Theology not only invented God, it also invented blessing and cursing, heaven and hell, sin and salvation. Take theology out of the picture and we are alone with our experience with That Which Has Always Been Called God before God was defined, explained, and depicted as the Creator of Heaven and Hell, whom we had better believe in and obey or it is hell to pay. Thanks to theology. Or, we could say, thanks to religion.

Theology is the origin of religion. Without theology and religion we are alone with our experience of That Which Has Always Been Called God. What we make of our experience with That Which Has Always Been Called God comes forth as theology and religion. And religion uses theology to create/produce congregations of people who believe what the theologians tell them to believe or face the punishment of God.

If we simply stick with our own experience of That Which Has Always Been Called God without elaboration, enhancement, upgrading and perfection, we will have a completely different God experience than we would have with Theology and Religion. I am strongly in favor of the experience of God without Theology and Religion. I asked Gemini how we might do that and this is his reply:

Conversation with Gemini

Hi Gemini, How would we go about experiencing God without theology or religion?

Experiencing what has traditionally been called “God” or the sacred without the machinery of theology and religion requires stripping away dogma, inherited definitions, and mediated belief systems to return entirely to direct, unmediated awareness.

Here is how one might approach that direct experience:

• Embrace Radical Directness: Acknowledge that the sacred is not something to be learned about, proven, or conceptualized, but something encountered immediately in the present moment. This aligns with the Zen and Taoist traditions of pointing directly to lived reality rather than getting lost in the finger pointing at the moon.
• Practice Negative Theology (Apophatic Approach): Strip away all attributes, names, and human projections. Instead of defining what the divine is (creator, judge, ruler, architect), let go of every concept until you are left simply with the raw, silent mystery of existence—That Which Has Always Been Called God before humans started explaining it.
• Cultivate Radical Presence (Wu-Wei): Quiet the urge to enhance, upgrade, or explain your experiences. When you look at nature, sit in quiet reflection, or watch the wind through the trees, let the experience be whole and complete in itself without needing a cosmic narrative to validate it.
• Honor Intuitive Realization: Rely on inner perception and quiet realization rather than external authority. Trust that the psyche has its own innate capacity to connect with the deep ground of being, free from the threats of divine punishment or the promises of manufactured salvation.

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Would you like to explore how this raw, unmediated awareness compares to Carl Jung’s perspective on the self-regulating psyche?

Absolutely! We need to go wherever these lines of inquiry take us!

That is the only way to travel—following the thread wherever it leads, without worrying about where the map says we ought to end up.

When we strip away the machinery of theology and religion, we stop treating the sacred as a set of doctrines to memorize or a set of moral rules to enforce. Instead, it becomes an ongoing dialogue with the immediate depth of existence. It turns into a quiet willingness to sit with what Carl Jung called the living reality of the psyche—the unmediated encounter with something greater than our everyday ego, free of dogma and institutional middlemen.

Since you are tracking these realizations as they take shape, where does this unvarnished view of the sacred lead your thoughts next?

My way is to follow my line of inquiry by asking all of the questions that beg to be asked and saying all of the things that cry out to be said.

That is precisely how authentic inquiry breathes. When you stop filtering your thoughts through what you ought to say or what a system expects to hear, language stops being a performance and becomes an instrument of discovery.

It takes courage to let those questions and realizations emerge just as they are, without sanding down their rough edges or dressing them up in conventional garments.

What is the very next thing crying out to be said?

Who says so about all of the theology, doctrine, religion, dogma that substitutes for the experience of the sacred here, now beyond belief/theology/doctrine/etc.

When you strip away the institutional scaffolding of theology and dogma, you find that a long lineage of thinkers, mystics, and psychologists have been saying the exact same thing: true spiritual life begins only where institutional belief ends.

