The Spiritual Path, Religion and Salvation

In this article, I will write about the spiritual path, religion and salvation.

I will follow Master Gautama’s discourse from a recent conference.

He says, «All religions and spirituality point beyond this world to something real beyond the natural world.» [1]

Spirituality and religion both apparently have the same goal: to help us achieve 'salvation' or enlightenment by taking us to a world beyond the material one.

As spiritual beings, we sense that there is something beyond the material world. We feel that the experiences we have through our senses and even linear reasoning are limited, and we long for something more.

But can religion and the spiritual path offered by the Masters be equally effective? While there are too many variables to answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no', there are aspects we should bear in mind.

The External Self Cannot Achieve Salvation

Most religions follow an 'external path', which is based on following rules, commandments and precepts, and performing certain actions here on earth. No matter how worthwhile this may be, it can never lead us to enlightenment or 'salvation'.

This is mainly because it is impossible to have a spiritual experience through the external mind. All the external mind does is create an image or concept of what 'spiritual' means, without enabling us to experience it first-hand.

In order to have a spiritual experience, our embodied spiritual identity, or 'conscious you', must connect with the mind of Christ and the 'I am' presence, rather than with the concepts created by the external mind of the ego.

The spiritual path is an internal path, or 'way', as Master Jesus referred to it in the same conference. It involves internal self-transformation and climbing the levels of consciousness from 48 to 144 - the maximum possible on this planet.

However, as Master Gautama tells us, «Religion and spirituality imply a different kind of consciousness to that of this world and should provide something that allows us to transcend our current consciousness. Yet people conceive of what they wish to experience using the same consciousness they have here on Earth. »[2]

However, this is not what happens in most cases. The result is that they are left with nothing more than an earthly experience that is neither spiritual nor religious in the purest sense.

The truth is that humanity chose duality consciousness as its defining form of consciousness long ago.

Having abandoned Christ consciousness - our natural state as spiritual beings - it now seeks to attain spiritual experiences with this purely mortal consciousness. This is impossible.

Duality consciousness is a choice that is possible and allowed on Earth. Its purpose is to enable us to experiment with freedom and explore every possibility we can imagine, even if it goes against the laws of the Creator, until we have had enough of that experience.

However, as long as people remain in this state of consciousness, it is impossible to have a real spiritual or religious experience.

True spiritual or religious experiences cannot be had with the type of consciousness that was created on Earth, so there is an insurmountable incompatibility between dualistic consciousness and these experiences.

The dualistic mind can only grasp material aspects; it cannot understand or experience anything beyond what the physical mind perceives and creates concepts about.

Furthermore, the emergence of the dualistic mind as a 'separate' mind characterised by polarity meant that it could never grasp the inherent unity of all spiritual experiences, whether religious or not. The word 'religion' itself comes from the idea of 'reconnecting' -reconnecting human beings with something that transcends them.

However, the dualistic mind can never experience unity because it is, by nature and origin, divided between 'myself' and 'others', subject and object, and so on.

Furthermore, it is completely incapable of experiencing the 'union' that only Christ consciousness can provide.

Thus, in general, religions only offer a simulacrum of spiritual experience, focusing purely on the analysis of concepts or the definition of 'spiritual experiences' without ever experiencing them firsthand.

If spirituality is based purely on concepts and teachings that focus on external rules and rituals without appealing to internal transformation and the need for continuous transcendence of the sense of identity, it is also a pure illusion.

This fails to achieve the goal of true salvation, which can only be attained when the earthly self is transcended, and the ‘conscious you’ connects with its spiritual source of Christ consciousness and the 'I am' Presence.

[1] Id., From my notes on the discourse.

[2] Ibid.