Religion As a Mirror: Are People Inherently Good?

 

Why are atheists passionate about their non-religion?  I mean, if you truly believe in nothing, wouldn’t the appropriate action and emotion be, well, nothing? Why would you bring energy into nothingness?  That makes no sense.  True atheism would be spiritual disinterest with no energy expended whatsoever.

So what causes people to be passionate about nothingness? (And I’m not talking about the Buddhist nothingness, that’s different and does have a religious context.)

I have a working theory, which is that these atheists actually do believe in God, but are so terrified at the thought of their own unworthiness that they violently reject God to protect themselves from the pain of their on spiritual unworthiness.

“If I don’t believe in Hell, then I can’t be sent there.”  But if you don’t believe in hell, then that entire sentence makes no sense. 

Religion, when applied faithfully, serves as a mirror – you see yourself and all your good and bad aspects.  People who reject religion aren’t rejecting the mirror, they’re rejecting the reflection because they can’t deal with the reality of their own imperfections.

This brings me to a fundamental philosophical question:  Are people basically good?

A lot of people, especially people in various forms of “love and light” spiritual bypass will say, yes, people are basically good and “turn evil” through corruption, etc.

But if one removes this distortion and answers the question honestly, the answer is much more troubling.  Throughout human history, people have not been basically good.  In fact, most people are pretty fucked up.  That’s not to say they’re “bad,” but they’re not inclined to goodness.

Thus the mirror test.  Some people look at the mirror with rose-colored glasses and say “I’m all good, even the bad parts are good, isn’t this wonderful?”  Well, no, it isn’t.  Humans are selfish.  They kill.  They fight.  They hurt each other.  They’re lazy.  They’re corrupt.  Outside forces didn’t corrupt people, people themselves did that.

It’s hard-wired into our brains to kill, to steal, to rape, to lie, to hurt.  Our primitive brains tell us we need to do these things to survive and pass on our genes.  The fantasy that people long ago were good people is 100% false.  People long ago were literal savages and did horrible things to others without any second thought.  They had no mirror.  They had no angel on their shoulder.  They were fucked up people doing fucked up things.

And the worst part? Every one of us walking the earth is a genetic byproduct of those fucked-up people.  Nobody on earth comes from a pure, good lineage. We all come from savages.

And when you take off the glasses and realize you’re as fucked up as “those other” bad people, or at least on the same spectrum, and that is in fact the human lineage, it can be jarring.

No, we are not all divine light.  We’re mostly fucked up people from fucked up lineages.  And that fucked-up-ness is literally the reason we are here.

Some people look at that and see hopelessness.  We’re all doomed.  Therefore there cannot possibly be a god, because that would mean God would condemn his entire creation and what would be the point of that?   If we’re products of the universe then the universe must also be fucked up and it’s all for nothing.

Some look at this reality and deny it.  No, no.  Everyone is good, we just need to “integrate our shadow” and recognize the divine light in every other person.  All is one. 

Different justification, same result:  nothing changes.

Religion, when applied properly, holds up the mirror, shows us the evil inside, allows us to identify it as evil and reject it, and serves a path toward eradicating that evil and building a good life.

Now, here some would say, well, we’ll never get this.  Only a small fraction of people on Earth are even mostly good.  Another small fraction are mostly evil.  And the huge majority are in this broad spectrum of “fucked-up-ness” and every time we make an effort to get better, we just fall right off or find some other avenue to vent our evil.

The promise of religion isn’t that you’ll achieve perfection on your own, but that you learn to identify good and evil and set your thoughts and actions more and more toward good.  You’re not perfect, but you seek betterment, not to gain something but to actually become a good person.

That in itself is an act of goodness.

God does not promise us perfection in this lifetime.  God does not promise us that if we go to church or follow his rules that everything will work out just fine.  In fact, all religions “promise” that the world around us is fucked up and there’s no getting around that because it’s literally in our DNA.  What God does promise is we don’t have to resign ourselves to this fate.  We can turn our gaze toward good and move – however imperfectly – toward the good.

