Confusion between spirituality and religion

I went to a church school, and spent many hours inside a cold echoing cathedral. Life is about having fun, and this place was no fun at all. So I rejected religion, and didn't have anything to do with it.

It was maybe unfortunate that whenever I came across anything that might be considered spiritual, I immediately associated it with religion, and rejected it.

I was 42 years old before I began to even consider that there might be another side to the coin, but now I see a clear distinction. Spirituality is about discovering yourself, and acting true to yourself. Religion is about discovering what someone else thinks, and acting according to their thoughts. Quite a vast difference I think you would agree.

So it might come as a shock to some readers to discover that first, they are a spirit. Our ancient sages spent thousands of hours trying to work out how things are, and their findings are still not believed by many today.

However, with the recent change of era, more people are beginning to discover spirituality, and are making a serious effort to find out about themselves. Their fear has subsided sufficiently to allow them to proceed with their evolution. Their body is unlikely to evolve further, their mind is fairly fixed, so the place for improvement is alignment with the spirit. Each of us has these three distinctly different elements that combine together to form "us". You and I are a spirit, a mind, and a body. And we have been neglecting our spirit, as the current world ambience favours promoting first the body, and the mind.  The spirit hardly ever gets a look in, with the body taking the vast majority of energy and resources.

The new era brings new education, and new universities will begin to reflect the universe, as opposed to the incredibly parochial attitude currently adopted by academia, which also generally ignores the spiritual part of our essence.

Our sages said that "All is mind". For those with scientific connections, "The All" can be considered as Einstein's Unified Field. For those with religious connections, "The All" can be considered as God. Our sages simply called it "The All". They went on further to say that this "mind" operated on the basis of birthing other minds which are free to do as they wished. Hence free will.

We can all choose to accept or reject these facts, but for those choosing rejection, I would ask for a more realistic idea.