on prayer and postponement

We imagine spirituality to be some big complicated thing. This suits us well because it perpetuates a huge career for the ego and creates lots of industry. In the words of St. Augustine, "Oh Lord, make me chaste...but not just yet." Likewise, we pray for vision, surrender, spiritual understanding, while at the same time we leave little occasion for anything but the perpetuation of spiritual alienation. Religion, with all its promises and systems, is the counterfeit of spirituality. Religion is what happens in the space between the two clauses of St. Augustine's prayer. "Oh Lord, make me chaste"---the first clause expresses a pure and undivided openness to Spirit. The second clause, "...but not just yet"--is the ego's desire to keep itself going as something separate from Spirit.

Our religious systems fill the immeasurable space that lies between these two clauses. Because we can't live with the conscious awareness of our own self-contradiction, we clutter up our lives with so-called spiritual activities, which are really nothing more than human busyness. Religion allows us to perpetuate the lie and still feel good about ourselves as we "earnestly pray" for the truth. It keeps us fully engaged with systems--dogma, doctrine, "practices" and all other kinds of human industry. It enables us to live with ourselves while on one hand we pray for enlightenment, and on the other, we postpone the possibility of its immediacy. If we really wanted enlightenment, we would be enlightened.