The point of religious practice or a belief system is to set you free. If it is not doing that, it has become a hindrance to you that you should examine and maybe abandon. Remember, whatever your practice – Yoga, prayer, being part of a church, or reading sacred Scripture – was there originally to lead you to God and to liberation. Any time your practice becomes an end in itself, it fails to fully achieve its purpose, which is to set you free, even from itself. If that happens, you should get outside it, dismantle it and make sure it is getting you where you want to go.

Your practice or the structure that you employ, then, is the means to an end. It is the vehicle in which you travel. Every once in a while (and maybe for good), you need to get out of the vehicle and realize it has been confining you and preventing you from experiencing the unrestrained beauty of the world around you – the beauty you set out to explore in the first place. You can travel this world in many different vehicles. They all will take you somewhere – and they will all outlive their usefulness. It’s not about the vehicle and it’s not even about the destination. It’s about the space through which you travel.

The Spirit is what matters, not the form, but we tend to have it the other way around. It is easy to get addicted to form, as if the thing matters more than how it came to be and that for which it exists. It’s not about the form. It’s about the spirit by which the form is rendered. The Spirit is abstract and can take on all different forms, even those you thought it could not. The Spirit is “meta” or “beyond.” It is the heart with which you do things, the place from which the thing came and the space in and around it.

It is impossible to encompass God and this feeling (freedom) in words. That’s because God is free, as you are meant to be. All these practices: religion, spirituality, and creative and recreative acts are aimed at setting you free from any form or physical manifestation, even your own body. It’s not because the form or structure is bad, though it is in some stage of giving out. It’s because becoming third party to something is how you sublimate and redeem it. The creative energy is the triangling energy. There is nothing wrong with the structure. You just have to know it’s the thing you need to push against.