This is how cults do it, even cults with billions of members.
The entire purpose of religion, any religion, is to cause existential pain.
When you are in pain, your blood/brain barrier gets more ‘porous’, and eventually elements of the ‘larger life’ gain access to you.
The words, the pretty songs, are irrelevant.
Now some ‘make lemonade out of the lemons’ and become beautiful people. religion or no religion.
But some just get turned toxic, creating heavens and hells for people who disagree with them, and try to cast them into their creations.
That’s what all religion does, that has any sort of tier system, some sort of advancement system.
Don’t fall for it.
Don’t become a victim.
No religion has ever saved anyone; it has only created exotic structures to damn them, whether to ‘hell’ or to ‘samsara’.
None of this is necessary, or even remotely a good idea.
BTW, if anyone knows where that graphic came from, it needs attribution. It may be f rom the 1975 film “The Image”
but I’m uncertain.
There are a few systems such as Zen, that mostly avoid this sort of nonsense (and they teach you to modify your
neurology by more positive means. But there aren’t many such systems out there.
Kevin Cann
12/17/2024