The role of religion in helping us attain God

Every day we pray. Why? Because we believe that our scriptures, our rituals, and our prayers, the chanting, the singing, will please God and will make us find God. We pray to a God with a name and with a form. We pray to a God with bone and skin. But we don't stop to realize God within. The myth overrides us, as years of indoctrination and generations of fairy tales about our God and our religion, blind us.

It hardly matters which religion we belong to. The myth is religion itself, not this or that religion. It is like a kindergarten where we are made to listen to interesting fairy tales. These are stories, not the Truth. The intention of religion is good — religion teaches us the ABC of God. It builds our faith, trust and belief in God. But unfortunately, we get stuck in religion. We grow and go from school to college in our education, but we remain in the kindergarten when it comes to religion! We are inspired and we believe that we will go to heaven if we pray. We blindly follow rituals and superstitions, without realizing how meaningless they are. Only a few of us go beyond our religion to find out that we cannot find God. We have to realize God. But the majority of us, up to 99% just live and die, with a dream that the God that we pray to, will appear to us, save us, and take us to his abode. When will we Realize the Truth that we cannot find God? When will we stop and ponder that religion is just meant to start our spiritual journey? When will we snap out of our beliefs, unlearn the religious fairy tales, and stop praying to the mythological Gods we always think are real? These Gods are a myth! We must realize it.

Can we find God? The Truth is we can't. We have to Realize God and we will Realize God when we open our real eyes. When we evolve from the kindergarten of religion to the university of Spirituality, God will be revealed to us. The way to God is not religion, it is Spirituality.

Isn't it unfortunate that we blindly believe our religion and we consider everything our scriptures say as the absolute Truth? We don't pause for a moment to ask, to investigate, and to realize what is the Truth and what is the myth. We just follow the herd in the temple or the church. We do what they do, say what they say, but we don't search for the right way to attain God. God is not a product that we can acquire. God is not a person we can find. God is a Power. God is SIP, the Supreme Immortal Power. God Is beginningless and deathless. God Is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. God is a Power, a Power that is within us, that is everywhere on earth, that comes to us at birth. God is the Power that gives us breath and leaves us at our death. But because of ignorance, we are trying to find that very God which is within us. We are none other than the manifestation of that God we are trying to find! The Power of life inside us, we may call it the Divine Spirit, the Soul, a Spark Of Unique Life, or the Atman, is the Power of God. Because we are trying to find God and taking a plane or a train to a pilgrimage, we never start our inner spiritual journey, that goes within, to realize God that is in every atom of our skin and within. If we want God, we must stop finding God, we must Realize God by Realizing the Truth.