“the spiritual lies beyond religion”
Our spiritual nature is uniform and inclusive—certainly not exclusive as many religions assert. The global community will never experience peace and harmony with limited and divisive religious teachings.
Religious texts delineate dogma and precepts which followers consider to be sacred. But Karen Armstrong, author of The Lost Art of Scripture (2019) says: “Too many believers and nonbelievers alike now read these sacred texts in a doggedly literal manner that is quite different from the more inventive and mystical approach of premodern spirituality.”[i]
Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!
Swami Vivekananda
Joan Borysenko points out that: “Religious statements [texts] … are mere substitutes for the not understood reality of the spirit [and] can neither replace nor bring about an understanding of the spirit which is the one essential thing. Whenever we speak of religious contents, we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable.”[ii]
Sacred religious texts may give us parables and precepts, they may bring us comfort and “words to live by,” but do they get us any closer to a personal relationship with our Creator and our True Self?
Insight # 37 comes to us from Joan Borysenko (b. 1945), a licensed psychologist, journalist and public speaker. She writes about healing, inner peace and the spiritual journey.
“The spiritual is not the religious. A religion is a dogma, a set of beliefs about the spiritual and a set of practices which arise out of those beliefs. There are many religions and they tend to be exclusive. That is, every religion tends to think that it has dibs on the spiritual—that it’s ‘The Way.’ Yet the spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma and practice. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is the bridge to the spiritual but the spiritual lies beyond religion.”[iii]
__________
Additional Reading:
- Religion, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
__________
[i] Kristof, Nicholas. “Faith and Reasons.” The New York Times Book Review. December 1, 2019, p. 10.
[ii] Borysenko, Joan. Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson. New York: Warner, 1990, p. 18.
[iii] Borysenko, op. cit.
