Real faith is rooted in a basic unknowing about ultimate things, and religion helps us to be in relation to that mystery. This kind of unknowing can offer calm or create anxiety, depending on a person's faith. Often people fill in this emptiness by insisting that they possess the truth. The fragility of their faith is betrayed by their strident insistence on being right and by their efforts to force their views on others. They seem afraid of the very things that define religion: mystery and trust.
True meditation is about waking up from the dream of separation to the truth of unity . . . awakening to the realization of what you and everything actually is, the oneness of all. To perceive everything as one is not an altered state of consciousness; it's an unaltered state of consciousness, the natural state of consciousness. Enlightenment is the natural state, the innocent state which is uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind. We wake up by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning . . . by "allowing everything to be as it is."
