The Root of All Religion

Nothing comprises existence beyond sensory inputs -- unclassified, unmarked, indiscriminate variations and patterns. Yet how we grasp at something higher, believing there must be something more, but unable to put our finger on just what it is…

The mind is the grasper, yet what it grasps is merely the roots of its own creation. This reality wherein there is nothing to learn nor know, it hides from itself. That one could be the searcher and the searched for is only accomplished through ignorance alone -- an ignorance in which the grasper is complicit. For we desire to be ignorant. We desire to hide from ourselves the truth that all without is in fact within.

The mind needs function, meaning, and purpose. This is its essential aim. Tools, fire, hunting, and onwards to the iPhones and electricity of today -- everything is pursued with an intention and purpose in mind. Working towards ends only imagined but never realized, the mind is a builder. It appropriates the sensations it receives -- that is to say it converts sight, sound, or touch into something appropriate for use in construction.

Action exists without meaning, yet the mind refuses to accept this. Behind every action is an impulse, and drive. The quest for food to sate hunger, and the pursuit of sex to release aggression are but two examples. Such actions the body demands -- but what of the mind, whose abstractions create desires insatiable by physical reality?

Towards these ends the mind must create its own reasoning and purpose, things beyond those which is so clearly felt by the body…

and yet it must also believe its own machinations to constitute genuine motivations.

This it does by never questioning, and simply accepting it to be so. The preference of an ignorant state may seem unlikely to you, but it provides to humanity a great benefit, which is to be free of the soulless, black void of nothingness.

You see, the mind, absent any immediate problem to solve, must create the impetus for its own existence. It wants to work, mechanically, constructing theories and ideas, but to do so requires inventing the cause for this action. It cannot work on fumes; it cannot build on vapors; it cannot make something of nothing.

And it must build: it is voracious in this activity.

These roots, these groundworks from which all thought and action grows, these most fundamental assumptions we take to be true in order to act, to live, and to know what cannot be known -- here is the domain of the spiritual. To sate the churning mind, to stop the question of “why,” at the largest level, to allow us to continue to pursue our single-minded desires and passions free from haziness and uncertainty.

It is enormously empowering; it is severely limiting.

To create this “something” from nothing is to trap ourselves to the endless imagination -- one wonders whether this situation is oxymoronic. To become slave to freedom.

And yet one must wonder if this situation is not preferable to the void, where the scope of freedom has expanded and stretched beyond meaning, where terms like slavery and free will explode into insignificance.

​In this horrid, enchanting stillness we become dead, yet wonder whether we were alive in life anyways.

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