A common mindset in religion is externalizing and personifying transcendent realities:

• God is viewed as a supreme being up there, out there, somewhere in the sky

• Spiritual truth is out there, located in a sacred book, teaching or guru

• Evil is out there everywhere, in Satan and the demonic realm

• Heaven is up there and out there beyond the clouds that we enter into after death

• Our worth and value is based on keeping a checklist of do's and don'ts and religious practices

A way to cultivate a spirituality from the inside out involves:

• breaking our dependency on others to do our thinking for us

• breaking our tendency to externalize authority to sources outside ourselves

• ceasing our guru worship and putting spiritual personalities on pedestals

• taking responsibility for addressing the root cause of our chronic unhappiness and disharmony

• growing in confidence in listening to and trusting ourselves

• taking responsibility and making amends for the harm we bring into the world and the ways we are complicit in human suffering

• using critical thinking, direct experience and self-reflection as our primary means of determining our truth

• shifting our performance-based mentality for worth and value to a deep acceptance of our true self

Too often religion focuses us on externals. In this paradigm God, is located up there or out there somewhere. Our spiritual authority or guidance is located in a sacred book or religious teacher. The steps or actions we take in our spiritual journey are an imitation of what others have done or what they told us to do.

The shift that will take us forward is turning inward - connecting with ultimate reality, authority, and guidance within ourselves. This also brings us together as one because when we connect to that inner reality we discover that it is a universal oneness that runs through all of us.

In other words, the power and authority resides in us, and not in some external deity, rule, code, tradition, creed, law, book, whatever. This is going to be a major shift, and we need to help each other along in this. For too long we’ve been made to mistrust what lies within us, and think of ourselves as bad, weak and powerless people.

Jim Palmer