Losing Our Religion Transcript

Liz: So before we really get into this, I just want to say that we do not judge anyone for their chosen religion, or any choice that they make when it comes to their relationship with their God, whatever that is.

Rhea: What we are actually focusing on and discussing today is the construct itself in which religion is defined, and a lot of the podcasts we have been doing before, we start with something very personal and we show how actually it is an internalization of something quite big. In this podcast, we are doing the opposite. We are taking the big first, and showing you how it affects you internally. I definitely think religion forms part of your identity in a lot of ways, even if it’s not having one.

Liz: It’s been so ingrained for so long that we have either been forced to embrace some version of it or some idea of God, or not at all.

Rhea: A lot of my generation has stepped back from religion in a lot of ways. What’s interesting is that in doing so, we’ve lost the light of religion but we’ve kept the shadow – guilt, shame, punishment. All those things are ingrained somehow in us and we apply them to our world today, but we don’t have the benefits that religion brings. 

Liz: Historically, religion has always been about leading the sheep. It was a version of love, but it was not unconditional love. It was more fear-based. It was “life is hard now, but there is heaven and there is hell”, and so there was always this philosophy that everything is about suffering. Life is about suffering. Everything that you do, because somebody else suffered for you and sacrificed for you, and that very notion to me defined so many other relationships as a result. To earn love, I must suffer. Whether it’s love in this lifetime or the love in the afterlife.

Rhea: It’s about those rules, isn’t it, that we were talking about in Unconditional Love. If I follow these rules, I will go to heaven, therefore I am worthy of being in heaven, therefore I am worthy of love. It does make me uncomfortable to just say throw religion out with the bath water, because there are so many people, people very close to me, from many different religions who not only believe, but are kinder, gentler, more compassionate people as a result. So I would struggle to say that religion is purely about controlling the masses. I would say instead that you can take the positive messages from religion and apply them to your life in a way that makes it happier, but you have to have the discernment to know which parts are written by men in order to control, and which parts are actually beautiful concepts that add value to your life. 

Liz: As you said earlier, that the positive things about religion which I actually think are less about religion, because I see religion as the construct, it’s the rituals.

Rhea: It’s the vessel in which these concepts are given to us.

Liz: Very much, which without them, to me creates more freedom. You didn’t need forgiveness or compassion. You can exercise that. It doesn’t come from anyone but yourself, and I think the more consciousness we have, the more we understand that to be true. I am not saying that religion did not serve a purpose. It certainly served a purpose. It was quite necessary in order to bring order to chaos, but what we are finding as you said, that there is too much shadow. All the shadow that had to do with religion has surfaced to the point now where we can’t ignore it. It perpetuates peoples’ fears in order to maintain its power.

Rhea: Or the fear of being punished. The fear of being wrong. The fear of not being good enough.

Liz: Or the fear of not getting into heaven. Not being loved enough to make it.

Rhea: And I guess that does mean that you surrender your autonomy, because you don’t do what you want to do. You do what you think you should do instead.

Liz: Absolutely!

Rhea: And that means that you are losing that connection with yourself and you are not honest with yourself, so you are not necessarily maybe getting the lessons and the experiences that you need to grow

Liz: Oh not at all. Your growth is in a very limited path.  

Rhea: I guess you could just argue that like the traditional family roles that was governing our real life that religion was there to govern our spiritual life. As we are breaking out of the archetypes of this kind of traditional role doesn’t work for me within the home, maybe this way of traditional way of thinking about spirituality doesn’t work for me either. 

Liz: God is sold as this sort of father figure, which we know is such a limiting idea and if you are fortunate, then you would be on the receiving end of many blessings. If you weren’t, then that’s your fault. 

Rhea: It’s not about judging someone for their beliefs. 

Liz: Gosh, no.

Rhea: It’s much more about saying well actually, let’s look at this objectively. Let’s look at the rules and the constructs and the concepts that come with mainstream religion, and when we talk about mainstream religion, we are kind of focusing on Christianity because that’s what we know best, and let’s just say, does that still work today? It’s how religion has been interpreted, how it has been imposed and how it has been internalized.

Liz: And how it has created barriers to our own development as a result. It’s all story.

Rhea: The Bible is a collection of stories.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: So when we look at those stories, just like the stories we tell ourselves, and say, so they quite work still? Do they actually give me the map to achieving those things that I am promised by following religion—peace, love, harmony? Or actually are they stopping me from being those things, because the way in which those stories are told are just reinforcing laws, barriers and rules that aren’t really making me very happy?

Liz: No, or result in the preoccupation of I should be doing more in order to achieve this goal.

Rhea:  Yeah. It’s like bargaining. It’s like negotiating. It’s trading. It’s if I do this, I get this. I now deserve this because this has happened to me because I have done all the work.

