| Freedom and Religion
Owen Waters
While religious organizations are filled with many leaders
who are pure of heart and uplifting in spirit, there are also
leaders whose agendas are more self-serving. People often give
People often give away personal power to large institutions, religion
included, and this attracts unscrupulous leaders who wish to pursue
their quest for power over people.
In the pursuit of power through religion, the primary weapon of
conquest is fear. When fear has driven love from the hearts of
their followers, then hatred can be installed in its place. Once
a person hates other groups of people, then they become trapped
within an emotional prison from which there is no escape as long
as they accept the original messages of fear. It then becomes
essential that the creed being presented is a rigid set of rules
and behavior, as flexibility could open a gateway to freedom.
As people are drawn to religion by the deepest of all human drives,
which is to consciously reconnect with God, their greatest fear
is to be cut off from such a reconnection. That fear is exploited
by self-serving leaders using threats of eternal hell and damnation
for people who reject the attempts at control to which they are
being subjected.
Another ploy to drive the love out of people's hearts has been
to tell them that they are miserable sinners. This allows self-hatred
to creep in and makes it even more possible to instill hatred
of other groups of people. These other groups include not only
people of other religions, but often other sects within their
own religion.
Fundamentalist groups are famous for insisting that theirs is
the one and only correct flavor of the truth and that all other
variations on the same theme are wrong. They go on to claim that
members of the other groups are destined for a hell which is based
on Dante's imaginary Inferno.
The lowest of the spirit realms do exist, as do the heavens, or
higher spirit realms, but they are nothing like the fantasy versions.
Unlike the physical world, the spirit realms are segmented by
frequency of consciousness. There are twelve realms, or layers
of existence, within the spirit world. People reside in the realm
that best harmonizes with their normal frequency of consciousness
and spend their time among others of like mind and spirit.
There is no judgment by others when you pass from the physical
world into the spirit world. There is, however, a self-review
of your life where you assess what you learned in your physical
life, see what needs to be healed or integrated, and start to
think about what you would like to focus on in your next incarnation.
The objective of life in the spirit realms is to integrate the
lessons of the physical life experience - to heal the conflicts,
release the negative emotions and become at peace within. The
spirit then becomes ready to move on beyond the spirit realms
and into the soul realms, where in-depth planning for their next
physical incarnation eventually takes place.
There is a reason why every snowflake is unique and every person
is unique. Infinite Being created infinite diversity in order
that an infinite variety of experience may be gained. This is
why there are as many paths to spiritual oneness as there are
humans upon the face of the Earth.
Trying to force people to live and act the same, according to
someone else's set of rules, is an attempt to interfere with the
Creator's principle of infinite variety. As I pointed out in my
book "The Shift," any attempt to coerce people into
conformity with the standards of another person, or another group
of people, is actually a violation against the will of the Creator.
Humanity will reach unity and a lasting world peace when, paradoxically,
people accept the diversity of humanity. There will never be a
one-size-fits-all, world religion which demands the conformity
of everyone, simply because one size of anything never did fit
all people. What there will be is a worldwide acceptance of human
diversity and the fact that there is a limitless variety of spiritual
paths back to God or Infinite Being, the one source of all life.
The freedom to pursue your own unique path back to original oneness
is a fundamental right endowed upon you by the Creator of all
life. As a living being, you have the inalienable right to be
who you are, and not what someone else wants you to be.
As we move away from the Old Reality and further into New Reality
consciousness, it is appropriate to celebrate our uniqueness and
the individual paths that we have chosen to tread. Life is a cycle
of experience and its ultimate purpose is to learn how to reconnect
with the spiritual joy which radiates from within our inner beings.
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