Religion, Practices, Study, and the Dissolution of the Outside God – My Brief Return Into the World

(Post-Ashram Contemplations Mar 25’)

Raised muslim on the father’s side and orthodox christian and protestant on the mother’s brought confusion that offered an early advantage: the ability to encounter the understanding of God from multiple vantage points without binding to a single interpretation. Each of these traditions carry their own gravity, discipline, and orientation toward what is referred to as God, allowing reverence to precede explanation.

Religions and practices preserve humility and restraint. They point to and bring recognition that truth does not belong to the individual. By limiting interpretation and personal authority, they protect god as mystery. God remains beyond reach as something that resists reduction to experience or mental explanation. Obedience, ritual, repetition, and order mute the impulse to claim truth. In this way, religion holds the self in check and redirects attention away from personal certainty. Over time, however, what once preserved that mystery may also become a limitation.

Time spent in buddhist temples, ashrams, and within various religious structures clarified their common function; these environments discouraged accumulation of insight and personal attainment; emphasis rested on submission, silence, order, and continuity. 

Scriptures, sanskrits and other forms and practices operate as stabilizing forces that prepare the mind for dissolution. Alongside this, the engagement with non-dual texts gradually revealed how sacred distance and devotion still rely on relationship and reference points centered on the individual. Study of those texts narrows the understanding, returning attention again and again to the limits of thought, belief, and position.

What followed was the dissolution of identity rather than a sought-after conclusion. Study, devotion, and practices ceased to function as inquiry and preparation revealing a natural flow of movement and stillness without identifying with either. 

The notion of God as outside, inside, near, or distant lost relevance through the disappearance of the standpoint that required location. Nothing new enters, nothing old requires rejection. The concept of God rests in it’s mystery realized within without the need of interpretation.

This contemplation does not invalidate religions, practices, or sacred texts, nor does it move beyond them. It allows them to complete their function. With the dissolution of the individual self, there remains no one to contemplate God, no one to practice devotion, and no one to relate to the sacred as an object. Structure, ritual, and study lose their role as orientation points because they no longer serve identity or position. 

God requires no contemplation when the one who contemplates dissolves, and practice falls silent when there is no practitioner left to sustain it.

(These shared contemplations address inner reference, not outward action. When read without context, it can be taken literally or as behavioral guidance, which is not its intent. The highest teachings are not instructional, nothing is meant to be applied or enacted. If the language raises questions rather than instructions, these contemplations are being engaged as intended.)