BECOMING ONE'S OWN AUTHORITY.

{Preface: Please see "More Words of Encouragement..." from March 17, 2019.}

Who really decides if a religious claim is true or not?

     Rabbi Rami Shapiro's Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler responded to this question in the may/june 2018 issue of Spirituality and Health as follows:

"You do. If you agree with the claim, you say it's true; if you don't agree with it, you say it's false. Once you admit you are the arbiter of religious truth and falshood, and that you believe what you believe simply because you've been conditioned to believe it, you will start questioning all your beliefs, liberate yourself from the straitjacket of intellectual and religious conformity, and slip into the gentle and terrifying grace of living with not knowing."  [p. 21]
    
     This was my experience as I struggled in my adolescence with my childhood fundamentalist indoctrination that the Bible was the infallible "Word of God," which I eventually came to conclude was the Protestants' counter to the Catholic claim of papal infallibility.  Father Richard Rohr spoke to this same issue when he wrote the following in his daily meditation on March 18, 2020:

"Most of organized religion, without meaning to, has actually discouraged us from taking the mystical path by telling us almost exclusively to trust outer authority -- in the form of scripture, tradition, or various kinds of experts -- instead of telling us the value and importance of inner experience. (I call that trusting the 'containers' instead of the 'contents.')


In fact,  most of us were strongly warned against ever trusting ourselves, told that our personal experiences of the divine were unnecessary and possibly even dangerous...We were taught to mistrust our own souls--and thus the Holy Spirit within us."  [Bold my emphasis--Ty]

     Elizabeth Lesser, author of The New American Spiirituality: A Seeker's Guide, writing in Spirituality and Health, asked:

"So what is new about 21st-Century Spirituality?  Some of it is not new at all...The big difference between the older forms of spirituality and 21st-Century Spirituality is the movement away from an external authority figure and a movement toward an empowerment of each seeker. 21st-Century Spirituality is not about being told what to do...It's about becoming one's own authority."  {S&H, Spring 2000, p.48 [Bold emphasis mine--Ty]

     To me, this issue of authority is what separates spirituality from religion:

* Religion is an institution that was created by others; spirituality is something you create and develop within yourself. 
* Religion tells you the truth; spirituality encourages you to discover the truth for yourself.
* Religion sets the creed, dogma and/or doctrine on what you should believe; with spirituality you decide for yourself.
* Religion promotes a path; spirituality involves you setting your own path.

     I like the way Jack Kornfield sums it up [taken from Bringing Home the Dharma]:

     "The spiritual path does not present us with a prescribed, pat formula for everyone to follow. It is a matter of invitation.  We cannot be Mother Teresa or Gandhi or the Buddha. We have to be ourselves. We must discover and connect with our own unique expression of the truth. We must learn to listen to and trust ourselves."