Throughout history, religion has been both a savior to mankind and a destructive force. Every religion or spiritual tradition first came into being as a means to help mankind go beyond physical and material limitations, beyond pain and suffering, and achieve self-realization, to discover the origin of oneself and the nature of our existence. On the other hand misunderstanding of religion and modified versions of religions have been used to control people and put a veil of ignorance on people to control them. The core of religions aimed to provide answers and techniques for achieving the highest truth and ultimate salvation but misinformation and ignorance have been used to put people into sleep pf ignorance. The great Sufi and self-realized saint of Persia, Rumi explained this beautifully in his poem where he says:
“We took the core from religion, and left the skin for idiots.”
The core is always pure and freedom-giving, the core always is about respect, love, kindness, service, healing, harmony, coexistence, and purity. But the skin, or the wrong version of religions been used to not enlighten people but to push them away from the truth.
Now, many religions today are less intact and still mostly pure, and some are almost nothing like the pure core they were in the beginning.
The false leaders and those who wanted to control people, which most of the time were also a slave of ignorance, they also invented the idea of heresy and sinfulness to further prevent people from attempting to question the authenticity of what they thought to people. Fear always has been the strongest tool to control people, once you tell people “what you learned is the highest truth and you should not question it, majority of people will do that, out of fear” and thus they stay ignorant as before.
True religion and spiritual traditions encourage people to find their own answers, to seek and seek and seek until they find the truth, they usually don’t give you any ultimate answer but point toward it, they also don’t intend to make you believe anything, because belief is also enemy of realization. Once you accept something as the ultimate truth and consider that as final you will close all doors to the possibility of learning something better. We talked about this in the first episode of the Greatness Glory podcast. This is true both for learning material things and also the ultimate realization of truth.
Only with seeking without considering what you find as the ultimate you can get closer to the truth. Imagine you are seeking for what you don’t know in a vast forest, if you find something that looks like what you seek and stick to it, you may never keep looking for the real thing and stay satisfied believing what you found must be it.
Nobody can tell you what is truth, you and only you can find it. Your intention is very important, once you intend to find the truth, the universe will guide you on your path, but you must be honest with yourself, courageous, patient, and open to learning anything!