Never discuss religion and politics at a party – I would say likewise on a blog, as it immediately makes it a gotta go to site or a never go to site.

Well my religion is NOT ABOUT GOD (or whatever you may be worshiping today).

As a bit of a disclaimer I actually believe in God (and that is the only description you will get from me) but have this radical theory that God does not influence what we do.  This is a good argument to start with your churchy friends; we are all just in the ant farm and God is watching, or if you don’t believe, no-one is watching.

To me it is all about free will; if we are supposed to have it, then an all influencing, all knowing God didn’t give us that free will at all.  To me that is not what a true GOD would do, what would be the point?

So where does that leave me with my religion.  It leaves me in the ant farm.  But, like any ant farm, leave the ants there long enough and they will eventually build a space shuttle.  So likewise with us, everything we need is already here.  It’s just that we don’t understand it at this stage.  I give an estimation that our current understanding of all that has been provided to us is about the equivalent of one grain of sand of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.

Funnily enough this theory dawned on me when I was watching a documentary about the Black Hawk Helicopter.  It was a few years ago and can be dated by the fact that at that time we were using ‘486’ computers.  The commentator was saying that the pilots in the helicopters originally could only fly for a short period of time because all the information that was coming up on their heads-up-display was making them fatigued.  So the answer was a mega-computer in the back which filtered the information on the heads-up-display which only gave the pilots vital information which was necessary for their survival.  There were a number of things that struck me at the time, like the computer was running at a phenomenal  speed of 1,000,000,000 bits per second being only one.  Remembering that at that time we were all using our 486 computers in our home which were supposedly state of the art – that is running at 486,000 bits per second!

Some of the other things that struck me were that the computer in the back of the helicopter was absorbing all this information and filtering it to the pilots in real time – basically making decisions for the pilot about what was important without the pilots input – just its programming….. and, how all of us were really getting ripped of in getting drip fed technology!

…. and most importantly I realised that the entire heads-up-display situation was like how we lived our lives.

I believe (no science here) that your brain absorbs everything you experience.  When I say everything, I mean everything.  Like when you walk into a party you catch a few conversations as you walk through the room, but eventually you settle on one and that is the one that you are listening to.  But, I believe you hear every conversation when you walk into the room but your heads-up-display has been programmed (by you) to filter out all the noise and just give you the information you are after.

In addition to that your brain notices and records everything in your life – I mean everything.  Every face you see walking down the street, every cloud, every leaf on every tree… it all gets recorded and put away.  The problem is that this information is rarely referred to again because we are programmed to just access the stuff that keeps us alive.  If we had the constant access and retrieval of everything we would be like the pilots except that the because it would be a lifetime of information our heads would probably explode!

So we live on autopilot – just give me the information I need for survival.

But our brains are hardwired to get every one of those grains of sand in there and for us to be able to use them.  How do we do that, or does it already happen.  You know when you wake up in the middle of the night suddenly remembering that name you haven’t been able to remember for the last week.   You know when you are suddenly thinking about someone and the phone rings and its them – or you see then walking down the street.

Is this intuition… yes.  What is intuition.  It is not magic.  It is the heads-up-display of the analysis of a lifetimes worth of experience and information telling us what the most likely thing that is going to happen next is.

The trick with my religion is that you can make the retrieval of this information, when you want it…. by the way this is a trick I haven’t mastered, but I know it’s there…. I always get a park.

I can go to the shops and always get the park out the front when I want it (mostly!).  Why, what has this got to do with my religion.  Well this is the example of it…. this is actually it.   I get the park because of a lifetime of experience that tells me I need to go to the shops at the time that I need to go to the shops then because that is when the park is there.  The trick is letting that happen.  You can’t let that happen when you try to make it happen, when you’re stressed, when you’re going for the result, when you are going for the park.

MY RELIGION

When you stop looking for it, it appears.  When you are calm, it is there.  When you take notice it is there.

When you find Mindfulness you find yourself and you find My Religion.