“How religion became hindrance and a catalyst for my Spiritual Growth”:
A self- confession
by: Dr. Stan Lobo
It was a weekday morning in 1964, 5:30 a.m., when childhood dreams were broken by the church bell in the distance, and a stern shout announcing prayer. At just eight years old, I was roused from sleep, compelled into rituals that felt more like duty than devotion. The rhythm of my days was dictated by dogma: morning prayers, mass at dawn, evening prayers, and the silent performance of obedience. Often, I would lie with closed eyes under my quilt, until the prayers subsided, or slip into church at the very end—pretending to have fulfilled the ritual, while my spirit remained untouched.
Years passed in this pattern until I was sixteen. Later, in 1974, leaving home for studies brought a flicker of relief, yet even in the hostel, priests imposed schedules that felt alien to my soul. Each ritual became a chain, each prayer a burden. Deep within, I cried, yearning for freedom, for space to breathe, for a life beyond the prison of imposed belief. Religion, instead of nurturing me, molded my identity—my education, habits, and behavior—into a narrow Christian frame. Dogma gnawed at my mind, forcing me to believe in a God who felt absent, unreal.
But adulthood brought courage. I broke the shackles, cast aside the weight of rituals, and discovered that life could be lived without religion. I learned to respect those who believe, yet chose to walk free of doctrine and preaching. Today, religion has no place in my life. I live as a witness that one does not need religion to grow, to love, to suffer, and to rejoice. Freedom itself is my faith.
The Turning Point
The change came through strain and pain, through the courage to stand up for myself and resist external rituals that stifled my awakening. I refused to stoop to external powers that demanded conformity. I questioned, I disobeyed, and I showed my discomfort at being forced to follow dictates that did not resonate with my truth.
Then came meditation. An accidental meeting with Maharishi Yogi Guruji in Chennai opened a doorway. I learned to calm myself, to go deep within, and to remain undisturbed by external happenings. Silence became my sanctuary. Reflection became my daily practice. Reading and contemplation now fill my days, twelve hours at a stretch, nourishing my spirit with insight and clarity.
Through reflection, I experiment with new behaviors, improving step by step, reclaiming my humanity. I discovered that the divine is not an external authority but a presence within. No longer dependent on religion, I live as a free human being, whole, awake, and alive.
How Religion Stifled My Spiritual Growth
Religion, as it was offered to me, became less a path of discovery and more a cage of rules. It was presented as a list of dos and don’ts, leaving no space for questioning, no room for clarification. That absence of inquiry made all the difference, it turned faith into obedience, and obedience into silence.
Dogma was handed down as unquestionable truth, yet its interpreters were men whose lives did not mirror their words. I saw the gap between preaching and living, between the sermons of obedience and the reality of hypocrisy. They told me life was about obeying orders, about bowing to superiors and role holders. But I could not believe them, for their example betrayed their claim. Religion, in this form, felt hollow, its truths unrealistic, its authority unearned. I was ten years old when doubt first took root
The parish priest, with solemn authority, asked me, “Do you have any questions?” With innocence and courage, I replied, “Father, where is God?” The answer was not wisdom,but violence. “Shut up, and sit down,” he barked, rebuking me into silence, teaching me that inquiry was forbidden, that truth was not to be sought, but imposed. That moment confirmed what my heart already sensed: “religion, as it was handed to me, was not a solution but a problem. It was a doctrine injected into minds by superiors, a belief taken for granted, a faith defended by uthority rather than lived by example. The priest’s refusal to answer revealed more than words could, that even he carried a borrowed certainty, unable to meet the child’s question with honesty. And so, my search turned inward, away from dogma, toward the quiet light of my own spirit. Most of all, religion set limits on my expression. It confined my inner potential, narrowing the lens through which I could examine life. It discouraged new ways of seeing, new paths of inquiry, new experiments in living. My spirit longed to explore, but dogma pressed me into conformity.
The Resurrection Within : my way of spiritual growth
Today, more than ever before, I stand tall within myself, no longer cowed by authorities,role holders, or the weight of social and religious obligations. I stand tall, guided not by external prompts, but by the quiet flame of my inner spirit. It is this spirit that now directs my steps, this breath of life that fills my being with fresh air, reminding me that freedom is not given—it is claimed.
Meditation has become my anchor. With each breath held in silence, I feel the pulse of resurrection not as a burdened cross to be carried, but as a process of growth, a union of challenge and awakening. Crucifixion and resurrection are not opposites; they are aligned, two movements of the same dance, leading me deeper into the discovery of my inner being. There is no separation between my source and myself. We are united in one spirit, where death and life dissolve into unity. It is this unification that drives my existence, this realization that my purpose is woven into the same divine energy that created me.
As Jesus proclaimed, “Me and my Father are One,” so too do I recognize the trinity within, the union of body, mind, and spirit, no longer divided, but whole, alive, and free.
