Choosing a Better Horse: Transcending Religion and the Ten Commandments

Now let’s begin the wonderful adventure of discovering who we are. In America we are having a hard time grasping the constitutional principle regarding the separation of church and state. I won’t go into the historical antecedents that prompted the adoption of that principle but suffice it to say—there was much human suffering to justify it. As an example of a specific issue dividing Americans today, let’s take the placing of the Old Testament Ten Commandments on public property. I’m going to make an end-run around the issue itself and ask the question—What if the Ten Commandments have no value? What if they don’t work! So let’s just not remove them from public property—let’s throw them out altogether and replace them with something that does work. Americans are, after all, a pragmatic people. We don’t beat dead horses.

Speaking of horses! Could it be possible that we have the cart and the horse reversed? Do religious sanctions create a righteous people or do a righteous people abide by the religious sanctions because it is their intrinsic nature provided they understand what it is to be “good”? To put it in Freudian terms—do we control the impulses of the id after a beating by the superego (the conscience) or do we behave ourselves after the ego realizes the nature of Reality and has things under control—not out of fear—but out of a rational self-interest and a natural compassion?

And finally to put it in religious terms, sanctions like the Ten Commandments are of no value to people who are lacking in awareness, who are out of touch with the more profound elements of Reality, including human nature. Humanity has lived with religious precepts for a very long time and the process of humanity’s self-destruction marches forward unabated. It’s time to send the old horse to the glue factory. In the spirit of switching the horse from behind the cart to “in-front” of the cart; from following to pulling the cart; from being a drag on human progress to lending it’s energy to an awakening humanity; I suggest that we not only change the position of the horse, I offer an altogether new horse. I offer a spirited, young, vigorous, powerful, eager and cooperative steed. His blood line can be traced to the most magnificent horses in both the Eastern and Western world, back beyond and through both Ireland and the Middle East to the steppes of Asia and ancient India; and best of all this Equus cabalas is one that is allowed on public property, he is a thoroughly secular horse.

The Ten Realizations (to replace the Ten Commandments):   

1. I need the answer to only one question: Is the Universe friendly?
2. The kingdom of heaven (Self-realization, paradise, nirvana, peace on earth) is within.
3. The kingdom of heaven is here and Now.
4. What I am seeking is not the meaning of life but an experience of life.
5. My experience of life happens in the present moment.
6. To simplify my life I realize that I must have nothing, know nothing, and do nothing.
7. In attaining Self-realization, I “feel” the distinctions between the relative and the Absolute, between emotions and feelings, between the ego and the Self, and between the intellect (thinking) and intuition (the Now), and between response and reaction.
8. The fundamental nature of reality is change itself.
9. I am not in the world, the world is in me.
10. In attaining Self-realization I arrive at the place that I never left and experience it for the first time.

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References and notes are available for this essay.
For a much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality, read  Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival,  by Roy Charles Henry, published in 2011.