Religion is local, but...

As these things happen, on the day I brought home a wonderful picture of Ganesh Baba (given to me by Hari Meyers), a brass Ganesh I'd bought arrived from India. The two are dancing to the same rhythm, no doubt amplified by the Ganesh mantra I've been using lately.

Ganesh Baba told me, and he says it in Crea Sadhana too, that there comes a time in everyone's spiritual practice that it's necessary to choose a single figure to love with your whole heart. It doesn't matter who you choose, Jesus, Mother Earth, Krishna, Bastet, Osho, whoever. It's a matter of giving your whole heart.

Maybe because I was raised in such an anti-religious family, I've always balked at the idea. I thought the best I'd ever be able to do was revere my teachers. Bhakti, religious devotion, was not a place I would ever try to go.

Which is why I am coming to it through the back door - the intellectual tussle I've been having with myself over whether religion is local or universal. What I've come round to thinking - and feeling, not incidentally - is not new, even to me, but lately my understanding is deeper: religion is local; spirituality is universal.

The understanding of ego and consciousness Tolle is talking about is very much aligned with Baba's teaching. What they share is universal. These new, very lovely manifestations of Ganesh that are showing up now, this new beginning just at the spring equinox, is my personal doorway to the universal.

What more could I ask?