2018-12-09-Missing the Point Entirely

Session

Lesson

The Scribe: “This is your Teacher, The Damascus Scribe, and we have an entirely different lesson for you today. Yes? Yes! For when it comes to spirituality — true spirituality — most of you are missing the point entirely. Even those among you who dislike religions and savor spirituality have to ‘go out from’ some basic beliefs and thereby may see others as less informed and perhaps less spiritual.

“As you found in the 1980’s, the Bali-Hindu (now well over 3.4 million) generally believe their island — all 5.700 plus sq km of it — to be a turtle floating in the ocean and gracefully providing his enormous shell for them to live on, care for their mosaics of rice paddies and construct their gorgeous wooden temples. Today you would no longer think to ask the Balinese where on their shore you need to stand, and at what time, to see this turtle lift its head to take a deep urgent breath, but I know it did more than enter your mind at that time. You have in the meantime come to admire the deeply spiritual folks who live on that turtle’s back.

“Nor do you pain yourself about where the Vikings’ Valhalla might now be and who’d be running it these days. All these, together with the many miraculous births and virgin births of the last 5.000 or 6.000 years I told you about are nothing but the pretty wrapping paper and the boxes within which you might find your Christmas or birthday presents of genuine spirituality. Understand that spirituality needed those religious ‘anchors’ made of wrapping paper and sturdy boxes for spirituality to come to exist inside them. Yes, evolutionary religion had to be invented — to be romanced I call it — for spirituality to grow and blossom because without religion the ‘jump’ to spirituality would have been too great for most.

Closing

“There you have it and now you see that you may no longer miss the point, make jokes about turtles that don’t come up to breathe and phantom pregnancies that turn out to be real, because religions are regular stepping stones that essentially lead to an ever-more-solid path of growing spirituality and eventual god-likeness.

“I am Sananda, but you may call me the Scribe of Damascus.”