The message pre-dates the messenger.

My world used to revolve around a 2000 year old interpretation of a message. I'm not the only one. It took a long and hurtful process to rid myself of such dogma. Running full speed away from my beliefs wasn't any more clear of a path. Somewhere in the muck was an expression of pure love, as it is with most faith systems. I made the mistake of judging a church by it's followers.

I can understand why someone who "saw the kingdom of heaven" would be very insistent on the process of getting there, despite the subjective nature of the experience. And to the illiterate masses, how else do you educate other than through stories, art, and metaphors?

The Buddah pointed at the moon, yet the followers looked to his finger. Christians killed to defend their path of love. My point being--somewhere beyond the egos of the followers of any faith, idea, or movement could be a pure intention to create loving change in the world around us.

The point of this is to share an experience that made this clear to me, and the painting that came from it.

I laid in meditation just before going to bed, following my breath, and reciting the Hare Krishna chant over and over in my head. I didn't know too much about the chant, which I preferred so that my mind remained free from context.
*I feel the need now to mention I was 100% sober for this experience.
As I drifted into a zen state, eyes closed, the image of a monkey appeared in my cortex. This was no normal monkey. It appeared golden, multi-dimensional, and cloaked in a mandala of geometry that expanded outward. It all appeared to share the aesthetic of Mayan and Egyptian culture. As soon as my brain tried to label what I was looking at, it dissipated into the walls around me.

I assumed it was some endogenous DMT release, but was so curious so I began research. It turns out that the Hare Krishna chant is closely intertwined with the story of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey God. The likeness was pretty uncanny.

The skeptic in me will suggest that experiences like this are projections of some memory into the present moment. The fact that I had never known of the correlation between the chant and the monkey before made me feel strongly that the messages under these faith systems have always been there for us to interpret.

That's where things get hairy. The source of these messages is the same source of the concept of understanding in general, so how can we use limiting language to correctly portray the grandness of our visions?

If there is a take-away, I would advise to not throw the baby out with the bath water. There is pure message underneath the dogma. It is a message of love, forgiveness, community, mindfulness, and transcendence.

We could use a little of each.