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Test Every Idea with All Your Senses
The embrace of uncertainty replaces absolutism—the source of ideological toxicity—with a simple, open question: Since no truth claim is absolute, does this make sense?

That was the seditious thought pattern that made my friend Drew question Preacher X's ranting. It's what led Copernicus to dispute the religious "truth" that the Earth was the center of the universe. It's what led the American founding fathers away from theocracy and toward democracy.

Asking if something "makes sense" has multiple meanings. It asks us to test a claim with both our common sense and our senses. Modern science owes its incredible advances to focusing on data perceived by our physical bodies. But other advances, like the "self-evident" truth of individual equality, resonate with a subtler, inner sort of knowing. Drew's problems with his cult came from inside and outside his mind because our observations come from obvious physical experiences and intuitive ones.

We frequently reference physical sensations when discussing metaphysical ideas, calling on all five senses to describe something that ostensibly can't be sensed: "I can see how that might be true," we might say. "It sounds right." Or, "Something about it feels weird. I smell a rat. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth." Some spiritual traditions refer casually to the five subtle senses, in addition to the five physical ones, and suggest we use all of them to decide whether we want to accept an idea into our belief system. That's why I chose, as my own religious hymn, the song "This Smells Funny, and I'm Not Gonna Eat It." If you get a queasy feeling from any of your 10 senses, back away. Don't swallow it.

Notice Whether an Idea Unifies or Divides
The word religion derives from the Latin religare, which means "to bind together." I finally fell in love with meditation when I felt it reconnecting me with my real self, with humanity, nature, the entire universe. This experience of oneness, at-one-ment, lies at the charismatic core of every religious tradition. So as you go along your spiritual search, observe the long-term effect of every doctrine and practice that comes your way. If it breaks, shatters, or destroys, it's not religion—its absolutism. That drug'll kill you. Real religion, by definition, makes things whole again. It heals.

"The problem for me," Drew says of his youthful religious experiment, "wasn't that I got high on religion. The problem was that the high was artificial. What I really wanted wasn't just groupthink, it was love. Real love—the kind that takes time, testing, solitude, service, stillness, effort, the whole spectrum of religious practice."

In other words, Do-Be-Do-Be.

So it seems Drew and I enjoy the same natural opiates, that we're following the same basic religious path. We sometimes walk together and enjoy the other's company, but we don't need to be in lockstep. We trust our souls to the embrace of uncertainty, to the reliability of our senses, and to the grand, mysterious impulse that has always led human beings to create religion. Imperfect, foolish, and fallible as we are, each of us seems to be designed—and maybe even guided—to find our own Way.

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