Liz: I have suffered enough, therefore . . .

Rhea: I’ve suffered enough. It’s always tit for tat.

Liz: Very much. 

Rhea: And that’s how we are living in our society at the moment.

Liz: Because we have lived with this for eons. We have lived with this lifetime after lifetime. I remember always having issues with that. I was a terribly religious kid, because I was trying to find context for everything I was seeing and experiencing. It felt good until it became more academic. We had to learn more stories, and we had to adopt and memorize the rules and say the prayers three times a day.

Rhea: There are bits of religion that are useful. Praying, for example is a good way to meditate. The problem is, like everything else, when there is that rhetoric underneath everything, which is ‘fuck this up and we are going to fuck you up’, it becomes a fear-based practice, which is the antithesis of love. 

Liz: And I remember being taught that fear from childhood. It’s that shaming vocabulary which stays with us. It has a punitive idea or consequences. I mean, how many times have I said to my kids, just be aware of the consequences.

Rhea: Which is the opposite of what we have been trying to do with this podcast, which is about as long as you know yourself, as long as you trust yourself, then you can handle anything. 

Liz: Very much.

Rhea: Whereas religion is telling you ‘don’t mess this up. Listen to us’   

Liz: Surrender yourself because you are not capable. I think the basis of so much of that was give it up, surrender and you’ll be taken care of in the end, and as we talked about, surrendering doesn’t help.

Rhea: No

Liz: Because it means giving up your power. Recognizing that you are the higher power, not the higher power over someone else, but you are really the most powerful person you can possibly know because you can do it.

Rhea: When you said ‘you are the higher power’, I went “Whaaaat?” and then I stopped and thought about it for a second and said well, the stories that you tell yourself define your past and impact your present and your future. How you act and react to people and experiences define your present and your future, and the future is yet unknown. The only thing you can be sure of if you are true to yourself, you’ll be okay. None of that involves surrendering. All of that is quite active. So when you say ‘higher power’, I guess what you are just saying is you are the master of your own life.

Liz: Absolutely. You are the co-creator of your own life and it always comes down to your choices and no one else’s, so just as much as you choose to believe in a “higher power”, in a God which I do think that it’s great if we could have more people in this world believing in something, some cosmic force because that level of belief does elevate  

Rhea: Personally, I am feeling quite faithless, which is ironic considering what I am doing right now and considering how I felt in the past. I allow myself to question what’s going on around me and my faith, because it means that if I end up settling on having faith, then I know that I have really explored it.

Liz: Yes, and that’s why I said it’s better to have none than to have it misplaced. 

Rhea: I am in control of what I end up believing, and I can create my own religion that is personal to me

Liz: Which is an expression of your truth, and when I said you were better off being faithless than having your faith misplaced, it’s because then at least, whenever you get there, you’ll have chosen that entirely, and that it’s not based on someone else’s idea or philosophy or how they told you to get there.

Rhea: It feels like allowing myself to question is an act of love in itself.

Liz: It is 

Rhea: Which means if I eventually do make whatever choices I make, it’s another act of love 

Liz: And it’s not a reactive choice. To me, what matters the most is that it’s one that you have chosen, one that you have developed, and that reflects your own spiritual maturity 

Rhea: And speaking my truth as we know from our talk about unrequited love, when we talk about trust, we talk about a lot of things. Speaking my truth and embracing how I feel is an act of love. Even though I thought I would feel really lonely by saying I could be alone in this world, in this existence and it’s pretty fucking linear. Because I have chosen to honour how I feel, I’m standing by myself, and I’m not saying standing all by myself. I am standing beside myself. Look, it makes me sad, I’m not going to lie. I feel like something is missing, but I can’t indulge it when I’m not sure. 

Liz: No, because I think some people run into it. They feel so out of control that what they are really doing is collapsing into fear, and when you collapse into fear, religion is often the safe haven because we are too afraid to really confront all of those issues that we were told were wrong.

Rhea: Yeah, if I look at what I think is wrong with me and find out it really does make me unlovable, I am going to be alone, a.k.a to hell which is the worst possible place I could be in, because I didn’t deserve the unconditional love of heaven. Hopefully, someone somewhere would have listened to these in sequence. When we talk about going dark and allowing ourselves to go to that dark place and then come out of it as a more whole person, that right or wrong stops us from going dark, stops us from embracing our shadow, stops us from seeing other peoples’, and then stops us from having compassion. So in a weird way, all the rules that religion has given us are actually the things that stop us from getting to the concepts that religion has promised us.

Liz: Exactly.

Rhea: Peace, love, compassion.

