Information versus experience

People enjoy mixing up information with belief, opinions, knowledge and experiences. Today we have a lot of information. The vast pool of information expands daily. The problem is that there is no real differentiation in regard of quality, sense and usefulness. Everyone does his best to gather more and more information to solve problems. But indeed, it is like producing more and more telephone books to find the one number you are looking for.

Then we have a growing number of people who are only busy with producing opinions and beliefs by the superficial scanning of the news on social media and the internet. You grab a headline and then you are well informed about the character of a person in public. Then you “know” that he is wrong, stupid, great or whatever. These beliefs become your knowledge, hard facts, which you are willing to defend against others.

In religious regards, many people take opinions and beliefs as pure facts too, ready to die or to kill for them. Religious teachings and rituals have often a kind of fairy tale character, – there are old stories about miraculous happenings in ancient times where you have no chance to prove them and also no chance to question who published them. Someone has spread these “news” hundreds or thousands of years ago, but no one knows who he was, what his intention was, if he was trustworthy or not. This is also true for all those holy books. Someone wrote something and people believe that the author was a holy man but in fact know nothing about him.

When it is about religion, people behave like in a day dream or on drugs. Everything is wonderful, everything is right, everything is true, no need to question anything, just enjoying the good emotions, the trip.

Imagine that someone tries today to start a new religion. He would probably proclaim that God has talked to him, that he has made miracles happen, that he is on divine mission, etc. People would probably think that he is crazy and needs to go to a lunatic asylum. A few would probably follow him, independent of what he says or does. Then this man would need to create morals and dogmas, specific rituals to give his cult a structure. And certainly, he would need to make promises, – promises which can now be not fulfilled but in a fictional heaven or paradise with all imaginable pleasures for the good follower and something like hell for all infidels and sinners. And the infidels here on earth need to be missionized or combated. It is always the same thing. As soon as his religious community is established, his whole cult becomes a living fact with conditioned, programmed followers who live and work in this frame. The children of the first followers will say “My parents followed our religion, my friends do it and so do I. There is no need to question anything.” And so it will go on.

When we talk about religion, then we see the big problem that there are nice stories and beliefs but there are no experiences. Talk is cheap when you can not make real experiences. The religious leaders talk about the great founder of their religion, his teachings, about the promised heaven or hell but there is no evidence and not a single person who has ever made any experiences.

Let´s imagine that someone without the brainwashing and conditioning grows up in a religion and then starts to put questions. These are questions like: “Why does God never shows himself? Why has he talked only to our religious founder? Why can I not see any angels? Where is heaven? Where is hell? Why can I misbehave according to religious rules and God is not punishing me directly? Why is God all-loving and merciful and at the same time jealous and evil if something does not fit into the religious practice? Why do we have to suffer when we are the chosen people? Why does God choose people at all? Are not all people his children? And why is so much evil in the world, especially among his followers when they are all such great believers? Why do we need to wait for heaven when we could have heaven on earth?”

You can put thousands of questions with no logical answer.

It is also interesting that ugly, evil and unhealthy rituals are practiced over centuries simply because they are a part of religion. No one questions them. No one says that they are ugly and inhuman. It is all good in the name or religion.

Now, beyond all this superficial dream state stuff, there is the path of experience and personal research. Here the seeker has the great desire to discover the truth, the secrets of the human existence and the mysteries of creation. And so he starts his journey into the unknown, ready for great adventures and challenges which might shock all what he used to know about the world. Fortunately, many seeker before him walked the path and so keys are given to make the necessary experiences to find wisdom and knowledge in the end.

Only real and personal experience is of value. Talk is cheap, equal how embellished and promising it might be.

And in teachings only the quality of the content shall count, – everything else is unimportant and misleading.

It will be one of the biggest challenges for mankind to overcome and to survive human stupidity, especially the religious one. Stupidity has reached a climax in these times which has never been accomplished before. This is true for all fields of human “knowledge”.