Trying to bridge the gap through the “most people are good” delusion ignores the truth and denies the work.  Collapsing into denial is also a lie – it’s saying your DNA is more powerful than God. Which is nonsense.  It’s not easy.  It may feel hopeless at times.  You will fail far more often than you succeed.  But none of that overcomes the truth that goodness does exist and is available to us, no matter how fucked up our reflection in the mirror is.

At this point people will argue that this is exactly the language bad people use to control others.  And that’s true, it is.  Bad people are drawn to power, and especially religious power, because this is the ultimate means of control.  So yes, a lot of organized religion is corrupted and run by bad people.  Not most, certainly not all, but “the devil quotes scripture” in all its forms.

So critics point to bad people who misuse religion to get people to do very bad things.  Yes, this happens.  People also do very bad things for no reason at all.  The commonality isn’t religion, it’s people.  People do very bad things.

Religion can certainly be misused as a trap, but that doesn’t make religion itself bad.  God is still there, even if his word is being misused.  And rejecting God doesn’t make the bad stop happening, it’s throwing away every tool you have to become better than your DNA. 

Rejecting God actually makes it easier for bad people to manipulate and control you.  Notice how communist dictatorships all seek to stamp out all religion and impose atheism.  In order to give the evil complete control they need to stamp out any hope for goodness. Then they can control the language to make evil sound good with words like “equality.”  (“Equality” is one of those “nice-sounding” evil words that literally replaces a good concept (fairness) with a cruel and amoral measurement system.)

Those who seek power – and evil people are profoundly drawn to power – tend to be those most passionate about getting people to turn away from the mirror.  Don’t look at yourself and try to get better, look over here, this is your problem, and I can fix it and then you’ll feel good without having to try to be good.  This is a fundamental aspect of communism, but also every other oppressive, evil structure that has come about through human history.  Evil Roman emperors engaged in this deception.

There are modern “spiritual leaders” who also seek to bypass the mirror, or sell the idea there’s some magic fix where you wave a wand and the “evil structure” vanishes leaving our goodness in its place. And notice how they also seek to appoint themselves as the source of truth and the final arbiter or goodness, often under the false pretense of “freedom.”

The reflection in the mirror sucks.  It’s supposed to suck. That means you can see good and evil and that you don’t like the evil you see.  This is actually good!  It doesn’t mean you should collapse into shame, that’s another bypass.  You see the evil, you reject the evil and you change thoughts and behaviors.  And for this to happen, you need a clean, good, strong, accurate mirror.

And yes, breaking that mirror is very bad luck. 

The Insanity of the Knee-Jerk "Anti-Religious" People

 

The two craziest types of people are the hard-core religious fanatics and the knee-jerk anti-religious fanatics.

And when I say “crazy,” I mean it in the literal sense.  It’s a well-known and poorly-kept secret that religions tend to attract people who are clinically insane.  A lot of hard-core adherents are either clinically insane or hanging by a thread.  I’ve seen it personally.  I have a family member who was a hard-core religious adherent, and clinically insane.  I’ve been to temples where someone goes on and on about Buddha without any awareness of his or her audience. 

Strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up unarmed people, or shooting them, or firing rockets at them, is clinically crazy.  Supporting that behavior is also clinically crazy.  So if the people chanting BS about how Hamas is right seem like lunatics, it’s because they are.

Religion has the same problem as society – it has a serious mental illness problem. 

The other side of that is the knee-jerk “anti-religion” people who can’t stop themselves from going off the rails every time religion is mentioned.  It’s the same clinical insanity manifesting itself.  When I was at school in Berkeley, it wasn’t unusual to see the bat-shit-crazy bums arguing over religion, both the adherents and opponents, shouting crazy talk at each other.  We had a guy in my neighborhood who spent his whole life homeless, driving a van plastered with “Jesus” all over it.  In both cases, people treated the mentally ill as objects of amusement and cheered on their mental illness.  (I’m going to withhold my rant about what I think of those bastards who celebrated people exhibiting serious mental illness, but let’s just say there are a lot of people who desperately need God in their lives.)

