OLS Reflections 42 — The Spiritual Edition

• Confusing religion with spirituality is like confusing education with intelligence.

• As long as man still regards God as an entity outside of himself and Heaven and Hell as places he will never wake up to his full potential. Echoing with Nietzsche’s words in Beyond Good and Evil: “As long as you still feel the stars as being something ‘over you’ you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge.” Once you look up at the sky and realise that you’re looking at your past self you’ll finally get the chance to shine unapologetically just like our ancestors — The Stars.

• I see that the regressive atavistic belief, often portrayed in Eastern cultures, regarding keeping the women at home stems from the insecurity of men. They know women can excel and be great in various fields and that freaks them out. It’s too much for their ego. So they choose to play the manly act, claiming it’s their God-given, patriarchal role to be in charge and to lead the race, while pushing women aside and degenerating their positions. As a result, the men get to use their own authoritarian positions and keep the women obedient and dependent as if they are mere pets or properties.

• When consciousness has not evolved through life, people tend to develop a juvenile emotional need for a patriarchal figure which represents a source of authority. Whether it’s a president, a boss, a religious leader, or even a God(s), the figures are accordingly looked upon as powerful, protective, comforting, and dependable entities to be trusted and followed.

• It truly is gratifying to have morals. Without expecting some divine reward or fearing any retribution, one can indeed be a decent human being who aspires to do the right things.

• A distorted truth or half-truth is much worse than no truth.

• The divine spark you seek is already within you. Allow it to shine through you unobstructed and it will eternally light your way.

• Essentially, there is no separation between life and death. They are both, in fact, complementary. And that is one of the many paradoxes of our mighty Universe. Unfortunately, that’s not we are taught as children. Through the established institutions ― religions and governments ― we are made to believe that death is sort of a punishment to be afraid of; if you don’t agree with what we believe in then you will die and go to hell and suffer on the hands of burning ghouls, from one side. And if you don’t submit to our powers we’ll kill you with our guns, from the other.
  
  It is all a control game. When irrational fear is induced people become controllable. That’s how fearing death came to being.  

• Seeing the sperm which caused you as better than other sperms which caused other people because of a geographical haphazard happening means you chose to use your small, egoic mind to view the world. Unlike the big-picture view of the Higher Self, this way you are separating yourself from all the rest of humanity by believing you are better than them, which is a mere delusion.
  
   

• We are not responsible for the conditioning we were exposed to during our childhood. But as adults, we are fully responsible for fixing it.

• Once individuals become too ‘religious’ about a certain belief or reality tunnel they subconsciously lose sight of the bigger picture. Whether it’s faith, atheism, patriotism, veganism, cross-fittanism among a multitude of other isms, a teacher or a follower of any of those schisms often cannot help but become dogmatic to a considerable degree. The key is to do whatever you feel like doing without the need to shove it down others’ throats; and those who vibrate at similar frequencies will eventually find you.
  
  
  
  
• If the faith of those who are easily offended over their religion is shaken by the opinions of others ― or their drawings ― then it’s probably time they question that faith.
  
  
  
  
• Some middlemen who claim to be closer to God than all the rest of humanity realise that they can outwit their followers by making them believe that the more you serve them, the more you are pleasing God. Needless to say, many folks throughout history bought this codswallop.
  
  For those followers, having an authority figure like a middleman, teacher, or guru becomes their only way to add spiritual significance into their lives and to feel whole. As a result, they throw away that responsibility by counting on another entity outside of themselves. This hand-holding renders them mentally and emotionally immature — losing their freedom and critical thinking in the process while never achieving wholeness.
  On the other hand, propelled by the exhausted dogmas, rules, and hierarchy they embody, when the fake gurus notice the submission of such followers they begin taking advantage of it.
  
  But as Allan Watts seamlessly put it: “Anybody who tells you that he has some way of leading you to spiritual enlightenment is like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch. Of course if you didn’t know you had a watch, that might be the only way of getting you to realize.”
  
  Know Thyself. The rest will follow.
  
   

• Similar to the scientific endeavour, spirituality is a ceaseless revolutionary act. One can never be too high up by thinking they don’t need anymore learning. For there are always new levels of consciousness to be explored. 

• You are the sage and you are the lunatic. You are also the One who rises above them and chooses which to side with the most.

• There are Spiritual laws and there are man-made laws. I see myself as a cosmic traveller who happens to be a citizen of the Earth for some decades, and I have chosen to be guided by the Spiritual laws.

• All religions are somewhat true. But my religion is the truest of them all because I was born into it and never got to choose it.   

• If you come to realise that you are connected to the whole, therefore you are the entire ocean — Youniverse — you will accordingly live a grand cosmic life. It all lies in our perception, which in turn stems from our conception of the world we’re living in. The difference is that the essence of obedience is doing what you are told regardless of what is right, while the essence of morality and integrity is doing what is right regardless of what you are told.
  
  Further, being good and having morals has nothing to do with your nationality, religion, skin colour, or creed. It simply depends on the level of empathy you possess — how you treat others. For it is not our beliefs that matter in the end, it’s our behaviour.

• In terms of depths of knowledge and in terms of Truth, this fundamental difference between scripturalism and experimentalism will always exist; between those who imitate and those who create; those who follow others’ path and those who dare exploring uncharted territories and create their own trail.
 

• What if I told you that God doesn’t have a Facebook account? If you believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful God, then you should also believe that He can listen to the prayers you whisper to yourself. Of course if the purpose of publicising the prayers is to gain attention and/or sympathy, then that’s a whole different story.

• I used to say: “All religions are somewhat true. But my religion is the truest of them all because I was born into it and never got to choose it.” Now I have transcended this atavistic dogmatic reality tunnel and evolved into spirituality, thereby making me more spiritually enlightened than you.
  
  
  

• May your divine spark grow and light your way.

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is
peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
— Alan Watts

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The Parable Of The Cow: You Are Not Your Thoughts

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The Millenium Eve Spent Alone at the Mosque

Why We Should Not Fear Death

Dreaming That The Buddha Was Not Fat

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