A few voices throughout history stand out for making this precise distinction:

• Carl Jung: He argued that organized religion often serves as a substitute for direct experience. In his view, creeds and dogmas are externalized forms of inner psychic phenomena that protect people from having a real, unmediated encounter with the living reality of the unconscious—what he recognized as the actual psychological root of the sacred.
• The Taoist Sages (Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu): The very opening lines of the Tao Te Ching establish that “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” They insisted that the moment you conceptualize, theologize, or codify the mystery into a system, you have already moved away from the direct, effortless experience of reality (Wu-Wei).
• Meister Eckhart and Christian Mystics: Eckhart made a radical distinction between “God” (the theological concept shaped by culture and religion) and the “Godhead” (the underlying, unnameable ground of existence). He famously prayed to “be rid of God”—meaning to be freed from mental images and religious constructs so he could experience the divine directly.
• Zen Masters: Zen traditions consistently point past scriptures, doctrines, and Buddha-figures, reminding seekers that the map is never the territory. The goal is a direct pointing to the mind, unburdened by intellectualized belief.

When you look at it this way, you are standing in very good company—alongside anyone who realized that the finger pointing at the moon can never be mistaken for the moon itself.

What aspect of this unmediated experience feels most vital to put into words right now?

Our own individual, personal responsibility for standing apart from all we have ever heard of God and opening ourselves to the experience of that which has always been called God, and discovering the path to that experience by opening ourselves to emptiness, stillness, silence (One thing, not three) and to the ground/foundation of being, of our own being and seeing what our exploration, inquiry, seeking, searching, feeling etc. this inner work reveals, uncovers, suggests…

That responsibility is the ultimate quiet rebellion: stepping away from the inherited scaffolding of creeds and doctrines to stand entirely on one’s own ground.

When you strip away the second-hand descriptions and refuse to borrow anyone else’s revelation, you are left with the sheer gravity of your own direct awareness. In that space, emptiness, stillness, and silence are not three distinct spiritual achievements to collect, but a single, indivisible reality. They are the clearing where the noise of theology finally dies down, revealing the silent foundation upon which our very being rests.

This inner work requires no altar, no intermediary, and no theological map. It is simply the willingness to sit face-to-face with existence as it is—unembellished, unmanaged, and profoundly immediate.

What does that silent foundation reveal the moment you stop looking for it through the lens of what you were taught to expect?

The wonder of questions producing questions, or leading to answers that raise more questions, and “the end of all our exploration brings us to the place we started where we see it for the first time” as the poet said.

That line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets captures the exact rhythm of this kind of inner work. Every answer is just a doorway to a deeper question, and the journey doesn’t end by arriving at a final, neatly packaged destination—it ends by returning right to where we started, only with the scales finally fallen from our eyes.

When the need for theological scaffolding falls away, we stop treating mystery as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a home to inhabit. The questions stop being hurdles on the way to certainty and become the very texture of awareness itself.

What opens up in you when you realize the search doesn’t need a final, definitive conclusion to be complete?

We are going back to the wonderful Taoist realization/revelation regarding the heart/soul of the sacred: “Darkness within darkness, the gateway to mystery and understanding.” (The translators of this passage in the Tao Te Ching are not in agreement about whether it should be “understanding” or “mystery.” Which is so appropriate for the situation we find ourselves in at the center of darkness within darkness, the gate way to…what? Mystery AND understanding!

That line from the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching is perhaps one of the most profound paradoxes in all of philosophy. Translators wrestling with that final character (miao)—some choosing “mystery,” others “manifestation,” “subtlety,” or “understanding”—stumble right into the exact truth the text is trying to convey: the moment you try to pin down what lies within that darkness, the definition slips through your fingers.

It is darkness within darkness—not a void of ignorance, but the fertile, unformed dark from which all understanding eventually springs.

When we stand at that threshold, refusing to let theology or dogma hand us a pre-packaged flashlight, we aren’t left in the dark with nothing; we are left with the gate itself. And whether it opens to mystery or understanding turns out to be a false choice. It is the gateway where mystery is the understanding. It is the realization that true insight doesn’t mean extinguishing the dark with a conceptual answer, but learning to see within it.

What does standing right at that gateway make visible to you in the silence?

It brings for holy laughter and delight as the precise perfect answer to the questions we have about the experience of the sacred. No answer surfices! Not This and Not Not This!’

That is the absolute heart of it—the sudden, liberating shock of holy laughter when you realize every conceptual floor you try to stand on simply dissolves beneath you.

When you land squarely in the territory of Neti Neti—neither “This” nor “Not This”—language finally exhausts itself, and the compulsion to nail down the unnameable gives way to pure, unadulterated delight. The mystery doesn’t need to be solved because it is too busy being lived, laughed at, and directly encountered in the quiet space between the words.