Leaving aside the mental illness, which is disturbing in and of itself for a lot of reasons, I find the knee-jerk “anti-religion” people to be particularly annoying.  The annoying lack of self-awareness in how they’re exhibiting the same negative traits they claim to see in religious people.  The idiotic-while-acting-superior-and-rational jackassery of cherry-picking of facts and theology.  But the most annoying feature is the damage they do to innocent people’s relationship with God.

What do I mean by a lack of self-awareness?  When you boil it down to the essence, you find the anti-religion people aren’t really concerned about where religion fails and helping it to be better and more aligned with the true nature of God.  They simply want to present *just enough* evidence to make themselves feel comfortable in rejecting religion, but not go deep enough in their inquiry to allow for the possibility of anything other than a knee-jerk reaction.

They experienced a bad reaction to religion – usually a family issue but sometimes other people did something wrong to them or someone they care about.  And instead of dealing directly with the issue, they’ve projected their wounds onto religion – religion is the enemy, so now I don’t have to do the work of healing this messy wound. 

Or they’ve just made a lot of mistakes and instead of facing and owing up to them, they’d rather get rid of the whole “right-wrong” thing and imagine that disavowing religion can be their reset button.

They’re entire energy is based on some version of a deep-seeded belief that they’ve hopelessly failed and, were religion to be accurate, they’d be going to hell.  So the entire philosophy of anti-religious people comes down to shame and limiting beliefs about themselves.  (And a false interpretation of the religions they believe they’ve hopelessly crossed.)

And I’m saying this with compassion and love.  Most people exhibiting mental illness are hurting.  Some aren’t – a lot of clinically insane people attest that their insanity is euphoric and like a drug, but the people exhibiting these intense negative feelings toward a loving God that gave them life, they’re really hurting inside.  And they don’t see a way out. 

But compassion for suffering doesn’t change the fact that knee-jerk anti-religious expression is an expression of mental illness, not an inspired religious viewpoint.

I’m also not minimizing the damage people do to others in the name of God.  There are a lot of abusive people who misuse God (especially the “going to Hell” part) to do some really horrible things to other people.  The Crusades, the Inquisition, many wars, but also on an individual level – lots of child abuse, spousal abuse, and generally shitty interpersonal behavior (up to and including murder) is committed in the name of God. 

As I said, the mentally ill are attracted to religion, and for too many it’s a way to avoid actually dealing with the issues.  Are you hearing voices or hearing the voice of God?  Are you speaking jibberish or speaking in tongues?  Are you autistic or an enthusiastic proselytizer?  Are you abusive and treating people as less than human or being a loyal follower of the literal word of God?  It’s easy to hide your neurosis, psychosis, or straight-up evil behavior, behind a religious facade, and nobody can question you because “freedom of religion.”

And I agree that healthy religions need to allow space for this conversation.  Because the overwhelming majority of religious people really and truly are good people who want to be better people.  And they’re as appalled with these abuses as I am, and as those who imagine religion is out to hurt them believe.  More and more religions are opening up to this important process and working to clean out the festering infections in their families.  This is difficult but good and will make us all better people.

And I get that this is difficult and some aren’t there yet.  We want to give some space for people to find their way through the healing process. Some try to find alternate religions, or make their own.  The whole “I am God, you are God, everyone’s a god-god,” “divinity in everything” BS is part of that “choose your own religion” mentality.  It’s another flavor of  rejectionism: If I can’t succeed by following an established religion, I’ll make my own where I’m guaranteed to win.

And I know I’ll get the questions – well weren’t all religions created by “crazy people” who downloaded some stuff that turned out to be aligned with God?  Well, yeah, probably.  Not all the stuff that comes out of crazy people is nonsense.  Some is pretty inspired stuff. 

