Saddhanandi - 'Superficiality: a fetter of religion and of life' | Taste of Freedom March 2024

Saddhanandi explores the theme of the fetter shilavrata paramarsha: dependence on moral rules and religious observances as ends in themselves, practices that are only wrong if we depend on them to shield a self-view, becoming a habit of chronic self-protection. We need something that will constantly remind us that ‘religion’ is simply a tool to take us in the direction of where we want to go, it is not the place of arrival where we settle down and take up house.
If we practice meditation, we should ask ourselves 'is it really helping me to develop?',
if engage in communication and friendship within the Sangha, we should ask ourselves 'is it really helping me to develop?'
if we listen to talks on Buddhism, 'is it really helping me to develop'?
if we live and work in a Buddhist context, 'is it really helping me to develop?'
Sangharakshita: ‘…so far as Buddhism is concerned, religion is what helps us to become free …But, what is it that hinders us from becoming free - apart our own sloth and torpor, laziness, neglect, forgetfulness and so on? Well, what hinders us from becoming free IS religion. So here we encounter a gigantic contradiction… Religion, which is supposed to help us to become spiritually free, only too often helps to keep us enslaved… because it has been forgotten that religion is a means to an end - that end being the development of the individual. We need a critique that will constantly remind us that religion is only a means to an end.’
‘A critique of religion is not to destroy it but to restore it to its true function: a means of spiritual development’. It is a critique that ‘destroys what you are so that you are free to become what you can be.’
Talk 2 of 3 from the International Sanghas retreat at Adhisthana in 2024.

[@vijayagita3158]

Delighted to listen to Sadhanandi. I see my fire and the fetters that bound progress, thanks!

[@treyblake1]

Thankyou x