Originally Posted By: lehe
I believe spirituality is when people have personal belief systems both moral/ethical and with respect to the nature of reality and their environment and the good sense and culture to treasure them as personal beliefs.

On the other hand religon is the desire to control people by manipulating their spirituality.

The garden of eden is a perfect image of manipulation and control through the principle of first, with holding knowledge, second, invoking fear and manufacturing guilt from meaningless associations. Thereby third, punishment is accepted and control relinquished.

People don't just become manipulated without first, stepping out from their own cognitive abilities and giving authority to the beliefs of a majority or an illusion already sympathized with.

The essence of spirituality is that spirit of all individuals is One and individuality a reflection of separation and ego.
When people create a ritual around their individual spirituality it automatically separates everything from the One Spirit within us all. It then becomes a thing to protect and worship, leaving the threat of possibility in difference as being subject to illusion and debate.

Tho God is within everything, and amorphous, it can only be personalized and made to take a shape by the illusions of the ego. Then it becomes sacred and ritualistic.

The story of the Garden of Eden is symbolic of mans insistence on making anything personal and subject to comparison and to relative measure of worth. Or the creation of the Ego as The authority of reality.

Man believes in his mortality and arbitrary rules such as death and taxes as being real within the manifest. Those ideals are derived from certain natural laws that support the manifest creation and how it thrives or dies, or comes into form and dissolves from its form. It's only because mans perfect memory becomes convoluted by the influence of fear and individual measures of worth and reality, that natural law becomes hidden by illusions that are egoic.
Spirituality then could be said to have a science to it rather than just something created from beliefs that conflict in individual assessment and imagination.

It is a science that supports all beliefs in individuality and illusion as well as being an open doorway beyond those illusions which create suffering and hell.
It is the individual who creates false authority, and it is the ego that never asks for help.

Only the Heart knows beyond all reasoning, but the intellect that is stuck within reasons of individual measure does not listen to the heart. It only listens to what it imagines is the heart that is attached to fame, glory, wealth, Sex and other illusions of sensory fulfillment. None of these are permanent.
The heart knows that, but it is overruled by egoic pride and prejudice. It is the ego that creates illusion from truth, it is the ego that creates religion out of spirituality and makes it individual and personal.

I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey, but then I turned myself around!!