Hi, Anne Corbin, your Mind Body Spirit Mentor. I'm here with this week's mode of the mind body spirit connection. You are a complex being composed of 3 parts, mind, body, and spirit. Just to get those 3 parts working together in harmony and upscale your life. I'm to in between religion and spirituality crops up all the time in discussions that I have with people.
In fact, as soon as they hear the name of this pod cast or that I'm the mind body spirit mentor, the next question is invariably, oh, is that religious then? So What I'm planning to do today in this podcast is outline the differences between religion and spirituality as I see it Anne I will take maximum care not to offend Anne, I promise. I apologize in advance if I should do so. Please believe it's absolutely not my intention. And that incidentally goes for all my podcasts.
If inadvertently I say anything that offends you, maybe it's just because I've touch the nerve, or something like that.
If you've heard people say, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual, which we hear a lot these days, and you've wondered what they meant, or if you have an inquiring mind Anne you just want to learn more, If you have an open mind and believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion, so long as they don't force it on you, If you've wondered about consciousness and the great awakening, or whether you're missing out if you have no belief in a higher power, Maybe
you're a little concerned that you might cease to exist when you die, then this, and indeed, future podcasts, will be for you. And also, if you have your own faith and beliefs Anne if you're a regular church goer, or if you go to some other comparable place of worship, well, that's fine. You're welcome, and my Anne, point of view shouldn't conflict with what you believe.
However, If you still follow the rules that you were taught as a child and do not want to question them, Corbin you feel, as you might do, that it's somehow wrong to do that. And dare I say it, if your mind is closed, to any views or opinions outside your own strong faith. Well, you're still welcome. Everyone's welcome here, but perhaps we can agree to differ on some or many points.
If you think there's no higher power, that man is supreme and all powerful and has no need of any of that consciousness stuff Well, this is a podcast with Spirit in the title, so I'm surprised and honored that you're even here. But I suspect you might not get very much out of it. So my own perspective is Christian. As a result of my upbringing. And if you've been listening to these podcasts previously, you've probably guessed as much.
But I truly believe that every religion has much to offer, and that as we become more world centric in our views and communications, Anne is recognizing that most faiths are directed towards approximately the same goal. Leading a good life on earth with the intention of obtaining eventual bliss of some sort, usually involving Well, god.
Unfortunately, some branches of religious fundamentalism Anne indeed, the sectarian violence, such as we see between Catholics and protestants in Northern Ireland, Well, they've given religion a really bad name. Throughout history, religious differences have caused an incredible number, if not, basically all wars. And of course, we see that situation ongoing even a day. So, what's the meaning of this word religion?
Interestingly, There is a word in biochemistry, ligand, which means to bind with a purpose. It sounds like it should have a Latin root, but it doesn't. I looked it up because I love looking up the origins of words and how they all connect with each other. Anne I'm going to do a podcast on that in the future. But going back to Ligand, humans are social animals, and we react very positively to having common interest and shared purposes.
So when commentators refer, for example, to football or shopping, or Facebook as being religions, it isn't purely a cynical use of the word.
And also, This is why lockdown was so devastating because keeping people separate from other people even down to the six foot distance when we were allowed to congregate in places like, oh, I don't know, Supermarkets, one of the few places that we were allowed to go to, it's really bad for the human psyche Anne not being allowed to touch as well, is a, an unbelievable restriction on what should be a natural human right. So how did organized religion develop?
Well, originally in very primitive cultures. Populations followed the sun god or the moon goddess or something like that. River goddess. Anne the purpose was for the common good. People knew that their crops depended on weather, and that they would suffer or survive and thrive as a community according to whether or not the various gods looked upon them favorably.
And over time, the activities of those people graduated from appeasement which meant generally sacrifice Anne killing any number of people throwing them in the river, burning them in sacrificial fires, whatever. Gradually, appeasement changed to worship And as societies developed, more complex structures and hierarchies came into being, to manage not just the environment, but the population. Anne gradually, the people at the top, of course, got a taste for power.
My view is that Too many people are turned away from religion at school. The whole school system has a great deal to answer Corbin my opinion. And many of the organized religions ask us to behave. In a very restricted kind of way, follow some uncomfortable rules, and quite frankly, to believe some very strange concepts, very often without questioning.
Anne most of us who were born into a religion are brought up by our parent or parents to follow the rules and the beliefs in that religion, very often they're backed up by what we hear at school or you get sent to weekly classes to get pastors and rabbis and so forth to teach you what you're meant to believe. Anne would you just accept it? You actually believe that it's true.
