Thou shall not know thyself – Andrei Drăgănescu

The religious knot

I had no idea until yesterday there is such a thing called “religious trauma syndrome”. I am going trough it and had no idea it existed. Damn, life is interesting sometimes. However, with no name to name it I had my thoughts about the thing.

Talking and writing appears to be best in class therapy for some people.

I found that somewhere between Manipura and Svadhishthana there appears to be a fake energy center which harbors inside an entanglement of religious convictions. This lying chakra is most likely the first road block in the path to spiritual advancement, and also the most persistent blocking factor, with a swath of secondary effects, effects that show in time after its destruction, if such destruction ever takes place.

Now, to discuss religious trauma syndrome with terms such as energy and chakra seems a bit like missing the mark. However, what I found is that it is not words (chakra heaven, hell, god, soul, prana, etc.) that make up religion, but our inside making of them, our faith and belief.

The force that creates this fake energy center is the religious organization that is integrated in a society. Let’s be clear, I don’t mean a particular church, I mean all of them, no matter the confession, but especially those who make children members by consenting parents and in the absence of choice by the child as an adult. In all societies, I believe, where there are such religious organizations priests substitute parents. The parent-child relationship is essential for the development of a healthy adult, one able to fulfill itself, but at the same time this relationship is the path to the subconscious and the straightest line to unconditional trust.

Unconditional trust is the sentimental way by which the child leaves itself in the care of the parents, especially in critical situations, or in situations that are beyond the child’s grasping power. The religious organization teaches us about unconditional love, but in order to do this it requires our unconditional trust. To get it the body of priests all over the planet substitutes itself to real parents, sometimes in an explicit manner, other times in an implicit manner.

So far nothing unusual. After all, folk are easily lost in Samsara’s wonders and someone should point out that there is more than what you see is what you get, and that someone is a welcome social addition. And considering that about God any Human has an opinion, the existence of a philosophy grounded in revelation can only be auspicious. The unconditional trust is a tool used to spare the congregation of the wasted time with doubting.

However, these fake parents bear into the world a complex and tough lie that ends up manifesting itself like a fake chakra, an energy knot instead of an energy center. Granting unconditional trust, combined with the initial ritual (such as baptism) sustains and feeds this knot throughout the entire life. Each decision grounded in unconditional trust granted to priests, each discernment lead by the belonging to a religious organization, adds a new thread, a new strand of the knot that makes it more and more complex and hard to disentangle. The touching, even by a slight idea or concern, of this knot will provoke in any knotted human a sensation of physical pain, an unexplained nausea, explodes a profound despair and a hot anger, and all these bad states are externalized with an unexpected violence.

Intentionally or not, all those who happen to find themselves in the enterprise of disentangling religious knots are either atheists, gnostics or mystics. After all, they are the only ones with enough internal motivation to risk the waves of violence they will receive as an effect of their effort. Obviously, they too are affected in a proportional measure with their attachment to their knots.

The religious knot is the temple. The temple must be turned to dust and rest assured it doesn’t have to be rebuilt. God is with every single one anywhere and everywhere One is.

You’ll notice that an atheist will provoke less violence than an gnostic, and an gnostic less violence than a mystic.

The atheist, although it works to destroy the foundation of religious convictions, that is the myth, doesn’t have the necessary rational force required to fight with the infantile subconscious. The atheist’s arguments are logical and direct, the atheist’s approach insists on unveiling the myth.

The gnostic has somewhat stronger arguments. This one tries to bulldoze the pillars of religious conviction, that is the dogma. The gnostic’s arguments are logical but indirect, insisting on unveiling the interpretation. The gnostic has more success than the atheist in the fight with the devout, simply because they both are still in the possession of their religious knots and so they communicate from the same level.

The mystic is, paradoxically, a completely rational human who managed to integrate the personal experience and the lived life in a coherent description of the universe. That is why the mystic will go for the cornerstone of religious conviction, which is unconditional trust. The mystic’s arguments are illogical and indirect, and the approach insists on releasing the existential crisis.

The dogma and the myth don’t last a day without the covering of the ritual, which sits on the arcades of fear, arcades connected to each other by unconditional trust. By removing unconditional trust the pillars decay fast, the fresco washes away, the floors crack and so on until all that remains is all that originally was there, a good fertile earth on which life sprouts vigorously, the human starts existing again.

It is important to note that I see a big difference between religion and the religious experience. The religious experience is intimate. It can hardly be expressed using words and even if we try, the discourse is metaphorical. The religious experience is the meaning we feel emotionally, making it from the life distilled inside ourselves, our discourse with us, our individual and intimate permanent choice and discernment. On the other hand, religion is public. It is expressed in many words, and, more often than not, the words are more precise than arithmetic. Religion is the meaning we believe irrationally, mixing in this external meaning our subconscious, our own conditioning, our superstition and the permanent need for social inclusion.

I am not a supporter of atheism because it appears to be quite obtuse to me, even if in the end they are proven right. Even if correct, I can still call them out on a complete lack of artistic sense. I don’t support gnostics either because the constant doubt and the logically circular questions that they pose are getting in the way of the human spirit’s accomplishment. I don’t even support the mystics because of the fetish they have towards power, a problem that puts them in a serious dissonance with the principle of mutual trust between humans.

Yet, when you become a free human, when you live out your freedom, there is a caveat to consider, there will be far too few places missing a devout, a faithful and bigoted one, who with the stoicism of the martyr bears the pain of ripping a thread off their religious knot and then proceeds in a mindless rush to tie you up with it back where you were before freedom made your wings unravel.

P.S.

Thank you Davidson Paulo and Benjamin van Loon for these stories about religious trauma syndrome and to all the others who shared their pain and struggle fighting a man made disease which escapes any medicine other than the warm healing of a welcoming humanity.

https://medium.com/@benvanloon/i-found-truth-ac6c3a81f4ad

Sure, when you have the time, love me, I dare you still,