What does it mean to be religious?
without conflating our notions of being spiritual, metaphysical, or philosophical?
Loosely speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who consider religion as a negative influence in the world. And those who consider religion a positive influence in the world.
Speaking of which, I tweeted the following the other day in response to this question:
What defines the distinctly religious? (As opposed to the psychological, the metaphysical, the philosophical, the theistic, or the spiritual)
To be religious is to practice open-source thinking in the truest sense of the world: Can I situate myself inside the GitHub repository of cultural commons that has animated my cultural life so far and consciously relate with it with the fire of the intellect that knows to choose what is dharmic and what isn’t.
What do I mean by ‘relational emergence of the self’?
Identity is relational. The identity that I bring myself into space is relational to the context. I am in touch with multiple realities. But in relation to what? When I am listening well (and that’s quite a challenge), I become the other.
When I am listening to someone share something deeply emotional, I become them.
As I keep repeating, what animates me in my study of dharma is the discovery of the central axis of Indic thought: The individual is the fractal of the universe. What is happening to the individual is happening to the universe. The individual is the collective. The collective is the individual.
And that is both a blessing and a tremendous responsibility, for it means that I am responsible for everything happening in the world.
At first blush, it becomes ridiculous to swallow. What does that even supposed to mean? Am I creating all the terrible things happening in the world?
No. The crucial question to examine is this. In what ways am I part of the problem? In what ways am I part of the solution?
To sum things up, To practice being religious is to continuously engage with three questions
1) Who am I ? 2) Where am I ? (Not talking about the location) 3) In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?
Are you religious? What do you mean by that?