The Fourth Mandala – Free Excerpt from the Responsive Universe by John C. Bader

My new literary effort, The Responsive Universe – Meditations and Daily Life Practices is now available for purchase. Within these pages are nine Mandalas or chapters that illustrate a new and authentic step forward on the path to self-discovery and enlightenment. Over the course of the next week I will be giving an intimate look at each chapter as well as a small excerpt from the new book. We have just reviewed the Third Mandala.

We continue with the Fourth Mandala…

The instinctual energy that is God is a boundless orb, a sphere known to the mind and the senses. God’s infinite sphere has a center that is everywhere and a circumference that is boundless. The concept of God arcs an indescribable celestial consciousness that guides and directs all life in form and non form. With this in mind, we know that books and rules cannot truly govern our faith. What we find is a power inside ourselves that drives our faith. The Dalai Lama’s sentiment rings true: “There are billions of people on this Earth, each with their own individual, spiritual needs. It seems we need billions of religions too.” It is almost as if each person needs their own personal religion to follow. Our quest to know more and more about God could take an eternity. Still, everyone and everything is connected to God. God’s light is the cure for all diseases and the knowledge of everything in the Universe. It is wisdom and love beyond all comprehension. The closer one gets to God, the closer he or she comes to the light. God created the Universe, the Universe created the Earth, and the Earth created humans. Humans created religions to explain this vast creation. Yet, you alone hold the key to your own faith. Your faith is based on the aperture of your open mind.

Fourth Mandala Excerpt

The Pillars of Religion in the Third Mandala posed several reasons for contemporary society’s need for religion – to explain cause and effect situations, social interaction, a crutch in life, fear, and our genuine need for spirituality. No matter what the need is, all personal reasons for clinging to religious belief are valid as long as they are derived from an individual’s own thought processes and are not the borrowed thoughts of another. Where the Third Mandala encouraged us to analyze our belief systems in regard to God and creation, the Fourth Mandala will take this a step further and challenge us to consider the difference between spirituality and religion. You may recognize a pattern developing as our Mandalas build upon each other – all are based around the notion that we all have an indestructible and unwavering quality within us called True Nature. True Nature, our minds, and the Universe are all boundless frontiers. Where knowledge and scientific explanation fail to answer the mysteries of our minds and the Cosmos, religion often picks up the slack, offering stories as answers and promises of heaven after death as long as we follow the rules of a determined “good” life. The challenge of the Fourth Mandala is to reconsider this boundless quality of our Universe and our minds and question whether this fits inside a man-made, structured belief.

Religion is expressly a vehicle for faith. Without faith in a religious order, doctrines of organized religions such as Christianity and Islam would be simply legends and parables. A faith-fueled merger of church and state is what has turned modern religion into the money earning juggernaut it is today. Religion is no longer left to church on Sundays. With cable and satellite television, apps and smartphones, religious programming is everywhere every day. It is now not just a vehicle for the politically powerful, it is a full-blown industry that touches every aspect of culture down to our historical teachings. In the past, religion was an effective tool for crowd control as well as mind control. History and religion were merged as one, and religious authorities passed down “knowledge” that kept the dominant church in power. Without information readily at hand to question authority, the poor and less educated masses blindly adopted what was presented to them as religious and historical truths without analyzing the source of the teachings. Questioning the validity of such lessons, after all, was heresy.

What amazes me is that with the infusion of television and internet into our lives, where research tools are now literally in the palms of our hands, many people still adopt religious beliefs that have not changed in hundreds if not thousands of years. The Constitution of the United States has been amended several times to better fit modern society’s changing needs, but few organized religions have made any attempt to adapt from their archaic ways. Yet, many of us still accept what a powerful few say is the truth. We accept lessons passed down by our parents and teachers as the truth. We incorporate them into our lives without considering that these truths have been handed down to us by a small religious and political minority determined to manipulate the majority. Questioning these truths is the premise of the Fourth Mandala.

John C. Bader
www.responsiveuniverse.com