Motivation

Religion is a dirty word.

For atheists and agnostics, Religion is the source of superstition, oppression and even murder and war.

For religious people, every other Religion except their own is either idiotic, misguided or the work of evil forces.

So why bother reading, trying or co-creating something that nobody wants?

Summary

Being born human is in some ways like waking up on a stage with some unknown play already in progress all around you. You watch it for sometime in a confused state. Who are these weird characters? What do all these strange words mean? What is everyone trying to do? What should I do?

Slowly you learn some story and character information from others around you. But they were not there from the beginning either, so their descriptions of the play are also just interpretations of the interpretations that they heard from others.

In time, you learn enough useful information to enjoy parts of the play, but a lot of the information proves incorrect leaving you confused, in self-doubt and in suffering. Before you have figured everything out, you are forced out of the theater and then it is “The End” for you.

It would have been nice to have a script or an Owner’s Manual to make sense of this experience and make it more enjoyable. Unfortunately, none of us are born with such an Owner’s Manual.

So the rest of us have put together this Owner’s Manual for you. It is just a collection of interpretations about the nature of this universe and a collection of practices for taking care of self and others.

While different combinations of these interpretations and practices can be helpful to different people, these interpretations are NOT the Absolute Truth and the list of practices is not exhaustive. Hence this Manual is incomplete.

Our hope is that by standing on the shoulders of those who came before you, you can see further than any of us. This Manual is your’s now. Do whatever you want with it. Read it, try it, ignore it, burn it or improve it.

Anyway, enjoy this magical play.

Details

We live in a magical world. Not the kind of magic we see in fantasy movies or in magic shows but a kind of magic that is so pervasive that it is almost invisible to us. Hidden in plain sight, like water to a fish, unless we take the effort to stop, get curious and experience.

Why is there something in the universe rather than nothing? How does life form out of lifeless material? How does life acquire consciousness? These Big Questions have troubled philosophers for millennia. Most of us do not spare much time to think about these questions but the stories used to explain the creation of the universe and human beings affect our life through deeply Personal Questions like, What is the purpose of my life? How should I treat myself? How should I treat others?

Even if we have never thought about these Personal Questions, we subconsciously absorb these answers from the society around us and they become our Default Settings. Unbeknownst to us, these Default Settings drive every aspect of our life, what we desire, how we act, how we love, how we suffer and even who we think we are.

If you were born and raised in a loving, caring and secure family, community and society, your Default Settings may be good enough to take you through your life without much chronic despair. But if you experienced insecurity, rejection, or abuse, your Default Settings are probably causing a lot of avoidable suffering to yourself and those around you.

The mission of Open Religion is to give you the tools required to recognize and fine tune your Default Settings so that you can minimize suffering and maximize joy in your life.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this is not just a matter of stating what the right answers are. There are two reasons for this. First, your optimum answers are unique to you and no one else can figure them out for you. Second, even if somebody had the exact answers that you need, we do not have the technology to install these answers in your brain.

This brings us to why this is a religion, instead of just a book. Just reading or hearing even the most perfect answers will make very little difference to your life. Your Default Settings are so deeply ingrained and outside your conscious control that knowledge alone is not sufficient to change them. It will take a combination of knowledge, direct experience of the nature of reality, regular practice and a supportive community to help you make this transition.

Of-course, Open Religion is not the first to try this approach. Across every region of the Earth, in every era, people have been able to attain this wisdom. For many of them, the first hints of these answers came in the form of Extraordinary Experiences while going through some physical hardship like an illness, starvation, seizures or near death accidents. These experiences shook them to their core and made them question their Default Settings.

During these Extraordinary Experiences, some they felt like they had come in contact with some Higher Power which underlies and creates all of reality (more on this below). In the awe of this Higher Power, whatever goals they were chasing before, be it the pursuit of pleasures, status or wealth, felt like petty childish games and all fears like the fear of being imperfect or unloved or even the fear of death dissolved into a Loving Bliss.

Alas, most of the times, this state of Loving Bliss does not last forever and the Default Settings of people take over again and with them come the petty human desires and fears. But once a person gets a taste of this Loving Bliss, a search begins to reunite with this Higher Power again.

Over thousands of years, the incredible humans that have existed before us have discovered dozens of methods to experience and remain in union with this Higher Power. This is the seed of most religions that have ever existed on this earth.

But if this is the case, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why are all of us not reveling in this Loving Bliss. This is because there are two fundamental problems with any human interpreting and conveying this extraordinary wisdom. And they are Language and Organizational Structure.

