done by religion or it was it was in a religious context or so there's a connection between religion and spirituality and mindfulness and a lot of people say,

Well,

I'm not religious at all but I'm spiritual or I'm mindful.

So it's a very mushy term.

In fact,

I tried looking for an agreed upon definition of what religion is.

No such thing.

There is no consensus on the meaning of the word and yet there it is.

So we're going to talk about that.

It should be quite interesting.

But first make yourselves comfortable.

Shake it all out.

Let it all go.

Take a nice breath and let the breath come and go.

Breath coming in and breath going out and as you focus inside your mind settles.

It's like a muddy old pond.

When the water stops flowing,

The wind stops blowing and all the sediment settles to the bottom and the water becomes clear.

So with each breath you see a little more,

You feel a little more,

You're a little more focused and you start to see your breath in detail.

The breath coming,

Breath going and the breath going and you're aware of yourself sitting here this morning,

This afternoon,

This evening,

Wherever you are and you're present,

Not distracted by the past or the future or by the way things should be or the way they might have been.

You're right here,

Right now.

And as simple or as complicated as it might be,

This is your experience and it's for you to describe it.

You're the only one who actually experiences it,

Even though we're all together,

We're all following the same directions more or less,

But your experience is unique,

Unique sensations in your body as you breathe,

As you sit,

Sitting up,

Resisting gravity,

Working your muscles,

Working your posture,

Working your attitude,

Which is simply to be here now without struggle,

Accepting,

Here is my body,

Here are my sensations,

Here is the feeling of these sensations in this moment and all of this together is experience,

These moments of my life and your life is ticking away with each breath,

It's precious,

It's temporary,

It's always changing and so you make an effort to be here now,

Feeling the breath come,

Feeling it go.

Bringing the breath into your chest and expanding your attention from the chest,

Upwards into your shoulders,

Your neck,

Your face,

Feeling all the muscles in your face,

In your forehead,

Around your eyes,

Your nose,

Your cheeks,

Your ears,

Your upper lip and your tongue and your jaw and your lower lip,

Feeling your face as it is right now,

Knowing your expression,

Knowing the tension,

Knowing the picture it paints and the mentality it reflects,

In other words knowing yourself inside and out and breathing in,

Pause,

Breathing out,

Pause.

And now taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.

So I think about and I talk about sometimes the religious impulse or perhaps the religious instinct and I think basically what it is,

Is the need to be awed or perhaps you might say the desire to be awed,

In other words we want to have our minds blown,

Okay,

It's a great expression,

It means just blowing out all that conventional stuff,

You know,

What time am I going to have lunch and when am I going to go shopping and how am I going to do this task and that,

Blow all that away and just be exposed to this huge cosmos,

You stare into the night sky and you try and imagine how deep it is and what's up there and it's inconceivable and that is the point where instead of living in this entirely conceivable world which we create for ourselves,

We're blowing that away because we want to expose ourselves and it's dangerous,

It's scary in fact or is an exposure to something that we don't understand,

That we can't comprehend and the reason we're exposing it is because we can't comprehend it,

Okay,

So I call that an instinct,

It's not,

Doesn't make any rational sense at all but we do it,

We want to do it and I think from there we come up with explanations which is our weakness because the whole point of this is to get beyond explanation but the next thing we do is we start explaining it,

Well there's somebody in charge up there,

It's God and so on and we're sort of,

We take that extraordinary experience and we try and bring it back to the ordinary,

We can't help it,

Okay,

We're a very complicated species,

So anyway this is,

This I believe is the,

Well it's what I call the religious instinct,

You know a lot of people today claim they're not religious at all,

I'm not religious,

I'm spiritual but I'm not religious,

So what they're doing basically is they're trying to distance themselves from religious organisations and again a religious organisation according to my definition is itself a contradiction in terms,

Now I can understand people get together,

People get together every year to visit Burning Man,

This great big festival,

I've forgotten,

Is it in Arizona?

I've forgotten where it is,

It's down in the southwest somewhere,

So what happens at this festival,

It's called Burning Man,

You've probably heard of it,

Is that lots of people assemble and they build these structures which are very ritualistic and among them is a temple and there's also a man,

A huge man of some strange shape or form and people are encouraged to come and wear whatever they want and express themselves and they take a special name for the occasion,

They're given a name as they walk through the gates and as they walk through their welcomed home implying that everything else is not really home,

This is your home and it's this experience,

This extraordinary experience and they have a few days of ritual and play and all sorts of artwork and everything and then they burn the whole lot until it's absolutely nothing left and that's it,

It's sort of like an acid trip except much more expensive and complicated and it's very successful,

It's growing year by year and most of the people who are there,

If you were to ask them I'm sure,

Would say I'm not religious,

Good god no,

Because they associate religion with organisation,

With rules,

With well you know in some cases with bad behaviour,

Religion in history,

Religious organisations in history have you know not a great,

What should we say,

Not a great face on them,

There's all sorts of positives but there are negatives too but I'm more concerned with individuals so this desire to be awed,

To be scared,

To have your mind blown is the instinct I believe,

It's not something we learn you know,

You don't tell our children to do that,

We tell our children to go to church,

Well at least my parents told me to go to church and behave and follow the rules and what they got from that,

Especially my mother and especially my younger sister,

What they get from that is a sense of consolation,

Of certainty,

Of safety,

That they're okay,

They're saved,

Literally that's the word they use,

That you know as long as they follow the rules,

That god is on their side and then everything is going to work and no matter how bad this life is it's all going to disappear and everything will be wonderful.

So compare those two,

The awe of not knowing and being exposed to the naked complete indifference of the universe on the one hand or this desire to be nice and safe and secure,

A comfort zone in other words.