So what’s the difference between your drug-induced “enlightenment” in the jungle and Buddha’s Sutras?  Who am I to say that you aren’t adding the next Sutra to the canon instead of spouting off crazy bullshit?  Well, first of all, I’m not dismissive of every insight.  Some I test as accurate, at least in part, but many don’t hold up to that test.  And by many I mean 99.99+% of the “insight” out there.

And within that very large percentage of BS religious insight, there are big patterns.  One of which is that the “insight” conveniently aligns to the, well, convenience, of the person conveying the insight.  That’s a big red flag.  The ones God has chosen to convey his message have to suffer tremendously, and usually the message is one the person really doesn’t want to hear.  At best the message is neutral.  But in the huge majority of cases, God wants the messenger to throw away their entire life up to that point, embrace a life of poverty as a social outcast, and likely be murdered by an angry mob or die in abject poverty.  So if God is telling you “you’re God, keep fucking around, doing drugs and playing in the desert and giving crappy spiritual advice to people who pay you,” …yeah… no… no.  No.  That ain’t God talking.

God isn’t going to waste his time telling you “you’re doing just great.”  He *might* encourage you to keep going through really bad shit, but why would God go out of his way to say “You’re awesome, Dave!  Rock on, dude!” 

That’s not to say you aren’t awesome and don’t rock on, but don’t confuse yourself and spiritually vulnerable people by claiming it’s the voice of God saying that.  Positive self-talk is important and a healthy self-esteem, but don’t go crazy.

And if this triggers you – “Are you saying that I’m crazy?!?  You’re not qualified to say that!!!  You don’t know me!!!!” Consider that trigger is yet another of probably many, many signals you’ve been getting that you need to attend to your mental health and seek professional help.

Because seeing a religious statement doesn’t trigger an emotionally healthy person to respond.  And challenges to one’s mental health also don’t trigger a response in people who are emotionally healthy.  People who are not mentally ill can handle opposing viewpoints or challenging questions and don’t feel compelled to react or respond to everything.  And if the thought of religion compels you to create an alternate fantasy religion to escape, well, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it isn’t an alligator.  And the damage you’re doing to vulnerable people is real and uncalled for, you need to stop that shit.

Is Alchemy A Sin?

One of the other complaints I’m sensing out there is that alchemy is somehow in opposition to organized religion.  First of all, this is simply untrue – alchemy is actually an extension of religion and in fact came into our awareness through the efforts of dedicated religious practitioners from every major religion – I’ll go more into this later.  But most importantly, alchemy requires a strong spiritual foundation to be effective.  I would go so far as to say that, without a solid grounding in religious practice (as opposed to Western “spirituality,” which is a mess, and I’ll get into that as well), one cannot be a truly effective alchemist.

I realize that some religious practitioners will take strong issue with the concept that alchemy is an extension of their religion, but keep in mind the forces that seek to deceive use organized religion to do a lot of their oppressive work for them.  Instead of following the “leaders,” consult the source.  You’ll find the truth – alchemy is refined spiritual connection, a highly-synthesized form of prayer.

 

And it is practiced in every major religion.  Early Pagans – Greeks, Romans, Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, Egyptians – all practiced alchemy.  It’s how we arrived at some of our greatest discoveries in math, science, architecture, art and so many other areas.  Buddhists used alchemy to develop Taoism, Chi Gong, mindfulness, martial arts, the meridian system in the human body, and all kinds of breakthroughs in medicine and healing arts, including Reiki and most healing massage techniques we use today.  Hindis (or the religions that evolved into Hindu) discovered Tantra, Yoga, and all kinds of scientific breakthroughs, many of which have been lost for centuries and only now being rediscovered.  Christian monks discovered many of the aspects of alchemy that are being used today.  Muslim alchemists discovered many of the scientific principles we take for granted today (though sadly, many of their most incredible discoveries were kept from the general public and have since been destroyed by fundamentalist fanatics).  Judaism has the Kabbalah (there is a misconception that Kabbalah is a separate religion, but in fact it is wholly derived and dependent on a Jewish religious foundation).  Then there are shamans, medicine men, and the list goes on and on.

