Being a genuinely religious person means cultivating faith and compassion, not belief and judgment. So many claim religiosity but are the latter, and thus feel absolved from addressing their sins in everyday life.
What do I mean by sins? Putting negativity into the world.
You can be edgy and even a little cunty, and if you walk with a truly pure heart, empty of genuine negative thoughts and full of feelings of comradery toward those around you, people will know you are nice. But it does not work for truly hateful, bitter people, because their insides are rotting.
And let me be clear: pretty much all bitterness and seething hate in people’s hearts is schizophrenic. There is literally nothing more illogical. It is like the cowherd said, “It is like taking a poison and expecting the other person to die.” Everyone has free will, and some hate it.
Hatred and bitterness arise from an internal clinging to control. To live with no bitterness and no regret, one must accept the present and forge the future. The past is not real. You cannot change people or the world, but you can change yourself to be good, and then you can help people better.
It is genuinely a revolutionary act to be genuinely kind. Even in the heartland of kindness in this country, true kindness and comradery are hard to come by, unmarked by a sad and tattered soul. So many live life as hungry ghosts. There is so much more to life.
It is the easiest thing to be miserable, the simplest to shift accountability, the norm to wait for someone to save you. But save yourself or be saved, and you stand among a broken culture. The answer is not to look down on others, but to help them too. We are all in this together.
There is a sweetness even in the worst of the world. It is not to be reveled in, but to give evening to the good. We must strive for goodness and a world of good, but we must not let the bad hold us back or cause us despair. We all have a right to live and prosper.
This is what it means to die daily. When you pass the roadkill on the street, do not look away, do not revel in the brutality. Understand in it the interdependent nature of things, death and rebirth, and your mortal frailty. Understand how little time we have, be kinder.
One could say, “Ah, but this is irrational! If I find it gruesome I must look away, I must wallow in grief over the world.” Yet this is how man lived for eons, in an irrational world. We are not rational beings. You must face the shadow of life, it is the face of the great mystery.
One must simply do what they can, and that begins with the self. One cannot help others if they cannot help themselves. Once they have helped themselves and can honestly say they have more good days than bad days, they can help others, and they will be great at it.
To understand the mind as the root of all things, the monadic principle from which all began, is freeing. Not only is it freeing, but it is the truth, and once you align yourself with this truth, everything comes into alignment.