Religion vs Faith, page 1

Yes, faith, not blind faith, is essential, it is intuition, inner knowledge not yet conscious to the outer self. However, an analogy might help to explain the difference between true religion and false religion.

Imagine you've crash landed in a remote forest. Some things want to eat you, something are beautiful and attractive, some people you encounter are friendly, others not. You know you don't belong here but you don't quite remember where you've come from. You make friends in a village and come to live there. Some people just want to be your friend others want you to make life easier for them or use you to simplify their life. You know there's somewhere else you’re from but you don't know how to get there. One person says they can show you where you’re from and you trust them, have some faith in what he says, follow him and he takes you over the hill to the next valley. It's not that he was lying, this was as far as he had ever been and thought it must be your distant home. Some time later another person says he knows where your home is and he takes you to the valley beyond the valley the other person took you to. Again, he wasn’t lying, it’s because that's as far as he'd ever been. For a time you follow a group that says after you die you'll go home and they had a great teach but he's dead so you just have to wait. When you get tired of that and more of the same, you strike out on your own for awhile search and search and eventually after being misled, endangered by other encounters you find your way back to the village. It’s not that you might not have eventually found your way home but you just have no idea how truly far away and difficult the journey home is. Finally, your next door neighbor from back home, who works for the search and rescue comes and offers to take you back home. Now, in all these other situations, trust, faith was needed. Some times, is was innocent and misguided or naive. If you ignore your intuition and run on the mind you’d be inclined to refuse the offer, after all nothing has been true so far, so why bother? Now there are lots of people in the village that are telling you their right and he’s wrong for all kinds of ego or selfish reasons. But if you listen to your intuition and cultivate even a little faith you can try one more time again and this time prove to yourself, by experience, that it is true, that this person can really does take you home.

Now, are all the paths the same? Are any of the guides really the same? Could any of them worked as well for you as another? This is the difference between true religion and the social popular and historic religions of today.