Beyond Religions, Sects and Cults (TE 123)

A talk at the 2016 Integral Yoga Retreat in Greenville, SC.

The age of religions is over. When a great Master comes and releases certain teachings, they have to be expressed in a body of words, which we understand in a human way, with a very inadequate means of receiving the state in which there truths were expressed. When a great truth is spoken to us – Gita, Ramayana, Bible – there are two ways we can approach it. We can keep a holy book on the altar, routinely read it as a scripture, pick up a few things, select some temporal elements, connected to time and space context when this truth was revealed, and treat them as eternal truth, observe some rules and rites, and form a religion. On other side, every great teaching has an eternal element, the Sanatan Satya, but to receive it we have to go beyond the customs and external things in which it is trapped, beyond the written words, which are inadequate to fully capture the great truth…