Keep the good religious feeling. Discard the religion

Recently I had one of my marvelous enlightened insights. These occur regularly now that I've forsaken the confines of "thou shalt" religiosity.

I'm not sure how much more enlightened and insightful I can become. Maybe infinitely. Can't be sure, since one of my core insights is that uncertainty and unknowing are part of the human condition.

Mystery is us. Also, the cosmos.

Anyway, My Big Insight (haven't copyrighted it, so feel free to share, steal, embrace) is this:

If you've given up unfounded religious beliefs that you used to embrace, yet miss the pleasurable feelings those beliefs produced, keep the feelings and discard the religion.

For example, I used to believe that whatever happened to me had some purpose, a deeper meaning. That made me feel protected, safe, secure -- even if what was going on was unwanted, painful, disturbing.

As I was recollecting this, suddenly I realized those good feelings were still close at hand. I remembered how I felt in my true believing days. Then that feeling stopped being a memory. I was experiencing it, now. 

Without the religion. Without the unfounded beliefs. I'd simply embraced the positivity of the good feelings directly, changing my outlook on life without the crutch of unproven religious dogma.

Give it a try. Recollect your most wonderful religious feeling. Then subtract the religion from it. What's left is yours, always available to you. Now.

 

Comments

[Tia]

Hey stranger....been a long time since I have posted here.

So I love and appreciate your perspective on keeping the good feelings. I do believe that each of us is responsible for our own emotional state....no person or situation can "make" us feel anything....we need to own it.

So I do want to hear more about this comment:
"For example, I used to believe that whatever happened to me had some purpose, a deeper meaning. That made me feel protected, safe, secure -- even if what was going on was unwanted, painful, disturbing"

I do want to believe that each of us "manifests people and situations for the purpose of our self-learning". But what if that is not true? What if life is totally random?? Wow, an interesting thought for this morning. Guess I never thought it could be that way....and I admit it's an unsettling thought before my 2 cups of coffee.....

Look forward to reconnecting with you!

[Brian Hines]

Tia, I don't see life so much as being random, as unpredictable. It sure seems like causes and effects rule the day, along with the cosmos.

But usually we can't accurately predict what's going to happen, or exactly explain why something happened to us, or confidently say why we, or anyone else, did this or that.

I don't have a problem with this. Life is more interesting with its mysteriousness. If everything happened predictably, that'd be boring. Not even living, really -- more like being the digital display in an electronic calculator.

And even though the universe/cosmos doesn't appear to have any built-in meaning, WE supply our meanings. The Meaning Remote Control is in OUR hands. If we want to change the meaning channel, we can.

To me, this is a lot more inspiring, optimistic, and hopeful than the notion that some god guy/gal has planned out a meaning for our life, but we can't know what it is without signing on to one of the world's thousands of religions, which means we're just taking a guess of which imaginary god to trust in.

How about trusting in the meaning that we find within ourselves? That makes much more sense to me.