Okay, I think I’ve made my point pretty clearly now – alchemy and religion go hand-in-hand.  Yes, there are “fundamentalists” in every religion who will tell you “beware of magic,” but ask yourself why that is.  Ask what benefit denying wisdom does for the betterment of connection to God?  Is suppressing knowledge serving God, or the ego of man?  The truth makes it clear – alchemy is the highest form of spiritual service to God.

So then the next question is “which religion is the right one?”  And my answer is again controversial, but indisputable from a spiritual standpoint:  The one that serves you best, and which you can best serve.  There is no “right” religion, because all true religions believe in spiritual elevation and service above self.  As such they are all “right.”

Personally, I practice Buddhism with a Christian foundation.  I grew up a secular Christian, found Jesus in college and began a true spiritual path.  Eventually I “moved” to Buddhism, which is my spiritual home, because it fits the criteria above.  But I didn’t “reject” Christianity.  For me, it was my access point to a spiritual path.  I still believe in and love Jesus Christ, still read the Bible (which I believe is another set of Suttras and enhances my Buddhist practice), and believe most Christians are genuinely spiritual connected.  I’ve felt this connection myself in church ceremonies, and it’s real.  So I didn’t “walk away” from Christianity, I evolved into Buddhism, because it is here where I can deepen my spiritual connection and practice.

So I guess that makes me a “Universalist,” whatever.  I hate labels, but some people have to see a label before they’ll try the product.  The point in all this is without religion, there really is no alchemy, and with any religion, alchemy works, and works in harmony.

I don’t buy the “if you worship another religion you’ll go to hell” nonsense.  This to me is a way to keep people manipulated by other people and takes their eye off the spiritual prize.  I say, focus on the core truth – the spiritual connection – and pay no mind to how other people worship, that’s not your problem.

Having said that, I will say that I have a criterion for working with me – you can’t be an Atheist.  This is not me being judgmental, it’s me being an honest businessman.  Sure, I can do NLP, hypnosis, EFT, and a bunch of other “secular self-help” stuff.  So can thousands of other people.  But the real power of my work is in the spiritual – alchemy, energy elevation, spiritual development.  So if you consciously predisbelieve the core of my work – why would you want to pay me good money to work with you?  We both know it’ll have no effect, because you’ve already refused 99% of my services. 

I could charge you full-price, do some cool NLP and hypnosis stuff, tap away some superficial crap, give you a “game plan” and send you on your way like 99% of the “evolution coaches” out there.  And maybe you’d think you’re getting real value (because in your mind the “other stuff” is a ripoff), but I know in my heart I’d be the one ripping you off.  So I’d send you to someone else who shares your perspective, better for everyone.

As far as the “uncommitted spiritualists,” yes I will work with you.  In fact, I really want to work with you, because I can be of highest service here.  But I’ll be prodding you to explore religions and find a home.  And I can guarantee we will be doing LOTS of energetic cleaning work.  Because I have yet to meet a Western “spiritualist” who isn’t bursting at the seams with implants, entities, spiritual entanglements, veils, and a whole host of other energetic crap.  The Western spiritual movement is the blind leading the blind – a lot of people who are lost, hurting and looking for help being led by other lost souls and many very dishonest practitioners. 

There’s a lot of work to do here, and I’m being charged with the first phase of the cleanup effort, because I have a unique understanding and compassion for the good people here, and it feels good to help.  But… you will find me annoying at first, because unlike the other coaches, I have zero patience for spiritual wishy-washiness.  I will push you and challenge you in ways you won’t find pleasant, but at the other end you’ll discover your true spiritual self and never feel “lost” again.  (And no, I absolutely won’t direct you into a religion – they’re all awesome, and in past lives I’ve been happy in several different religions.  I’m just committed to helping you find your home, that’s very important.)

This should clear up a lot of misconceptions – alchemy enhances religion, I love all religions, spirituality is essential to alchemy work, and the vague, undefined “spirituality” in the West is well-intentioned and full of suffering.  Have I left anything out?  Oh, I love you all!

With Love,

Uthaithani