Skip to content
4 min read Sunday Spiritual

Isn't this just another religion?

Why the 3 Principles have nothing and everything to do with religion šŸ™šŸ»

Isn't this just another religion?
Photo by Noah Holm / Unsplash

It’s Sunday, so let’s talk about God, shall we?

(Ooooh, what did the Reader Ego Construct šŸ“¦ do, when I used the ā€˜G’ word then??)

šŸ¤”

You’ll have noted that I don’t, very often. (Use the ā€˜G’ word).

Because of that very reason: our conditioning around the word and what it represents is so entrenched—over millennia, in some cases!—and people are understandably a bit precious about it. It’s easy to offend.

Actually, that’s not true. As my first ever coach pointed out to me:

It is not possible to offend; only to be offended.

…think about it.

🧐

But, yeah, that aside, it’s a big deal isn’t it? Wars being fought and atrocities being committed in the name of… etc. and after having been brought up going to church as a child, it never made a great deal of sense to me to continue with religion, when I had the choice.

So I drifted away.

Then I went in the opposite direction and was radically opposed to the idea of religion during my Uni days (while still having some very close friends in the church), and to be honest, never really ā€˜got it’.

Then I came across the 3 Principles, and all the pieces of the jigsaw slotted into place for me.


I get questions (sometimes accusations!) about the relationship between the 3 Principles and religion, which I think is only natural when you listen to, or read, anything by Syd Banks and he’s talking about ā€œGod being the allnessā€ and stuff like that. In fact, some of the older audios of his (pre-3Ps) from the 70’s feature a lot of ā€˜G’ word action!

Here you go; a quote from The Missing Link:

ā€œBoth the form and the formless together create the whole, the oneness of life, that which we call God.ā€

So the natural question is, ā€œHang on, isn’t this something to do with religion?ā€


My view—and of course this is just what the Giles Ego Construct šŸ“¦ believes—on it is this: it’s all saying exactly the same thing.

ā˜Æļø
Everything is a metaphor for life, and existence. Everything.

There’s clearly an energy to life (if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be typing this and you wouldn’t be reading it), and whether you call that life energy Universal Mind, or God, or Spirit, or Prana, or Nature, or Chi, or the Quantum Field, or Soul, or Truth, or The Great Spirit, or Wisdom, or Evolution or a bazillion other things, is neither here nor there, really.

So there’s this indefinable thing—call it ā€˜Jeff’ if you want!—that we can never fully know, and then there are 8+ billion doorways opening onto that thing. All these human apertures. Some are more ornate than others. Some have entry requirements. Some are rich in story and meaning.

But these are all mind-made and I think that’s the important thing to see.

None of them are true. All of them are wrong.


So if you ask me, ā€œGiles, is there a God?ā€ you’ll get two answers:

  1. Of course there is! – what exactly is it you think you’re experiencing right now, FFS?!
  2. Of course there isn’t! – it’s just a concept us humans have made up to satisfy the left brain’s need to categorise, label and find meaning, where there is none.

šŸ¤·šŸ»ā€ā™‚ļø

(Awkward bastard that I am.)

When push comes to shove, there’s just THIS. Here. Now. 

That’s all you get.


And maybe your take home points are:

  1. If you have a faith… then the 3Ps aren’t a threat to it. They’re just a metaphor for how we experience this thing we call ā€˜reality’. I suspect, as is the case for many of my clients, a deeper appreciation for those principles will only enrich your faith. Principles are great at explaining stuff, and I’m guessing you’ll make the connections that make sense to you.
  2. If you’re a bit anti-religion… the 3Ps aren’t that. They’re merely a (very simple, rule-free) metaphor for how we experience this thing we call ā€˜reality’ and there are infinite ways to view that. Stick to the neuroscience and the evidence from the world of physics, if that’s the case, and do what makes sense to you.

Either way… have your self a peaceful Sunday.

šŸ’

Giles

p.s. Still can’t get your head round the idea of it not being possible to offend someone? Argue the toss with me in the comments – I’m happy to be proved wrong (and, as it happens, impossible to offend)! šŸ˜‚

Metaphors all the way down
When lyrics really hit the spot šŸŽ¶

As I said: Everything is a metaphor for life, and existence. Everything!