The Western Gate

Header Image :Saint Jerome Penitent : Hendrick De Somer (1620-1655)

Religion is, as I see it, defined by others, not discovered or created from within, it becomes an instrument of conformity. You are not seeking truth—you are inheriting a system of thought that serves someone else’s vision of order. You are required to believe on command, submit to myth, and often suppress doubt. This breeds intellectual stagnation, moral outsourcing, and often, tribalism.
There are many methods by which the authors of ‘religion’ manipulate its material to ‘force’ you to accept. “This is the only way”, “those that cannot understand this wisdom do so because I, God, have removed the right of their minds to accept this.” – No-one wants to admit to being less in the eyes of a Supreme Godhead, so willingly accept, submit. Religion creates a hierarchy, a pyramid structure of those who are chosen and those who are not, those who preach and those who listen.

Practice, in turn, becomes the mechanism of your own captivity. To practice something endlessly while believing you will reach the goal, but never really see the fruits except the contentment in your mind, is to submit to futility, to be cruel.
It, practice, creates discipline without destination—you become devoted to a system that offers no real hope, only the illusion of progress. It risks becoming an aesthetic of struggle, not a means to liberation.

Together, religion (as externalized belief) and practice (as internalized repetition) form a feedback loop of control and submission. You do what you’re told, and you do it again and again, not because it works—but because you’ve been convinced not to stop.

True Religion is personal Gnosis. Each of us lives within our own limitations and circumstance, we all have local traditions. All of us know the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and these form our nature cycles, just as woman is in tune with the moon and nurtures and is organically connected to nature, and man is the static and stubborn unwavering force. This is the archetype of being by which all religion basis its recipe.

The belief that we are somehow fractured and splintered from the original primordial enigma, demeans us. Just as a pool on a mountain side is distant from the ocean, does not mean it is less. It is, inherently, the same.
Division is ripe for unbalancing. Where there is one religion there must be another. One philosophy and one psychology and another will be right behind it. This then creates, division, and pride in one belief or another, then unity and bonding with like minded souls to war against the other who says Green is THE colour and you Say it IS Blue!
Faith is religions noose. We would not put half the fuel required in a car to get to our destination relying on faith, because we have knowledge the car will fail. If we do not have the knowledge or awareness of how much fuel to get to our destination then we shall surely be the fool .

Remember that, if we awoke tomorrow and all our knowledge of the past was lost, and all books and recorded histories forgotten, in a few thousand years our science would be the same, the mathematical arguments constant, the formulas exact, but our religion would not. Religion is Subjective created by subjective, and perhaps well meaning, minds. Knowledge and Science however is reasoned by experiment and continuous affirmatives- facts.

I have seen many a proud soul who have devoted their life to their God and Religion, prostrate before their faith, and none of these will rise up and say their whole life has been in vain because new truths have revealed the ‘book’ they are anchored to has been shown to have been contrived by those in power who have used using comparative and historical cultural prompts to create the ‘new word’. There is nothing more hardened than the Ego, and it will not shatter if it believes it is perfect.

“Eat the fruit of Gnosis~ our blessed Sophia, Beloved of nature, ye shall not perish, you will not die”