#transrational

The only language religion is capable of is metaphor. If they'd just make that humble realization, we could have such healthier religion.

You've got to start [with fundamentalism], though. You've also got to react against it. First, you construct yourself. Then you must deconstruct. Conservatives get trapped at the first stage, constant construction of their ego-identity. Liberals get trapped at the second stage, constantly deconstructing everything and thinking that makes them smart.

The mystic goes through the necessary deconstruction. They are not naive. They've faced evil, they've faced the rational and seen its limitations, and they go into reconstruction. That would be the level that I want to teach from. It includes both construction and deconstruction.

The mind, left to itself, is a binary system that understands everything by comparing it to something else. So, when you first comprehend the word "short", it's only in comparison to "tall". Most people spend their whole life simply comparing things. Whenever we say "short" and "tall", for some damned reason (and I use the word "damned" intentionally), we say, "tall is good, short is bad". This is why Buddha, Jesus, your great spiritual teachers will say "do not judge". It would be closer to say, "do not label"--that's what they mean.

If it's not Democrat, it's Republican. If it's not gay, it's straight. If it's not black, it's white. This is the basis of all biases. That's why the discovery of the soul by your great mystics and saints is really discovering the world of subtlety, the world of discrimination, discernment. Which becomes, ironically, a much greater clarity. That you see things in their uniqueness, in their specialness, and their ordinariness and their wonderfullness by seeing them in their specificity.