About no-religion

Jeroen

In a way religion is a spiritual framework of thought which we use to give meaning to our place in the world. But that is just the way it appears to the mind. When you become more advanced and start examining no-mind, witnessing, and being just loose & natural, you start to move beyond the mental definition into a kind of no-religion.

In a way, what is at the core of the Tao, that sense of being in harmony with the natural world, is also what is in the Song of Mahamudra where Osho talks about being loose and natural as the ultimate goal of Tilopa’s teaching. You could say that that is what underpins all actual religion, that religion is a behavioural pattern on top of a primeval, unaware natural being but that eventually when you let it all go, those concepts of God and creation and enlightenment, that you then come back to a more aware natural state.

It is a kind of movement of return, where you let go of many of the things you have accepted about the world. It is a clearing-out, which can happen gradually or quickly. You know in the Tao Te Ching, where it says, the man of knowledge learns something new every day, but the man of Tao lets something go every day? Becoming knowledgeable about a religion, even Buddhism, brings new patterns to your life and mind, it is an accumulation.

Untangling these things and letting them go reduces the mind to a kind of pure state, where there is love and goodwill and a kind of basic pleasure. Beyond that there is a kind of indifference, or even upeksha, equanimity, which allows you to be in the world without being in the mind. You look through the mind, and the mind kind of vanishes. Things become simpler, the past and the future largely disappear.