In fact, sometimes within a religion, We are conned into believing that we're special because we know what other people don't. But about not questioning, The fact is as we get older Anne we develop the ability to think, we're all so busy. And it's easy to use that as an excuse. Think about it when somebody asks you how you are, don't you very often answer, oh, I'm busy. I'm I'm so busy. I've got no time, whatever, whatever. There is a tendency to drift away from organized religion.
Anne the third thing is that for many, we don't replace it with anything else. Did I do that when I was in the corporate Hohyes. I would say I am definitely guilty as charged, but it was never a conscious rejection. It was just laziness. Or inertia or maybe exhaustion that was driving my weekend behavior. Now, I quit formal office life over 10 years ago, gradually reading more and more as I regained time for myself. Anne I came across a writer who really resonated with me.
That was Neil Donald Walsh. He has a series called conversations with god. It's written for Christians, and I think he offers a fresh and compelling perspective on what our time on earth is all about. And that puts me in mind of a conversation I was part of on Clubhouse a week or so back, it got quite deep and profound with speakers questioning what it's all about down And maybe the question we should be asking is what am I all about Anne what's the purpose of my life here on earth.
As and when you find time in your life, to contemplate the things that really matter. You'll probably discover that words like purpose and fulfillment occupy your thoughts these days on a regular basis. So when I started outlining a structure for this podcast, I realized that before I spoke too much about how religions had come into existence, I really needed to justify why it was even necessary to talk about religion when I'm supposed to be doing spirituality.
I suppose the truth is that personally, I don't see them as mutually exclusive. Anne I have gradually been building up my own knowledge of other religions, which I find really interesting both the modern ones and the ancient religions. And I find the historical development of and the links between all the various religions, very enlightening.
There's a vast number of structure still standing today, like, there's, the stone henge, avebury, and dozens of similar things relating back with druids in Southern England. There's huge Egyptian temples dozens of them that you can go and visit If you take a trip to Egypt, there's the pyramids, of Corbin. There's the ancient inca ruins, machu Picchu, all sorts of pyramids in South Anne Middle America as well. There are giant statues on East Island in Polynesia. There are massacre lines in Peru.
Oh, there's all sorts. The problem is there was no form of writing in those days. So as those populations disappeared for one reason or another, which we don't know, the entire history of those civilizations and peoples, well, that was lost too. Archaeologists conclude that those remaining structures do indicate practices of worship by the different groups. In other words, the earliest religions.
And whilst we know little detail, the historians of piece together theories old priestesses and vestal virgins and sacrifices. 1 of the oldest written historical records is the Bible. And of course, there are the hieroglyphs in Egypt, and they were a complete mystery until the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone. And that happens to have, the text of a priestly decree written in 3 different languages, one of which was hieroglyphs.
And then there was Dimotic and ancient Greek, Anne because the scholars knew how to translate the last 2, they were able to, from there, gain a working knowledge of hieroglyphics. So present day knowledge of all these previous religions is sketchy. To say the least. But clearly, there were structures Anne there were hierarchies Anne there was control. And it seems that in times past, well, it it it there's no question actually. In times past, when education was not widely available.
The general population had no choice, but to submit to control by those that were higher up. The pecking order. And also, anybody who was very intelligent usually ended up joining the church, and then the church would educate them. But the the general mass of the population was kept in, blissful ignorance. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is control.
But This will have happened at different rates in different cultures, but gradually, people became interested in what would be in store for them when they died. You probably are familiar with myths and legends about Orpheus in the underworld Anne sticks, and that's STYX, and ferrying people across the river, and I don't know my mythology all that well, but I know that there are plenty of really, really ancient beliefs about the possible places we went to after death.
And of course, the, the riches that the pharaohs were buried with in the pyramids, again, go to show what was, amassed by them to help them on their journey in the next world. There are also theories that the pyramids had nothing to do with burial chambers, but, I'll oh, that's a whole different topic. But the idea that one's behavior whilst alive would dictate one's comfort after death provided enormous leverage for organized religions Anne the people who wanted to control the population.
Anyway, I am running out of time so I think I'll say I'll do part 2 of this Anne next week. I look forward to your return. I that time. So friends, that wraps up the mind body spirit connection for this Let me know, please, if there are any specific subjects that you would like me to include in a future podcast join me same time next week or connect with me anytime on social media.