I think most of todays depressions and neuroseis are because of the fact that we are lacking in the simple understanding of what we are. Whilst i'm no expert and cannot offer proof i have a theory i would like to share, and don't think i'm alone in this thinking either.

I believe that what we are is EGO. And it's our ego that seperates us from the higher consciousness and allows us to reside in these earthly planes. If we could 100% ditch our ego, we would cease to exist as humans, and this can only happen when we die. Because whilst we are alive our ego is still at work maintaining our earthly being.

Religions i believe only serve as some kinda coping mechanism for keeping us ignorant to this simple truth and we find comfort in something "tangiable", for without a psychadelic experience to illustrate to us, we find the idea of an "intangiable" higher consciousness teriffying. In fact our whole existence is a sort of expression of how we fight against this simple truth by trying all we can to distract ourselves from it, and i believe we act so out of fear because we have been deprived of the psychadelic experience. Meditation allows us to shut down these distracting parts of our minds, as do psychadelic drugs, and great benefits arise to human welfare when we open up to the possibility of such a great awareness, we become calm and accepting. There is no need for madness and growth, we just want to be.

Religion is a crutch created by the ego to maintain the ego, and actually holds us back from the simple truth. And what we consider progress on earth is actually a reinforcement of the ego, and therefore another step backwards in our spiritual natures.

just a little thought that i wanted to share.

Word.

But what about the psychedelic oriented churches?

I have had similar thoughts.
I agree, the ego is somewhat of an illusion in the way you have mentioned, but what is the ego other than my mom and dads genes, before that their mom and dads genes and so on? It seems to me that the individual ego, while misleading in that it blinds the true nature of things, is simply another (beautiful sometimes and ugly sometimes) expression of everything.

Hate, love, good, evil, jealousy, boredom, cancer, war, all just expressions of the One. Without getting too far out, I just mean to say that our egos, or temporal existences seem to be venues for meaningful existence sometimes. By ego, we are referring to our sense of self right?

Why have we been given egos by reality? I assume there is some 'reason' for it. I like the soul-school philosophy.
I don't know, this whole 'reality' and 'life' thing can be kinda tricky, and I don't remember signing up for it hahah...

Whoopsie.. looks like I just went on a ramble

-They use light doses of psychadelics so their dogma isn't torn to shreds. They are still using brainwashing, so it's still an experience filtered through their dogma. In fact light doses of psychadelics perhaps make their dogma seem even more believable. This is not a good thing IMO. The only valid experience is a dogma free direct experience perhaps using entheogens or deep levels of meditation, etc. (But at least it seems that they are kinda accepting that entheogens play a role in our connection to the godhead, which is a step in the right direction i suppose, even though i would prefer all religious institutions to be abolished)



-Yes Cave paintings, this 'reality' and 'life' thing can get quite confusing , and i was only offering a simplistic theory of mine. I guess we are here on these earthly planes to fulfill an earthly function, and in doing so it seems that we need to detatch ourselves from the godhead to 'make our way' into this existence, like a child must grow into an adult to make his own way into life. But like a grown adult should keep in contact with his parents, so should we keep in contact with the godhead i suppose.
Just a few silly rambles!

we are souls in a challenging enviroment which supports inner growth


Or as McKenna put it:
the placenta of the soul

Robert Monroe in his contact with entities via OB travel, found out that Earth is considered to be a 'school of compressed learning', or in other words you get a lot of soul experience through the human incarnation cycle. Indeed, he even went on to say that the reason souls choose to come to this very difficult place is that the graduate of the Earth life school is considered a type of god in other reality systems.

There is also this guy Darryl who channels an extraterrestrial named Bashar (youtube this if your interested). While I don't like channels specificially, Bashar seems to echo this sentiment that Earth is just a temporary school. This channeled entity says that, to other beings, souls who take on the human experience are 'the masters of limitation'. He says also that when other beings in other parts of the universe have their own struggles, they like to use the Earth experience as a motivational tool. I believe he describes it like "and when they are dealing with how hard their own experience is, and when we show them yours they say 'well, if they can manage to do it in all of that mess, so can we!'". He also describes what's called the rubber band effect (and I've heard this echoed elsewhere) that the deeper we go into negativity and seperation, just like a rubber band we shoot that much further into the light once we're released.

Food for thought

Word - as Carl Jung put it: "Organized religion is a defense mechanism against direct religious experience" or something along those lines.

Anything that has "sign-ificance" to you is derived from language (relative cultural signs, symbols, sounds, etc.).

IMO, ego is nothing more than an illusion derived from the association and interpretation of relative cultural symbols that have nothing to do with reality.

Alan Watts sums this concept up nicely. Start the video at 7:03 for his talk on ego.

Best wishes.

who are we? There is no real answer to this for this has been a question on a lot of people's minds since the beginning. For me personally, i think we are just here to perceive the universe's existence.