While religious organizations are filled with many leaders who are pure of heart and uplifting in spirit, there are also leaders whose agendas are more self-serving. People often give away personal power to large institutions, religion included, and this attracts unscrupulous leaders who wish to pursue their quest for power over people.

In the pursuit of power through religion, the primary weapon of conquest is fear. When fear has driven love from the hearts of their followers, then hatred can be installed in its place. Once a person hates other groups of people, then they become trapped within an emotional prison from which there is no escape as long as they accept the original messages of fear. It then becomes essential that the creed being presented is a rigid set of rules and behavior, as flexibility could open a gateway to freedom.

As people are drawn to religion by the deepest of all human drives, which is to consciously reconnect with God, their greatest fear is to be cut off from such a reconnection. That fear is exploited by self-serving leaders using threats of eternal hell and damnation for people who reject the attempts at control to which they are being subjected.

Another ploy to drive the love out of people's hearts has been to tell them that they are miserable sinners. This allows self-hatred to creep in and makes it even more possible to instill hatred of other groups of people. These other groups include not only people of other religions, but often other sects within their own religion.

Fundamentalist groups are famous for insisting that theirs is the one and only correct flavor of the truth and that all other variations on the same theme are wrong. They go on to claim that members of the other groups are destined for a hell which is based on Dante's imaginary Inferno.

The lowest of the spirit realms do exist, as do the heavens, or higher spirit realms, but they are nothing like the fantasy versions. Unlike the physical world, the spirit realms are segmented by frequency of consciousness. There are twelve realms, or layers of existence, within the spirit world. People reside in the realm that best harmonizes with their normal frequency of consciousness and spend their time among others of like mind and spirit.

There is no judgment by others when you pass from the physical world into the spirit world. There is, however, a self-review of your life where you assess what you learned in your physical life, see what needs to be healed or integrated, and start to think about what you would like to focus on in your next incarnation.

The objective of life in the spirit realms is to integrate the lessons of the physical life experience - to heal the conflicts, release the negative emotions and become at peace within. The spirit then becomes ready to move on beyond the spirit realms and into the soul realms, where in-depth planning for their next physical incarnation eventually takes place.

There is a reason why every snowflake is unique and every person is unique. Infinite Being created infinite diversity in order that an infinite variety of experience may be gained. This is why there are as many paths to spiritual oneness as there are humans upon the face of the Earth.

Trying to force people to live and act the same, according to someone else's set of rules, is an attempt to interfere with the Creator's principle of infinite variety. As I pointed out in my book "The Shift," any attempt to coerce people into conformity with the standards of another person, or another group of people, is actually a violation against the will of the Creator.

Humanity will reach unity and a lasting world peace when, paradoxically, people accept the diversity of humanity. There will never be a one-size-fits-all, world religion which demands the conformity of everyone, simply because one size of anything never did fit all people. What there will be is a worldwide acceptance of human diversity and the fact that there is a limitless variety of spiritual paths back to God or Infinite Being, the one source of all life.

The freedom to pursue your own unique path back to original oneness is a fundamental right endowed upon you by the Creator of all life. As a living being, you have the inalienable right to be who you are, and not what someone else wants you to be.

As we move away from the Old Reality and further into New Reality consciousness, it is appropriate to celebrate our uniqueness and the individual paths that we have chosen to tread. Life is a cycle of experience and its ultimate purpose is to learn how to reconnect with the spiritual joy which radiates from within our inner beings.

Owen Waters is editor and cofounder of Infinite Being LLC. He promotes a philosophy of spiritual empowerment through inner connection to the source of your ultimate potential. For more Spiritual Words of Empowerment subscribe to his free weekly newsletter. For the full picture, read Owen's book, The Shift: The Revolution in Human Consciousness.

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