Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...very existence of the People's Temple--California cult religion par excellence--and the knowledge that there are plenty of similar groups out there somewhere, does not speak too well for modern culture. If society's rejects can be coddled and hosannaed into giving up their possessions, leaving the country and then killing themselves, then there are a lot of sheep out there and a lot of wolves to lead them. Moonies stalk the streets, even hold semi-respectable conventions; they and countless other groups offer an identity to people alienated by a society that doesn't give a good...
...come back and help them. There were times when no music was played and each person prayed silently to himself. Other times the Road Man (medicine man) passed the prayer stick to some one who would sing and chant to the accompaniment of the water drum. This is a religion of the earth, and the ceremony involved humbling me to all living things. The fire, the smoke, the peyote, are all seen as means of putting the body and the prayer out into the elements. The purpose of this ceremony was to call upon the forces of nature to give...
...Western religion has always had trouble justifying its beliefs, resorting in the last analysis to exhortations to "Take it on faith." Fine, if as a result of faith people could experience their own innermost being and achieve religious ecstasy. But except for a few mystics and saints who starve themselves (and possibly affect their perceptual systems through vitamin deficiency) and thereby find God, the mass of westerners live spiritually devoid but hopeful. Religion has ceased to give them the real psychological experiences they seek...
...Eastern religions, even in the pre-packaged form they take when they are shipped over to the U.S. Many Hindus and Buddhists actually attain inner peace, actually experience their spiritual souls as part of the spiritual energy pervading the universe. Western religion is stingy: God came to earth (so the story goes) in only one incarnation, Jesus. In the East, there were many incarnations, many teachers, many who attained nirvana. The spiritual struggle in the East is not so hopeless, with divine grace coming in the last moments of submission and despair like some celestial cavalry riding over the hill...
THUS NO RIGID church hierarchy is needed in the East, no state dogmas, no equivalents of the social power of corporate religion in the West. Each man should realize them himself, by himself, and then submit himself to the larger reality he has just discovered...