Language is a very useful tool and it has allowed humans to plan and collaborate like no other species can. But language can only capture experiences using concepts which are familiar to the speaker and convey them using concepts that a familiar to both the speaker and the listener.

For example, try describing the taste of an exotic fruit or a foreign delicacy to a friend who has not eaten it. Notice how you try to fit the experience of taste into the approximate concepts offered by words. Check with your friend to see what they imagined the taste to be from the description you gave and ask them to transmit it to another person and see how well even an ordinary experience like taste can be transmitted through words.

The Extraordinary Experiences that lie at the root of many religions are so beyond our regular experience that no human language comes even close to capturing this complexity in words. Hence, making sense of these Extraordinary Experiences and communicating them to others is a very difficult task and so people try to use metaphors, analogies and stories. But this approach is prone to misinterpretation and corruption over time as the listeners get attached to the symbols of reality rather than reality.

The contact with Higher Power mentioned above is a prime example of an Extraordinary Experience and depending on the cultural concepts familiar to the person having this experience, they can interpret (and sometimes even “see”) this Higher Power as a Heavenly Father, an Angel, a Deity, a Formless-Nameless-Attributeless Divine, Tao, Spirit, Nature, Universal Consciousness, Universal Principle, Aliens, a Hallucination, True Self, Oneness and countless other interpretations. Millions of people have died and committed murder because they believed a different interpretation than the other person.

The diagram below tries to capture this difficulty in transmitting wisdom through words alone (not to scale).

The second problem preventing a world of Loving Bliss is Organizational Structures. After a person who teaches the wisdom and practices of their Extraordinary Experience dies, their followers may try to individually spread their message. At some point, a follower or a follower of a follower may try to institutionalize the wisdom and practices as best as they can understand it. They themselves may or may not have had any Extraordinary Experience but they may have the skills and resources needed to build an institution.

With the backing of this institution, this movement becomes more popular and widespread. Regional branches emerge. Leaders have to be appointed to run these branches. Over time this institution becomes a source of wealth, power and prestige. Any such institution attracts people who want to take control of them for their own benefit. Some checks and balances are instituted but they usually have the side effect of preventing alternate interpretations or exploration of different practices and instead follow some strict “ideal” practices that are handpicked by the leadership team.

In the best case, over time, such institutions become a vague caricature of the original founders vision, rich in symbolism but lacking in the soul that once gave life to these symbols. In the worst case they become just obsessed with maintaining and increasing their own power. Combine this with the Language Problem we discussed above and it is easy to see how any religion can become a force of oppression rather than Loving Bliss.

Open Religion is an attempt to fix both of these problems. It aims to fix the Language Problem by sharing multiple methods of direct experience of the Higher Power and multiple interpretations of this experience. It aims to fix the Organizational Structure problem by making it mostly decentralized with some checks and balances, so that people can add their own methods and interpretations and best practices.

This is not because the founders of Open Religion are more “enlightened” than the founders of older religions, it is just the reflection of the incredible progress humanity has made in science, technology and governance in the past 300 years.

Founders of older religions only had access to concepts passed down in oral myths and legends limited to their geographical regions and they had to convey these to a mostly uneducated population who had access to even more limited concepts with mostly oral discourse.

Science has expanded the concepts one can use to make sense of experiences and communication technology and education has brought knowledge about these concepts to the fingertips of a vast majority of the human population regardless of their geographical regions of origin.

With this, Open Religion has the luxury to learn lessons from history and also has access to more responsive governance models like Open Source Software, cooperatives, and content curation mechanisms like upvoting in Reddit, moderation in Wikipedia etc.

But the progress of science and technology has been so rapid in the past 100 years, that most of humanity has not had the time to update its Default Settings. This has lead to the huge productivity gains from technology being applied to magnifying our petty pleasures and insecurities rather than towards reducing suffering.

We have mastered the outside world enough that our technologies like nuclear weapons and our consumption appetites threaten to destroy the entire planet that hosts us but we have neglected our inner worlds enough that our happiness levels are decreasing even in the midst of this increasing abundance.

As we are embarking on new adventures like colonizing space, creating artificial intelligence, modifying genes and slowing down aging, it may be helpful to slow down and check-in with ourselves, why we are doing these, so that we can proceed in ways that increase joy in the lives of ourselves and others.

This new beginning starts with you. Enjoy this magical ride.

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