Religion is the Opiate of the Masses
While on the journey to find absolute truth and free myself from the tomb and the womb, realizations came to me in waves. One major realization was about religions. That was because I was in one even though my associates said it was not one.
I had been surrounded by religion since I was born, as most humans are. I told my friend one day, “I hate religion! It just separates people, everyone thinking they are better than the other.” She replied, “Yes, it separates them, but it also brings them together.” Well, shit! I couldn’t deny that. But let me just paint a picture in your mind. Here’s a Hassidic Jew with curls as sideburns, some sort of hat and long black clothing. Then there’s the Catholic priest with his black uniform and white collar and the nuns with cape-looking covers and big hats. There’s the Muslin man with his squared off round hat and his long tunic. His wife is wearing a black burka with her mouth and nose covered and her eyes peeking through. There’s a Buddhist monk with his head shaven and orange robes and beads. Close to that, the Hindu monks wear orange robes, some with shaved heads, others with a pony tail in back and some have dreadlocks down to their knees. How about the American Indian Priest and all the feathers, beads and bones!
Each particular article of clothing is there to say, “We believe this.” These costumes say, “I believe in Mohammed, or I believe in Krishna, I believe in Jesus Christ, I believe in the Sun God, I believe in Nirvana.” Honestly, who gives a shit? Should you wear your religion? Should you mark you face with three vertical lines or two horizontal ones? Should you bow down to pray three times a day or go to confession? Maybe I should go to confession but the poor priest might be there for a while. Nevertheless, it’s probably all good if it helps you to connect with God as you understand Him/Her and you don’t criticize others.
Elevated souls do not criticize other religions, so I have heard. If you believe in God and have started some sort of process to reach the ultimate Truth, then you are evolving. I did not need to criticize you for your beliefs, because at least you were doing something. Good for you, but I thought humans in religious costumes looked like monkeys who found different costumes in a box and were parading around in them, not understanding what each costume meant. Why did I feel that way? Because I honestly felt your beliefs or religion should be your private business and to wear costumes can be an egotistical effort to say you are better than anyone else or it simply separate you from others. I did realize all the people wearing these statements of their religion were not egotistical about it, but some were very humble. So there were two types of people who dress up in their religious garb.
And, I realized different religions considered that their costumes were practical for their particular practice. Hindus, with their orange robes, needed to have as few possessions as possible. Simple cloths tied around them, with no stitching was pretty renounced. Thin cloth in hot weather also worked well. Muslim women covered their bodies from head to toe in black whilst they were decorated with sequins underneath and thought they were being chaste for their husbands. The list goes on.
In both Vrindavan and Mayapur as well as a few other places in India where westerners joined the community and adopted the dress, it was a bit of a different story. First of all, it was being respectful to the others in the community. Then, well, when in Rome. If you are living in a foreign country with a completely different culture, there is certainly no harm in adopting the standard dress. It can be both practical as well as kind to not draw attention to yourself. It only becomes weird according to the time and place. It becomes weirder when it is part of your ego.
But about religion, Krishna said to Arjuna, “Give up all varieties of religion and simply surrender unto Me,” Bhagavad Gita 18:66. I liked that. Did he really mean it? Again, as far as I know, He is the only person in history with balls enough to say, “I am God.” (There’s that sentence again! But it is sooooo true.) So, I wondered, if Krishna says to give up religion, then why has a religion sprung up around the words He spoke to Arjuna with more rules and regulations and practices than you can count? Hindus published books with all the religious processes you needed to follow. And why? Was it because we needed to turn our seven deadly sins into seven virtues? No harm in that, but when my religion tried to intimidate me in order to get me to follow the rules, or told me there was no chance for redemption without following their regulations, I definitely had a problem with that and that is what the cult did. It used fear and intimidation and in the end, only we were responsible for our own ascension or salvation. It used rules saying you were required to use this hand for one thing, the other for something else. You needed to wear clay markings all over your body and if you didn’t sip water with a name of god with each sip, your offerings would not be accepted. If you didn’t decorate your body with clay before you chanted the mantra, it would not be effective! Really??? What about love and affection? What about doing something from your heart? All those rules and regulations were more of a distraction than an aid for me. You weren’t supposed to take your meditation beads in the bathroom, yet one of our most elevated grandfather guru’s hid himself in a latrine in order not to be bothered when he chanted.
And did we really need a religion? Did we need a ritual to help us cross the ocean of material existence? It was nice to know we had a spiritual guide where we could go with our questions and maybe take gifts and donations to that person for their generosity, but did that guide need a format and a building? Did his instructions need to be packaged in the robe of a ritual? Krishna didn’t think so. Why did we?
Actually, we humans probably could not reach our goal without guides or gurus to help us along in our search for truth. We go to astrologers for advice, architects to help us build a house and doctors to tell us what kind of medicine to take, so if we needed a teacher to help us cross the ocean of birth and death, we needed a guru. But religion was just a big reason to start wars and wear costumes as I saw it. Nevertheless, it pretty much did it for everyone, the masses, as it were. It didn’t do it for me.
If there was a drug for everyone, an opiate, it was probably religion. Here’s the thing. We were all convinced our religion was the only true, and real path that would get us to the destination we wanted. And I was sure it was true. Each religion has its own destination, like Nirvana or Heaven and for my community, it was Vrindavan in the spiritual world. And maybe we needed a road to get there, so there was nothing wrong with a taking the right direction, but we were all running around in circles preforming all types of rituals and ceremonies and sacrifices and wearing all types of robes and headgear and I wondered just how crazy we must look! I could see a picture in my mind’s eye of a higher species in ethereal bodies looking down on humans and scratching their heads, thinking, “What the hell are they doing?” If they were angels, hopefully they would have compassion on us poor deluded souls! But they may have been thinking, “These humans should just take some LSD and really get high. That is guaranteed!