Religion in a Nutshell

[sdi]

My spiritual path in life has, to date, wandered near or through each of the following:

• Christianity: Earth is a test for sorting beings into good and bad.
• Taoism: Earth is. (What more do you want?)
• Buddhism: Earth is a nightmare from which one ought to awaken.
• Occultism: Earth is a kindergarten where beings learn the basics of how to live.
• Neoplatonism: Earth is a borderland where exiled divinities eke out a meager subsistence.

While each of these has a fragment of truth to it, none of them have been entirely satisfactory to me. I was pondering, today, what I might say if somebody asked me to describe my religion in a single sentence. This is what I came up with:

• Earth is a womb where baby angels gestate before birth.

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

Hmm, my current cursory thoughts are:
Earth is a part of the divine which encompasses everything, but we often struggle to recognise this divine aspect. Just as the kingdom of God is within me, so too is it within all things - the house of my father has many mansions. One of our tasks is to connect with this divine aspect within ourselves and to recognise that what seems to lack divinity is yet divine - shades of the Iamblichus's immortal mortals/mortal immortals paradox I've been reading about (Shaw's Hellenic Tantra) (and which brings to mind Eisbrecher's song Lebenslang unsterblich [lifelong immortal]), and also aspects of J.B. Kerning/Krebs's Christian mysticism, not to mention Meister Eckhart (whose work I was introduced to via literary criticism of the novel Der Heiligenhof[The Blessed Farm] by Herman Stehr, the first author I ever published translations of).

So in a way, Earth is where we learn to recognise our divinity and take possession of it.

(Which in some ways isn't too far off what you came up with!)

Asides: Karl Du Prel uses the metaphor of a comet to describe our incarnation on earth - the part of the comet's journey that we can see is the incarnation, the part we cannot see if the part between incarnations. On a related note, Immanuel Kant suggests a similar thing and also seems to suggest that heaven and hell represent affinities so-to-speak - if you are virtuous, you will attract virtuous people and that is heaven, and if you practice vice ...

[sdi]

I am fascinated by just how many ways there are to almost say the exact same thing, and yet how profound the differences are between two very similar statements! I guess it just goes to underscore how even though there are billions and billions of human souls, each one really is unique.