Modern religion has not given up its reliance on the emotions, on feelings, on the belief that the conditioned life is the only life possible. Modern religion must also satisfy secular consciousness. It must help me in achieving my worldly goals but also help me to cope with my unhappiness and misfortunes. If religion cannot do this then what good is it?
It seems that modern religion is unknowingly undermining itself by its over willingness to please those who have not renounced, sufficiently, the secular or worldly life.
What hope religion at one time offered has shifted over to the miracles of technology. Unless religion can out miracle technology it doesn't have much of a chance of winning the hearts and minds of the people.
But wait a minute, during the period of the golden age of Egypt, India, China, Greece and Rome religion was very important. What we have today is an extremely watered down version of what the religious mind actually was.
What has been substituted for the religious mind over time has been the ecclesiastical mind which has been allowed to merge gradually with the secular mind and its demands in which the interpersonal life overshadows the intrapersonal life in which the contemplative life has its existence.
Everyday life eventually falls into a kind of conformism as a result of degradation of the intrapersonal. As a result, the socio-cultural landscape becomes all too mechanistic. Human existence becomes confined to what is biological and physical and therefore measurable.
This limitation eventually finds an escape. It expands itself into a kind of psychological wilderness in which people anchor themselves in the imaginal and the ideological, that is, filling fiction with a density of feeling tones and emotionalizing the formation of ideas. Incidentally, perhaps this gave rise to the popularity of the novel, a work of narrative fiction which we fill with our own personal feelings which originated from our life experiences.
Those who are destined to walk in this psychological wilderness (most of us) cannot escape from this wilderness because even the escape, itself, is imagined. The truly real is absent from it. And so we turn to Buddhism and with it, especially, Zen. It is a search for true reality or the same, ultimate reality, which necessitates the religious mind.
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