Thomas Daniel Nehrer Quotes

But Lao Tzu’s teaching suffers from the major problem endemic to such visionaries. In the intervening two and a half millennia, his words have been misinterpreted and distorted by generations of adherents until his message is riddled with meaningless ritual and dogma. Taoism contracted the conceptual plague: it became a religion.

Clearly, when western cultures absorbed Christianity, they got an all-inclusive package: ancient Hebrew rituals and myths steeped in lost purpose, scantily recorded and broadly misinterpreted teachings of Jesus, revisions and distortions by Paul, twisted cosmology and superstitions supplied by priesthoods and bureaucratic/political distortions innate to man’s traditionalendeavors.

However, in regards to the theological aspects of each religion, tradition or philosophy, the same exacting standard must be set as measurement: does it clearly and accurately depict the functionality of Reality? That is, does the cosmology precisely describe how Reality works? If not, then the religion is invalid.

Even though this deity (the Christian God with a capital "G") has evolved through its 2000 years, it somehow maintains in its current version all old characteristics, whether conflicting or consistent: readiness to punish but ability to heal, vindictiveness yet forgiveness, utter cruelty to outside nonbelievers but looking for converts, etc.

But what you are looking for is not “truth,” not a collection of fine and polished answers emanating from grand buildings, expert acknowledgement and advanced academic degrees. What you are looking for is your Self, and what I provide here are some tools and perspectives to aid a Journey through the jungle of explanations and definitions and up a mountain of perspective to where you can see that Self clearly.

Understand that religion, at least western versions of it, rests on a type of thinking called Revelation. This mode holds that truths concerning the workings of reality are hidden, masked by, through or behind a deity such that only a few privileged souls are able to see through the veil and “reveal” those truths. . . But (around 1600) revelation as a means of understanding began to be challenged by two other methods of differentiating truth from fallacy: Reason and Empiricism.

Visionaries have two principal means to immediately communicate insights beyond people’s mundane, common mindset. They can liken awareness to equivalent situations in life to which the listener can relate – using metaphor, analogy and other grammatical tools to picture points. Or they can illustrate how listeners can gain such awareness – a path to proceed on, techniques to engage, what to look for within.

Religions take hold and dominate a culture, not because they accurately portray reality, but because they appear to, once having been accepted – such that succeeding generations are heavily indoctrinated into the shared cultural mindset from birth.