So among all those things that this demonstrates is the flexibility of the human mind where we can just flip things over to the exact opposite of what they are or to put it another way,

The people who follow the religion for the sake of consolation are out of touch with that part of their mind and with those people who are into religion as a challenge,

As a mystery,

As something extraordinary and although the people in church want to have those mystical experiences they also want the safety,

So it's very contradictory.

So I'm not complaining about that,

This is not a problem that it's contradictory,

It's simply the way we are and accepting that is a first step to understanding what's going on here.

We're always looking for certainty,

We're always looking for safety,

For security,

We have more than any other species we've invented the idea of security,

We have secure homes,

We secure our possessions,

We secure our relationships by getting married,

By investing in them in all sorts of ways,

We're always looking for the security and religion sort of seals it,

It makes everything now and even secure against death and the afterlife.

So this is very good for social order,

All right,

So from a sociological point of view,

From a political point of view,

Religion is good which is why we get people who like to run religions,

Who like to rule them,

Control them,

Set the rules,

Make sure everybody obeys,

Okay.

That's sometimes very nicely done,

It can be very benevolent or it can be really harsh and nasty,

Look at the Spanish Inquisition and a lot of people criticize the Catholic Church nowadays because of the extraordinary amount of child abuse and sexual,

Just awful and yet the Church does a lot of good things,

There are good people in the Church who are kind,

It's because they're in the Church,

It's because they want to follow those beliefs and follow those values,

The values of charity and hope and faith,

Because of that they try a little bit harder,

They become a little more mindful,

Okay,

Am I being faithful,

Am I being kind,

So that's a good thing but at the same time following the rules just because somebody else made them is not really the essence of mindfulness,

The essence of mindfulness is to understand why I'm following these rules,

What happens if I don't,

What's the meaning,

What's the purpose and how does that get me to this experience of I don't know,

What is it,

Transcendence,

Merging with God,

Enlightenment,

There's all sorts of different words and of course everyone will agree that they're completely different things because this is my religion and that's yours but basically it does come down to the same thing,

We're trying to fulfil that religious instinct,

We want something more than this world because we feel this world every day slipping through our fingers and we want that and we know,

We know that there is no real ultimate security and yet we hope for it,

We wish for it,

We believe in it,

We invest in it and some people say I don't believe in God,

I know God,

I'm sure,

I have no doubt whatsoever but of course I mean just the fact that they're saying that means they're making an effort to believe it,

It's clearly something they've decided to do,

It's nothing natural about it and they're afraid of being called into question so this is the basic dilemma of religious consolation that the more comfort you take from it,

The more you have to hide from the fact that this is your belief and this is your hope and this is what you would like to be but you don't really know that that's the way things are,

You're just you know keeping your fingers crossed in a sense but of course when you're in a community,

Just as I was in a community of Buddhists and before that I was in a community of Catholics,

Everybody tells each other they're right,

They agree that that's the way the world is,

There are millions of them around the world and this has been going on for 2000 years so must be right,

I mean how could you not be right?

Okay so wow I just sort of picked the pimples off a hundred different aspects of religion,

Okay the rest of the week we're going to put them all back together and we're going to see religion is not a bad thing,

Spirituality is not a bad thing,

Mindfulness is not a bad thing but all of them can become harmful,

It all depends on how we take it and our attitude towards it and let's remember religion,

Spirituality,

Mindfulness,

They're just words,

They're just words,

It's what you do with those words,

It's how you play with those ideas and what they actually mean to you in your daily practice,

That's what counts but I want to talk about it because I want to not think that we're just talking about this few people in the world who practice mindfulness you know,

Us weirdos,

I'm trying to connect us to everyone else and connect everyone else,

We're all in the same pot,

We're all trying and of course there are you know die-hard materialists who think all of this is a lot of hooey but that's another issue altogether.

So for the time being let's get back to being awed,

Okay so make yourselves comfortable take a nice breath and let go and today I want you to imagine,

Visualize yourself staring up into the night sky and actually being drawn up into the heavens,

Into that vast cold empty space which is most of the universe,

Not just 51% but 99.

999999% of the universe is space and most of what is left over is rock and gas and fire and you're surrounded by this space,

Galaxies,

Light,

Movement,

Gravity and you bring something special to this,

You bring consciousness,

The ability to see and know and experience,

You open yourself to that experience because it is,

This is life so feel it,

This is the universe so be in it this is your home,

It's where you came from,

Perhaps it's where you're going back to as well.

Feeling how fast it is,

Feeling the depth,

The distance,

The time,

Timelessness and you are part of this,

You are part of the universe,

You are a creature,

Something that's been created that is conscious,

Awake,

Alive and to explain why you're alive,

It's too complicated but to accept that you're alive is mind-blowing,

Mind-boggling,

Mind-shaking,

Enough to make you doubt all your certainties,

All your explanations,

Knowing that what matters is not how you account for all this,

How you describe it,

How you desire it or fear it,

What counts is simply to experience it nakedly,

Without resistance,

Without any expectation,

Without hope or despair,

Just breathing in the universe and staying with the breath back in your body,

In your heart,

In your mind,

In this moment,

The breath comes and goes,

And your life comes and goes,

And the whole universe comes and goes with each breath,

With each moment,

As big as it is,

It's just as impermanent as you,

Because it's what you're made of,

It's what you're part of,

All of this is part of who you are,

And it's yours to experience,

To remind you that life is much bigger than the next chore,

The next job,

The next item,

And this is your life.

And now taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.

Reviews

Thank you - I enjoyed hearing your motivation for this topic - to connect us all together