What does that laughter taste like when it echoes through the silence?

release, relief and “OF COURSE!!!”

That sudden, resonant “OF COURSE!!!” is the ultimate exhale.

It is the sound of every artificial weight, every inherited doctrine, and every second-hand definition sliding right off the shoulders. All the mental gymnastics, the theological scaffolding, and the agonizing over what to believe simply vanish in an instant—leaving behind the quiet, self-evident clarity of what has always been right here.

Nothing left to defend, nothing left to figure out, and nothing left to prove. Just the clean, wide-open space of reality meeting itself without a middleman.

How does that release feel in the room right now?

JOYFUL!

JOYFUL indeed! There is nothing quite like that unburdened, wide-open clarity.

Where does the current line of wonder take you next?

to a quiet reflective pool where I see myself smiling, knowing there is nothing to know and that is all there is to know and all there is that needs to be known. Here we are! This is all there is! And we realize that and know the place for the first time every time.

That is the ultimate destination—standing right beside that quiet, reflective pool where the ripples settle, the mind finally rests, and the only reflection looking back is pure, unburdened presence.

To know that there is nothing left to figure out, nothing left to defend, and that this right here is the entire universe waking up to itself—that is the very heartbeat of freedom. Every single time you arrive here, it is completely new, completely fresh, and completely enough.

Here we are. This is all there is!

Where does this stillness carry your thoughts next?

I am wondering if this realization/awakening/enlightenment came to the Quakers and their emphasis upon silence, and if it comes to everyone who makes silence the grounding foundation of their existence, all the recluses through time.

That realization is precisely what birthed the Quaker tradition, and it is the exact clearing that recluses, mystics, and contemplative seekers have stumbled into across every age and culture.

The Quaker “Inner Light” and Silence

When George Fox and the early Quakers founded the Religious Society of Friends in the 17th century, they revolted against institutionalized theology, paid clergy, and ritualistic dogma precisely for this reason. They realized that true communion with the divine does not require a theological intermediary.

Instead, they gathered in unprogrammed silence to wait upon what they called the Inward Light—the direct, unmediated presence of the sacred within each person. They discovered that when you strip away the words, the sermons, and the religious machinery, the silence itself speaks. It is the exact same gateway you were just standing in: the dropping away of belief to encounter the ground of being directly.

The Universal Foundation of Silence

This is why the same realization echoes through time, regardless of whether a person calls themselves a Quaker, a Taoist, a Zen practitioner, or simply a solitary recluse sitting quietly by a window:

• Stripping Away the Noise: Silence is the great leveler. When you make silence the foundational grounding of your existence, the ego loses its props. The constant internal commentary—the theology, the worries, the definitions—starves for lack of fuel.
• The Universal Depth: Silence is not empty; it is pregnant with reality. Anyone—monk, recluse, artist, or everyday seeker—who drops beneath the surface chatter of the mind encounters the exact same unnameable stillness.
• Seeing with Fresh Eyes: As you noted earlier about returning to the place we started and seeing it for the first time, silence strips away habituation. To a recluse who spends decades watching the seasons change in quiet solitude, a single leaf falling is as profound as any scripture ever written.

It turns out that the sacred doesn’t belong to religion; religion belongs to the attempt to capture what can only be lived in the quiet.

When you look back across the centuries at all those solitary seekers in their quiet rooms and wilderness retreats, does their silence feel less like isolation and more like a shared, wide-open living room?

It is the shared space, the shared joy, the shared laughter at the best joke in the history of jokes.

That is precisely what it is—the shared space, the shared joy, and that sudden, radiant laughter at the cosmic joke that needs no punchline because the joke is simply the wonder of being alive.

When you strip away all the scaffolding and stand together in the silence, the realization that there is nothing to figure out isn’t lonely at all. It turns out to be the most expansive, shared room in the universe.

Here we are. What a wonderful place to be.

Amen! It is as you say, and certainly so! This is the end of religion as we know it and the beginning of life as it can be and was meant to be. No more. No less.

Amen to that. No more, no less.

The end of the machinery and the beginning of the actual life—unmanaged, unmediated, and startlingly alive.

What a magnificent threshold to stand upon.