Dogma and Ritual Do Not Equal Spirituality by Tina Erwin

There are endless books about the spiritual path. There are wonderful guidelines about what it means to be spiritual. There are great teachers who demonstrate spirituality by their life mission.

And then there is religion, which is supposed to epitomize the building concepts of control and power. It would appear that the trappings of religion equate to a very profound structure. The pillars of that structure are dogma and ritual.

When the Great Ones walked the Earth, none of them built a church. When the Great Ones sought to show us the way, none of them specifically wrote anything down and demanded that it be followed other than the Koran and the Ten Commandments, which were literally written in stone so they could not ever be edited. None of them demanded dogma or ritual to show their power.

It was the followers of the Great Ones who built the structures, created the dogma and invented the rituals that would define a particular religion based on what the current, second or third generation leader at that time felt was appropriate. Some of the rituals were appropriate for that time and place in history but no one was ever allowed to question them, so they could not ever be revised to accommodate ever-changing times.

Ritual is a specific way of doing something at a specific time with unique tools following unyielding guidelines. Ritual is rigid, uncompromising and unforgiving. Ritual carries with it the energy of power and associated fear. If you don’t perform the ritual in the exact manner, then somehow you have done a terrible thing and ‘God’ will not forgive you. No one is ever allowed to question whether or not the ritual actually ever does anything particularly spiritual for anyone.

There are very profound rituals that create a certain frequency and that have often been corrupted from their original intention. The original ‘Mystery Schools’ back in the mists of time, taught the physics of how these rituals worked and why they worked. They had a very specific purpose and a very deliberate outcome if performed properly. This is where the concept of the hand gestures called mudras came from, the use of essential oils, incense and prayers. However, along the way, many rituals became completely corrupted.

The original Mystery schools also taught the basic tenants of spirituality. These were eventually corrupted into guilt producing, stomach wrenching dogma. Being spiritual was originally believed to be able to take place anywhere, whether it was in a field of flowers, by the bedside of the sick or at your dinner table. Prayer was always appropriate and never limited to a specific grandiose building of wood and stone.

The concept of forgiveness was corrupted into the power to forgive and that power was invested in certain people who lorded it over, literally, the followers of that religion. Believe what we believe or you are not ‘one of us.’ We will require you to confess your sins, and only we can absolve you. Power was and still is the key here. The ritual of confessing sins to another person was a corrupted form of an individual speaking directly to God. The priesthood of all believers was the original tenet, not give your spiritual power to another to judge.

The other problem with this concept, of often dogmatic ritual, especially when it comes to confessing one’s sins to another is the concept that one mortal can transmute the karma of another. Six Our Fathers and Five Hail Mary’s will not transmute anyone’s karma. Lovely prayers each one, but they do not have the power to absolve someone of a terrible karmic act. No mere mortal, no matter how elegantly they are dressed, can absolve the karma of another.

Each individual uniquely defines being spiritual; no one has a monopoly on that definition. Perhaps each of us might wish to look long and hard at the ritual and dogma that often confines us in our belief system. Doing something routinely because you are supposed to without remembering why you are doing it is not being spiritual.

Just for a month, let go of ritual and dogma. Experiment with spiritual freedom. Perhaps then each of us can feel what it must have been like to walk with the Great Ones and know the freedom in the delight in the divine because we could feel that the connection to the Divine genuinely lived within us!