Excerpt from the live Satsang on 8-17-2026 Belief vs Reality showing why thoughts, beliefs, and religions are not true and hide the direct experience of what is.
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Belief vs Reality
Live Satsang Transcript Excerpt 8-17-2026
I wanted to talk a little bit about belief, religion, and reality, direct experience.
So, religion is not reality, right? Let’s just get that straight, right? Religion and belief are not reality. Reality is reality It’s not something that we believe. That’s not reality.
It’s not what religion says it is.
That’s not reality.
Those are illusions. Our thoughts can only be illusions. Therefore, all belief is an illusion because we don’t have thoughts that are true. We only have thoughts that are illusions. What in Buddhism we call this relative truth, right? Relative truth. It’s relative to an illusion.
So within this illusion, there are some things that are relatively more true about the illusion, and there are things that are relatively less true about the illusion, but none of them have anything to do with truth or reality.
So, let that percolate a little bit
Religion is not truth and not true. Beliefs are not true and thoughts are not true
If you’ve been relying on your thoughts to interpret what’s real in the world, and of course we all have, but if you don’t realize this and you rely on them as truth, as a way of finding truth, as a doorway into truth, as having anything to do with truth whatsoever then it may be hard to accept this. Because this is what you’re depending on.
You’re depending on your beliefs. You’re depending on your, on your thoughts, your interpretation of what’s real. As soon as you interpret what’s real, it’s no longer real. You bring it into the world of illusion, bring it into something that’s not true
This is why the only way to understand what’s true is to let go of all thought.
In the absence of all thought, there’s truth.
Can you understand with your mind what truth is?
No, of course not. That would just be another thought. Your understanding comes in the form of thought and therefore it can’t be true
So I think I’ve told you about the experience I had as a young child, two years old or so, when I would wander out into the forest, the woods around my house, and feel this sense of oneness, this sense of truth. No thoughts involved.
I didn’t know what it was, the sense of peace and love connected to everything, everything around me, the, the ground, the trees, the birds, squirrels, leaves.
None of it was I separate from It was an experience of truth, an experience of reality, and later, a number of years later when I first heard the word God I attached that name to it.
I said, “Oh, that’s God.” What was it? Was it a being in the sky or something? No. No, those are beliefs. I didn’t have them. And because I had that experience, I never developed them, right? In church, people would tell you what God was. God is this. God is all-powerful. God is this. God wants this for you. God is like, you know, watching you. God is investigating you. God is judging you. God loves you
But there was no God the way they describe God, the way religion describes God. That’s not God. That’s just human thought, human illusion. Notice that.
You know, in Hinduism, Krishna a blue person, a blue human. Shiva is a human with multiple arms, but a human with multiple arms
And it really can’t be helped because what would truth really look like? What would God really look like? How could you describe what God looks like? It doesn’t look like anything. It just is. That’s reality, that’s truth, and that’s God
So religion essentially tells you what God is not.
In no uncertain terms, by trying to describe what God is, it exactly tells you what God is absolutely not. All religions do this in their own way. Why? Because they’re created by human thought, by humans. They’re not created by God. The Bible wasn’t written by God, it was written by a human, or many humans, all trying to interpret with their mind what God is. And all of it leading you away from God.
Isn’t that ironic? You go to church to get closer to God, but it leads you away from God.
Or you go to a mosque, or you go to an ashram to find God, and instead it leads you away from God. And what you get in exchange for your attention is an illusion, a belief in something that’s not God that you now believe is. Well, that can’t help you, right?
This isn’t doing you any favors.
Because if you sit quietly until your thoughts fall away and there are no thoughts. In that open space without a single thought, you will experience God. You will experience truth. You will experience reality. It can’t be helped. Because you are not separate from reality, from truth, from God. But because you believe your thoughts, you don’t realize it.
You don’t experience it directly. You’re lost in a world, a dream of thought.
Religion isn’t the only thing to blame for this. Everything in society is.
Everything you see on the news, every conversation you have, every book you read, including spiritual books, including religions, books based on religion, these are all what’s keeping you from reality.
