There isn't any adam and eve ashamed of their nakedness within the mystical feminine, these ladies, pictured above. It's a celebration of all of nature, this life, and there seems to be no personal religion and it's judgements clouding their consciousness, at all. It's like The Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas, Nevada in the late single digit years of the beginning of the 2000s, except the equation for bodily pleasure doesn't involve any Ben Franklins, a world we have created here in The Great American Spiritual Desert. In Las Vegas 'the savage heart of the american dream' it's most always an orgy 'controlled by money'. The painting above is a celebration of youth. Either way, it's this kind of personal freedom that personal religions have no desire to allow, as their Gods always seem to be dressed up in holy robes, or a business suit.
Empires and religions walk hand in hand down the corridors of time as The King or The Caesar have a special audience, the preemminent relationship, with their God, or gods. Heirarchial control rests at the top of every totalitarian pyramid of power, be it held by a king, emperor, priest, or shepherd. Speaking for God and telling everyone what God wants them to do is every psychopaths wet dream. When religion gets personal, personal freedom vanishes. Brave New World. 1984. The former ecumenical christian community, Lamb of God, Incorporated. When you have that kind of power it's like an addictive drug, something you have to use, for when you really get down to it all of any society's behaviors can be controlled.
Constantine and the cannonization of The Bible. Justinian I and the doctrinational elimination of reincarnation. Christianity lifted from obscurity by a dying Roman Empire and shaped in content by two Roman Caesars. Christianity is an extremely personal religion for it guarantees the salvation of your soul, he self, the little you. No longer do you have to fear death for your consciousness will be delivered into eternity by your own personal savior, Jesus, and through what he did you will be able to live forever, in Heaven, with God, and the other people he saved. That power a personal religion gives to the organization that represents God in this world is the deepest penetration and most controlling hook one person can have over another. Knowing God's Will for you creates two classes of people: those who know, and those who are told. An elite class, the master race spiritually speaking, and the common man who needs their help. Personal religions get really personal in their control of all that is personal, and that's why they're the best political religions ever invented. The Roman Empire and The United States of America, so what's the difference between these two? One sold religion 'over the counter', one 'under the counter' due to 'prohibition', but either way their personal religion was sold, it was toxic. The implosion of Lamb of God personally illustrates just how personally violent personal leaders of personal religions can get, for it's just what happens when you try to establish, and manipulate, that which is sacred. The genocide of the Native American Peoples and the theft of their continent, the religious crusades and all their veiled conquests, The Final Solution of The 3rd Reich and mass extermination, the psychic slaughtering of all the sheep in Lamb of God, all of these holocausts, are examples of how personal religions go toxic. Doctrines that divide the whole, festering the belief that they are the best, that god is on their side, and they the chosen ones, and that all other non believers have no value whatsoever, such are the toxic mutations personal religion manifests, in mankind's consciousness.
What in time is released into the timeless? What besides That Which Is can reside in both places? Is time just an illusion? What survives death? Mystery religion say that All Is One and the creator of all, That Which Is, is all around us and dancing within this temporary maya, this violent world, our earth, and all of it's seeming seperateness. Mystery religions tear at the veils of the illusions of thought, beg us leave the confines of Plato's Cave, awake from the dream, open our eyes, and see things as they actually are, timeless. The Life is within all of us, no one besides ourselves holds the key of our being alive, to all, and to everything. Through the valley of the shadow of death, all this seemingly violent impermanence, space time, where everything comes and goes, is born and dies, has it's beginning, and then? The End. Mystery religion embraces the everchanging dance of maya, trusting the life, it is elways dying, always being reborn anew, in the moment; while personal religion, hangs on to what it's got, the illusion, for dear life.
Mystery religion is molten, fluid, organic, alive and not fixated, while personal religion is set in doctrine, belief, and all the rigidity that the dead words of set cannons brings to consciousness. I've vacillated between these two religions all my life, from spiritualist hippie, to fundamental christian, and now, some kind of vedantist who really doesn't know a thing, but trusts the life that is within us all, like a little child, thankful for all that I have been given.
Old wineskins can't hold new wine, and maybe next lifetime, I'll be frolicking in the springtime of our youth with those naked girls, having the freedom to be lost, and dance to the mystery. It sure wasn't in this lifetime, until I walked in the door of The Spearmint Rhino in the winter of 2005, and I was 55 years old.
Life isn't death's opposite, birth is. Life is something altogether different and the only way to 'discover this' is, to live your life, not try to hold onto it, with thought and belief, for old wineskins can't hold new wine. Life is too expansive, alive, connected, whole, sacred, and one for that to happen. Life can not be held in a rigid vessel, for how could time ever contain, that which is timeless?
Dead trees don't move with the wind.