Discovering that You Are Whole
Deepak Chopra MD (official)
Founder at Deepak Chopra LLC
July 19, 2025
By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP
Over the past twenty years, the word “holistic,” like the word “organic,” has moved from the fringes to the center stage. It is a buzzword with positive connotations and yet remains hard to define. The main reason for this, I believe, is that wholeness is caught in a seeming contradiction. Do you aim, as millions do, to become whole, taking this as a spiritual goal?
But in spiritual terms, you are already whole. This lesson was learned long ago in evolutionary terms, when multicellular organisms found a path to survival through constant coordination. At this moment, your body’s trillions of cells are precisely organized into thousands of processes. Evolution promotes wholeness, and when wholeness breaks down, organisms malfunction and die.
Ask Deepak Chopra
If we are already whole, why dose the ego keep seeking something more ?
Understanding such complex wholeness is beyond anyone’s current intellectual grasp,and things are likely to remain that way. The only working model of a neuron, it has been said, would be a neuron. But the wholeness of mind and spirit is even more baffling. If every organism innately chooses wholeness, why do we struggle to attain it?
For the mind, wholeness is the same as consciousness. If you are conscious, you will be as innately whole as organisms on their level of physical wholeness. It is now commonly accepted that meditation and Yoga offer a path to expanded awareness, but there is a deeper message that relates to wholeness and how it works.
In the ancestral Indian tradition, two diametrically different approaches reached the same aim, which is to exist in wholeness as your normal, constant state. The first approach (known in Sanskrit as Neti, Neti) works by the process of elimination. The word Neti translates as “not this,” referring to the false identity we carry around with us. The ego, the everyday “I” that we automatically refer to, is built up as an accumulation of experience and memory. “I” can be defined as a collection of tags, such as age, gender, race, religion, income, marital status, etc. The tags are endless, and we unthinkingly collect more of them as life unfolds, so that “I” feels unique, accomplished, complete, and whole. But if looked at closely, you are not these tags. Winnow them down one by one — “I am not this, not that, not this, not that” — and that objectified “I’ begins to shrink.
Ask Deepak Chopra
If we are already whole, why dose the ego keep seeking something more ?
The ego’s wholeness is a thin disguise for what really exists, a sense of self that has no automatic responses, memories, inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, wishes, or fears. These are add-ons to something much simpler: a sense of your true or whole self. Without applying any of the elaborate trappings that “I” requires in order to keep the focus on itself, your sense of a unified self has been silently present throughout your life. Neti, Neti serves as a reminder of your wholeness. You are rediscovering your status as an all-embracing consciousness that needs no temporary identities of the kind we all accumulate from infancy onward.
The opposite procedure from the Indian traditions expands your awareness until it is unbounded. The most common Sanskrit formula for this is “Tat Tvam Asi,” which translates as “You are That,” where “that” is the infinite field of awareness. Instead of winnowing out illusions, this is a process of going beyond boundaries. In meditation, the mind ceases to be active and finds itself drawing closer to its source, which is the simple state described in the pop phrase “Be here now.” Aside from anything your mind is doing. You exist here and now.
The implications of this apparently empty statement are immense. Being here now sounds passive, even inert (like a Pet Rock), but it is far from that. In reality, very few people exist in the present moment. They are preoccupied with the same ego demands that Neti, Neti seeks to discard. The active mind is too absorbed in thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, fears, and habits to really know itself. In a way that most of us don’t recognize, we haven’t really met ourselves, because if we did, the essence of “be here now” would dawn on us.
This essence is the infinite pure consciousness from which reality rises. Compared to infinity, the ego is barely a speck of dust, so Tat Tvam Asi, despite being the complete opposite of Neti, Neti, leads to the same end. The incredible shrinking ‘I” is eclipsed so that wholeness can predominate. The terminology is secondary here. Wholeness should be understood as the true basis of human life. I don’t claim that this is so through any arcane metaphysics.
Ask Deepak Chopra
If we are already whole, why dose the ego keep seeking something more ?
Instead, there is only a single proposition that needs to be brought to light, experienced, and tested. The proposition is this: Existence is consciousness. The two are the same. The physical world didn’t evolve through some chemical or electromagnetic chicanery to allow consciousness to emerge. Consciousness isn’t an add-on, because nothing is more basic. What is literally true is that reality is consciousness modifying itself into space, time, matter, and energy. This is the setup for the human gift of self-awareness. Every living thing participates in wholeness, because, by definition, wholeness excludes nothing.
Exclusion takes place in the human mind, which adopts beliefs, habits, and conditioning on behalf of the ego’s agenda. The ego’s agenda is to get more for “I, me, mine” through the increase of pleasure and the decrease of pain. Most people are so unsuccessful at this that the ego has to keep promising that fulfillment is just around the next corner. In fact, the ego setup is deficient and false to begin with.
The only valid setup is consciousness as the all-pervading source, from which the qualities of life we most value spring, including love, compassion, creativity, intelligence, beauty, truth, and personal growth. As “I” begins to grow less significant, its agenda shrinks, and eventually the provisional identity we call “I,” the separate isolated self, vanishes altogether. When that happens, the worst trappings of “I” — self-doubt, insecurity, dread, fear of death, free-floating anxiety, and depression — no longer exist. They have nothing to hang on to anymore.
