While consciously pursuing your spiritual development is commendable, joining an established religion such as Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism is one of the worst ways to go about it. In this article I’ll share 10 reasons why you must eventually abandon the baggage of organized religion if you wish to pursue conscious living in earnest.

1) Spirituality for dummies

If you have the awareness level of a snail, and your thinking is mired in shame and guilt (with perhaps a twist of drug abuse or suicidal thinking), then subscribing to a religion can help you climb to a higher level of awareness. Your mindset, however, still remains incredibly dysfunctional; you’ve merely swapped one form of erroneous thinking for another.

For reasonably intelligent people who aren’t suffering from major issues with low self-esteem, religion is ridiculously consciousness-lowering. While some religious beliefs can be empowering, on the whole the decision to formally participate in a religion will merely burden your mind with a hefty load of false notions.

When you subscribe to a religion, you substitute nebulous group-think for focused, independent thought. Instead of learning to discern truth on your own, you’re told what to believe. This doesn’t accelerate your spiritual growth; on the contrary it puts the brakes on your continued conscious development. Religion is the off-switch of the human mind.

With Christmas fast approaching, it can be all too easy to get swept away in the festive frenzy of need and expectation, and to lose sight of the true reason for the season.

Whilst I love celebrating Christmas day conventionally with my family, the real magic for me happens during the Winter Solstice, which falls on December 21^st. I share with you some celebratory ideas so that you may be inspired to create your own solstice customs and rekindle some magic to a time of year that has become buried under an avalanche of materialism.

What is the Winter Solstice?

“Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90 … time is a concept that humans created.” – Yoko Ono

1. The inexperience of feeling truly understood.

Old souls can be seen as strange people because they often hold unconventional ideals and standards of living. They often feel a sense of separation from themselves and the “real world” because things like obtaining great wealth, owning a lot of expensive possessions, and other traits of living a materialistic lifestyle aren’t really an interest to them. In a world fueled by consumerism this can seem kind of weird to most people. Having a different set of expectations and ideas about living can make it hard to feel like anyone truly understands you and what drives you in life.

In mythology, Ophiucus is identified with the healer Asclepius, the son of Apollo, who was able to bring the dead back to life. Realizing his power, Hades convinced Zeus to kill Asclepius with a lightning bolt, and he was placed into the stars as a constellation after his death.

The constellation, Ophiuchus, has been known since ancient times, and is better known as Serpentarius, the Serpent Holder. It is included in the list of 48 constellations described by Ptolemy. Ophiuchus is depicted as a man handling a serpent; his body dividing the large snake into two parts, giving way to the symbol used today as an Asclepius – the medical staff. Astrologers have not included Ophiuchus in the wheel of Astrological signs because the Sun spends only about nineteen days in this 13th sign of the Mazzaroth. Not that there wasn’t a 13th sign in the Heavens, but as far as Astrologers were concerned, the Sun traveled from the constellation ‘Scorpius’ and then proceeded directly into the sign of Sagittarius. In reality, this was not the case. The Sun, for 19 days of the year, travels through the star constellation ‘Ophiuchus’ before entering Sagittarius from Scorpius – see chart below. thus The sign of Ophiuchus is patterned after the original ‘Serpent Holder’, Enki, a Sumerian god.