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One of the worst mistakes you can make in life is to attach your identity to any particular religion or philosophy, such as by saying “I am a Christian” or “I am a Buddhist.” This forces your mind into a fixed perspective, robbing you of spiritual depth perception and savagely curtailing your ability to perceive reality accurately... Religious “truths” are inherently rooted in a fixed perspective, but real truth is perspective-independent...
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True. But how do you come to experience this perspective-independent truth? Do you experience it by saying that 'you' isn't the real 'you'? By thinking, that 'you ' isn't the real 'you'? Or by feeling that 'you' isn't the real 'you'?
In my opinion you can only experience this perspective-independent truth by becoming it. That is and always was the goal of the great mystics. You have to develop the possibility to experience it by contemplative and/or meditation techniques (Like father Thomas said in the video I posted before, in some cases it may arise out of an intensive experience while being in nature or something else). But there is severe evidence that most of the time you have to walk one of these paths (meditation, contemplation...) to really become this truth in terms of a deep experience.
Today many people tend to pay lip service after watching spiritual movies, reading books or self-development blogs (no offense! Count me in!) and say: "I am not my opinion", "There is no one who can be holder of a point of view", "The observer is not the observed" and so on. But do they really live and feel it from the bottom of their heart? Ask yourself: when your house burns down, when you're diagnosed a deadly disease, when your partner dies in a car accident, when your kid is killed by some crazy rapist - would you still be able to keep that distance to what is or what holds your point of view? Steve maybe one of the few who would, I for my part frankly think I wouldn't (though it's my ideal).
I think lip services keep us more from ever experiencing this truth than any religion ever does, because those lip services are intellectual concepts disguised with a deep spiritual meaning. Of course same goes for many things going on in organized religion, but there is a tendency to return to the mystic source of religion. Much homework was done hundreds and thousands of years ago. As Wolfgang said: Why throwing the baby out with the bath water? Why condemning the bible or religion in it's whole when all we should do is putting it in our today's perspectives? There is so much worth in it!
Steve, I really appreciate your work and your article. There is a huge shift to be made. And maybe we have to become non-believers in the first place to believe again.