Best Of

It struck me a while ago that most religious views of the spiritual are useless obfuscations at best. For example, the Muslim heaven has rivers of wine. The Christian heaven and hell are places among the clouds and in the lava. These are things which are derivative, they are present on Earth and some enterprising priest has extended them into the spiritual world. Yet language brings these concepts to us as if they were truths. “Don’t you know what heaven is? Let me tell you…” They are cheap tricks to convince and frighten primitive people.

If you accept these things are all the dreams of other people and largely illusory, you are just left with places which are more pleasant and places which are less pleasant. If you wish to truly understand the world, a walk among the woodlands has more to teach you than the words of priests. You would see that everything is continually transforming, trees becoming soil becoming bushes, clouds becoming rain becoming streams, plains becoming mountains before being worn down again, and that all form is purely temporary.

It seems to me only reasonable that in a spiritual world there might be a similar principle, that acting beings get recycled from role to role according to the whims of the energetic winds. That as beings become more sophisticated they pass through a series of natural challenges to do with how well evolved they are, which are intended to teach them lessons.