Not religion but the Truth is a must. All else, one may well let go. Or give a rest.
However, before one decides for or against religion, one needs knowing as to what it is. For, rightly understood, religion does not irk. But taking one’s cultural myth to be the almighty truth and the end reality, is to be a slave to the silly superstitions of one’s less knowledgeable and “little”-minded ancestors. This sort of ism if adopted and accepted as one’s religion, makes one a fool following an illusion - a hallucination.
In its original Latin, the word religion means “re-join”. Similarly, yoga is to “join”. Therefore, metaphysically religion would mean joining with ‘That’ which is the Absolute of What Is.
And the Absolute Truth is not a god in the bush, or a personal god with a tush!
In fact, no human-like person or a this-that “spirit” is God. Nor are there any humanoids as gods, yours nor mine! All such fancies are regional or religious fantasies. They are ingrained in our minds owing to our cultural fancies or due to our “lower” thinking or because of our “lesser” experience in the metaphysical realm.
Eventually, as one advances in meditation and in metaphysical seeking - following a purer life and a pristine living, never excluding non-violence and killing or eating of living beings - the Universal Unity of the Almighty Existence is found to open its bosom to the “thirsty” and the “hungry” seeker of the Ultimate Reality. Of God, so to say.
In ‘IT’, the “rapture” of the “happening”, after being led to innumerable surreal visions of unimaginable kind, even of gods and similar wonders of the Divine - the “spirit” of the meditating Buddha to be separates from the bodily entity of the human being. Thereafter, a transcendental travelling of sort begins, ending in the soul or the spirit of the “being” ceasing to be as though! And “becoming” its “lost” self - the Universal Self of Whatsoever Is.
The only god and reality “THERE” is the “SELF” experiencing itself as ALL.
No religion, messiah, guru or god “stands” therein. No angels or spirits “breathe” herein. No this or that is the ‘IT’ of existence in this immortal infinity of all-ness. Just a Oneness of Eternity is god in this heavenly unity and divine non-duality.
Having self-experienced this “non-happening”, the KNOWING ONE (the Buddha, so to say) “returns” as if, to the bodily experience - of being the physical human entity that was meditating before the aforesaid “stateless state” was known, or experienced.
Thus, this re-alignment or re-joining with the Absolute is the “real” religion.
In this context, of “getting” and “knowing” this truth and reality of eternal universality and immortal unity of forever-ness of everything - whether understood scientifically or spiritually - the ism of “It”, is no hallucination.
Yet, until one “gets” the ‘IT’ of it all, all gods and religions are but nansy-pansies.