Because they all rely on thought.
Free of thought, you’re real.
Free of thought, there’s just reality.
Free of thought, there’s God
So often what I experience here is people, you know, wanting to say, “Well, is God like this? Can you, can you give me something that my mind can hold onto that is God?”
Well, no. Unless I want to lie to you. Why would I want to do that?
I can say, “Well, religion says this and this and this,” but those are all lies. You have to leave it alone.
You have to leave all those beliefs that you’ve developed over lifetimes that are distracting you from simply what’s here now and always
And if I told you what that is then it would distract you, right? It would just be more thoughts, more beliefs.
You experience reality when you no longer experience thought. When your attention goes to thought… I think Will had asked me a question about when I said, “Freedom from thought.” And he said, “Is it the same as freedom from attention?” No, it’s not. No, because you can put attention on what’s real as long as there’s no thoughts interfering.
Attention can be on what’s true, what’s real. This is essentially what we call enlightenment or awakening or truth or reality or God. These are all words pointing to the same thing. Does this thing that’s not a thing have a name? No, it doesn’t. For convenience sake, we can call it God. For convenience sake, we can call it consciousness or enlightenment or truth or reality or being.
But it doesn’t have a name. Don’t believe in the name.
What I’m attempting to point to, you know, the finger pointing at the moon. I’m attempting to point to the moon. Don’t look at the finger. Don’t look at the words. Don’t give any attention to the words. Simply let go of your thought. Remove attention from your thinking mind.
And put it where? Well, I, I can’t give you a direction for that. Just don’t put it on thought and you’ll find out.
Because this reality, truth, is always present. It’s always here There’s never been a single moment, a millisecond in your entire life when it was not fully present all the time because it, it can’t not be. It’s eternal.
Is it located in one specific place? No, it’s infinite. It’s everywhere, always.
And it’s not an it. It’s not a thing.
The best way to understand it is it’s being itself.
So you know that you are being, right? You’re being itself. You are existing, not as a body or mind or any of that. That’s all thought stuff. That’s all a dream. But the beingness itself. Let go of the body and the mind and the physical senses and all that. The experience that you have of reality is not a sense experience of the body.
Like the body can feel, you know, air, senses, your digestive system, your heart, emotions, things like that. Your body can feel all those things. This is not that. You want to not put your attention on your body, on the senses. There’s something else in you. Before there ever was a body or a world or a universe, there’s this.
That’s what the word eternity is pointing to.
So, this is always here. What is this? What is this? By putting your attention on it, not by making a word or a thought about it. That just distracts you, so don’t do that.
What is this that’s not a body, not senses, not a thought, not a belief?
When those aren’t distracting your attention, what is here?
And when you experience this, when your attention is here, when you realize this, you will no longer believe anything that you learned in religion about God. You’ll realize how primitive and foolish this is, how ignorant it is.
And how those things are keeping you from this direct experience. Not helping you get to it, but literally keeping you from having the direct experience of God. That’s what religion does. It’s a form of brainwashing. You know, is there some Machiavellian character who’s creating this in order to do this to you?
No.
It’s the human mind.
Trying to interpret sometimes a direct experience of reality, trying to interpret this direct experience of reality, and, of course, through a human mind and body, so it sounds, God sounds very much like a human. Of course, because that’s what the interpretation does. Because it can’t. Any interpretation is a moving away from it, is a distraction, is an obstacle to it.
And yet it is. It always is. It’s always here. That’s why a two-year-old can experience it as well as an adult, as well as a spiritual teacher, or someone that’s meditated, you know, for eight hours a day for their whole life. In fact, if you do that it’s less likely you will experience it because you’re trying too hard. You think there’s a path or a way to this. There doesn’t need to be a path or a way to what is always here.
Essential Pointers
- Religion and belief are not reality.
- Thought cannot know truth. Reality is directly experienced in the absence of thought.
- Descriptions of God are not God. Words point; they are never the reality itself.
- Reality is always present. There has never been a single moment when it was absent.
- What you are seeking is already what you are.
