I grew up in a religious evangelical household. Some of the things I was taught warped my thinking and it took me many years to recover. I think many religious teachings are powerful myths that can improve ones relationship with the self, others, and the world. But when people use religion as a weapon to instill fear, shame, and hatred it can wield damaging results.

This is why we seek inspiration from many religions but do not hold fast to any one religion. We see religious teachings as metaphors or myths that are meant to guide each of us into a life well lived, but are also stories of their times and should evolve as we evolve.

“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.”

Joseph Campbell

Even when many religions teach that God is essentially You… God is within You, most people miss this point. They instead hold dear this physical image of a Creator out there… even so far as personifying the Creator as an authoritarian white male. God is a reflection of our collective unconscious. It personifies and magnifies our hopes, dreams, fears, and nightmares. It is what we wrestle with within ourselves, what we repress and what we run from. It’s much easier to personify God as a creator outside ourselves because we can then personify the darkness as something out there to be banished or repressed too. If we can purpose our fear energy to an evil outside of ourselves we don’t have to face it within ourselves. It becomes evil, devil, or other people.

Without darkness there is no light. The dark is our teacher and must be embraced in some sense or we cannot access the light within. The creator and the destructor are within us all. It is within.

“Do you know what you are?

You are a manuscript of a divine letter.

You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.

This universe is not outside of you.

Look inside yourself;

everything that you want, 

you are already that.”

Rumi