Liz: Precisely

Rhea: You are always doing the best that you can so there can’t be right or wrong. There are only lessons, experiences and growth.

Liz: It’s about losing that, like you said that construct. Stepping outside of it for a while, just too sort of see and question, what do I really believe in?

Rhea: And actually, you find more in common with the people around you who are a bit religious. That’s what I found. 

Liz: Okay. I’ll run with that

Rhea: So for example, when I started going on this journey and kind of looking into more spirituality stuff, I would talk to my friends and my mum, who is quite religious. I talked to people around me who were quite religious from different religions and I tell them what I believed. They all would agree with me but then they would all say it back to me in their language, and I realized that actually I could explain to someone my beliefs using their language and they’d understand me. By removing the construct, what it does is it bring everyone together.

Liz: It does

Rhea: Because we can all say them in the same language now because we’re not using our different religions to make us believe they’re different

Liz: Exactly

Rhea: When they’re not

Liz: And we know that ultimately what connects us all, what underpins our existence and what we all want is love. When we allow all those sort of tentpoles of our 3-D reality, one of them being religion, to crumble, then we can really recognize the light, and that light has everything to do with love. Ultimately, it’s what we carry in our hearts

Rhea: And that’s always going to be the same, which is love—wanting love, giving love, connection, harmony, all that kind of stuff.

Liz: This religion has this God and this religion has that God to understanding it’s really that there is only one source of love

Rhea: And it exists in all of us, and that source of love that exists in all of us unites us, which is what you like calling ‘oneness consciousness.’ I like calling it love.

Liz: And so when you have wholeness and oneness and love, the framework and the constructs no longer serve. They hold us back. They perpetuate the stories and the histories . . .

Rhea: The radical religion that we see in the news that is putting us off religion, is that why that is happening?

Liz: Yes

Rhea: It’s actually kind of calling us to say, ‘wait a second! Does this still fit?’ We are going to show you the deepest, darkest parts of it, rather like on a personal journey when your toxic patterns become so toxic, you have no choice but to actually look at them and go ‘let’s question this for  a moment.’

Liz: Exactly

Rhea: And see if it’s still working for us. It’s kind of the same now with religion on a wider scale.

Liz: Precisely. It’s a lot to stomach and so they would just rather go entirely without.

Rhea: Because actually, what they are doing is they are causing that separation. They are making more the ‘us and them’. You’re right, I’m wrong. You don’t believe in what I believe 

Liz: They have held the space for separation for a long time and that was always the purpose.

Rhea: Our lives were a lot easier and better and kinder when we see ourselves in others.

Liz: Yes, when there is no separation.

Rhea: When there is no separation, and religion is just one of the social constructs that keep perpetuating the idea of the other, and the idea of punishment and the idea of black and white, and so it’s time for that construct to fade away, but the faith below it of—love, peace, compassion, harmony to really come up to the forefront

Liz: Connected by a cosmic force

Rhea: I keep pushing back at you every time you bring up source, cosmic force because I’m having my own personal issues with it

Liz: Yes

Rhea: But we see now where a lot of people don’t believe in mainstream religion. They are believing in manifestation. They are believing in the law of attraction. There are a lot of concepts out there which link to a kind of cosmic, universal force that aren’t a religion that people are following because we are going to talk about those things

Liz: Right

Rhea: It’s important to talk about those things and I’m really interested to talk about those things 

Liz: Well, one of the reasons we are talking about them is because you are so interested and you have a lot of questions. 

Rhea: Exactly. If you give too much to the external constructs of religion, you are giving away your power. You can’t really look at yourself and say, what do I want? What do I need? But once you are able to come into yourself and go actually, ‘this one, yes. This one, no. This one, kind of’ or whatever else it is, you are creating your own view of the world, but you’re giving yourself back your power.

Liz: Very much

Rhea: And you are giving yourself back your choice, and that is going to allow you to co-create your life in the future. So I came here, I started this journey because I saw the same patterns repeating and repeating and repeating and I wanted to break them. I wanted the life that I didn’t think was possible, but knew kind of it was.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: I knew that that glitch, that change had to come from me, and once you come to your own truth, you can see what you really want and you can see what you really desire, what brings you true joy, what makes you fall more in love with yourself. That is how you build the life you want.

Liz: You have to take the broadest perspective possible and understand what is keeping us from really grasping or seeing them objectively, and so what we have been, since Episode 1, it has really been about questioning what you are fearing, sit with those fears, sit with your shadow, own yourself, so that you can get to this point of can you see how you’ve constructed your life in order to cope with all the turmoil and chaos of this reality in order to create a new reality.

Rhea: Love is the only thing in my life that I can’t explain, and that’s my truth, and for me religion is having faith in the unexplainable, and for me, that’s love.