Don’t forget about Erik’s Hour of Enlightenment radio show TONIGHT at 5:00 PM PT/7:00 PM CT/8:00 PM ET. No more than 15 minutes before the top of the hour, call 619-639-4606 to ask Erik your question. There are three ways to listen: Listen on the phone line, click on the “Listen” icon on the right sidebar of the blog or click on this link: http://goo.gl/aFHTzJ
This Best of Erik is short but sweet! Gives you a break from the recent long posts.
Me: When a religious person asks for help reconciling their religious beliefs with spirituality, what do we tell them? How do we help?
Jamie: He’s already answering, but it’s so inappropriate.
Me (sighing): I bet.
Jamie: He’s horsing around. He says, “You look at ‘em and you tell ‘em, “Baptists are full of bullshit!”
Me: Erik!
Jamie: He’s laughing.
Me: Oh, Whitney Houston is not going to like that, because she was a devout Baptist. By the way, Robert channels Whitney all the time and she keeps referring to herself as Nippy. That’s kind of funny.
Jamie giggles.
Me: Anyway, sorry that I digressed. Go ahead.
Erik: So, everybody, human wise, feels comfortable if there are similarities, and within every religion, there is a mystic vein. And within that mystic vein is where there is all the spirituality, where there are all the morals, where there is everything is that “spiritual people” live by, and so you encourage them to find that vein within their own religion. Once they can identify that within their own religion, it’ll make them comfortable with the ideas and they might start seeing how their original religion is starting to confine them.
Me: Ah.
Erik: Confining them in ways they’re not comfortable with.
Me: Yeah. Interesting.
Jamie: He’s talking about how in the case of the Jewish religion it would be the Kabbalah—
Erik: It’s straight in the Bible. There’s everything. How about The Book of the Dead?
Me: From the Tibetans?
Erik: You know there are documents older than this that even talk about how spirituality doesn’t need to be confined by religion to be valued.
Me: Yeah, exactly.
Erik: Really, that’s what people are looking for. But if they’re already seated in a religion, I would encourage them to go through that religion to find the underbelly of spirituality. You can’t knock somebody out of a religion and encourage them to embrace only spirituality. That’s so fucking lame. That’s the biggest bullshit you’ll ever hear. You can’t encourage someone to be spiritual They’re doing it on their own. You can’t say, “Come to our team!” There’s no fucking team. Religions do that shit, not spirituality. There’s the difference.
Me: So no proselytizing.
Erik: Yep.
