Chayacitra

Truth is a Pathless Land

=== JKrishnamurti.org Daily Quote ===

The religious mind is something entirely different from the mind that believes in religion. You cannot be religious and yet be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist. A religious mind does not seek at all, it cannot experiment with truth. Truth is not something dictated by your pleasure or pain, or by your conditioning as a Hindu or whatever religion you belong to. The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is – what actually is.

- Freedom from the Known The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader

=== Thoughts ===

What is the difference between “a religious person” and “a person who belongs to an organized religion”?

Most people would probably answer with “absolutely nothing”.

After all – we’ve invented a new word for those types of people, right? Don’t we call them “spiritual”?

Well I reject that label!

I reject it because it has no meaning. Just like organized religion has absolutely no meaning.

And while I don’t mean to offend anybody’s “religious” sensibilities (or do I?) – I would argue that followers of any organized religion are essentially not religious at all!

Perhaps it’s because the word “religious” has been so watered down in ordinary parlance as to have lost all it’s meaning, just like the word “love” (a topic for another day).

Let’s turn to Dictionary.com and take a look at their definition of religious to find out if my assumption is correct.
What used to mean “strict faithfulness” or “devotion” (see the archaic usage) has since devolved into:

• “A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhumanagency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.”

So many words, yet so little meaning. Truly “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing“.

Why don’t we do the Dictionary a favor right now and agree to change the definition to “Dogmatic acceptance of fantastical beliefs”, or even better yet- “Ideological slavery”? We’re likely only a few years from that revision anyway; in fact I’d argue it’s well past due!

I guess you could say that the ultimate cosmic joke- and the penultimate expression of irony- is that people attempt to “find God”, “know Truth”, or “reach Enlightenment” through blind devotion to the very barriers which block them from achieving their spiritual goals in the first place. Isn’t it a pity?

And what could possibly be more destructive to real Freedom than attachment to ideological thought, ritualistic behavior, and rigid beliefs?

…

It’s the obsessions with such systems, with such paths, and with what others have said before that’s holding you back from reaching your own enlightenment and experiencing your own awakening.

Lighting incense, chanting mantras, and prostrations to the Holy land will not get you Truth.

For Truth lies in the very negation of these things.

Let them go and reincarnate now!

When we live in a world of concepts, as we do now (“good” vs. “bad”, “pretty” vs. “ugly”, and all the rest of the didactic pairs), we never meet the world itself, but instead we meet our concept, or description of the world. We meet our images, our ideas, and our beliefs about the world.

This is what the Tibetan Buddhists are attempting to point out with their discussions of “non-conceptual thought” (which I once thought was babble and utter insanity). Similarly, it’s what don Juan refers to with the concept of the “Nagual”. It is also what the Taoists call “That which cannot be named”.

But the title, the name, is not what’s important here. What is of importance, and of supreme importance to us as human beings, is that as long as we remain chained to concepts, to ideas, and to images, we will never meet the world as it actually exists. We cannot understand Reality, Truth, or God, until we are willing to give up our attachment to our “ideas” (including the idea of a separate “self”). As long as we remain chained to such concepts, we see a version of reality, translated through those beliefs and ideas, according to our conditioning and experience.

We meet the world not as the world at large, but as the world according to our ideas, constructed by previous experience. And our world, which exists in a state of perpetual motion, change, and impermanence, can never be fully experienced, or even marginally understood as long as we continue to translate it according to the past.

Thus, we feel conflict, confusion, and suffering.