Everybody researching religious and spiritual phenomena - including William James´old and still valid work on religious experience, which everybody shouldn´t have missed reading - will discover especially in the field of religion and spirituality, that humans worst opponent or even enemy is the human itself.

James Fowler has pointed to several stages of human faith expressions, dependent from his mental mind set and biography (see http://www.exploring-spiritual-development.com/JamesFowlersStages.html).

Martin Heidegger described the human fate from "being there" to "being this way": you are thrown into this world (being there) and have to undergo long processes to get a distinguished human (being this way). And religion has different functions at different times and experiences in that developement we call personal history.

Certain sentences and temporal perceptions of "divine fixations" might serve as shelter for human individualities as far as they feel unsafe or uncomfortable allowing freedom to be and express themselves. Then divine words or commandments become important helping humans to survive at least in the immeasurable ocean of freedom to be oneself.

I will not go deeper in this, this leads to many misunderstandings and misinterpretations.But the honest researcher will discover an amazing revelation: no divine word and no divine commendment nor "word of God" or other "divine entities" will ever have the power to convince anybody to get obediant - it is at least always the human himself finding himself in a struggle with himself. The human himself is his worst opponent or enemy. Divine words and sentences are only media to express such opposition (self - opposition). Divine words are external expressions of an internal happening: the human has to undergo lots of fear discovering freedom.

But the human himself finds himself thrown between other humans challenging him, and the human game is eating and being eaten (we do not speak now of the deeper layer of reality which declares humans as being part of the divine). In this context there is the human playground of finding freedom (in the deeper layer the human is of course always free and ever has been). But now comes the crux: the game appears as "the fittest command the weakest" establishing a model called "analogia entis" (analogy of being) - the super fittest is God, and we are weak, so we must obey divine revelations. Yes, it appears that way, but actually we internalize such thinking - because we still fear freedom - thus getting armed with self-resentments: we become our strictest slave masters to ourself.

The results are fatal. We might feature external expressions of slavery producing deepest disgust - but internally we still are trapped in the mind set of self slavery by being our own worst enemy. This is internalized fascism. Fascism is always an enemy of freedom, but internalized fascism is seldom perceived and acknowledged. We rather react on external expressions of fascism (see http://dreamvolution.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/14-indicators-of-fascism-fit-us-politics/) and feel uncomfortable. We miss the internal form, it is in fact always appearing in humans having difficulties entering freedom.

This brings me to the final point. In the human game of fit and weak, of eating and being eaten, we find INFLUENCE an important thing, and more influencial humans always dominate less influencial ones. This goes up to religious and spiritual dimensions - some humans consider themselves divine or expressing "extrahuman" revelations and powers. Such are religious and spiritual leaders influencing (and not seldom trying to influence) other humans. They often put a seed in human souls helping the human to enslave himself - he becomes a "struggle human" fighting with himself. The struggle will not end until the human enters freedom. Otherwise internal fascism has found another victim.

In my view each and every one proclaiming any agenda a human has to fulfill in order to achieve a religious or spiritual level is a hidden fascist. Humans have nothing to fulfill, this is one of the deepest lie which came to human minds.

Whenever I hear of "achieve" and "must get" and "must understand" and "must accomplish", I see red flags raised. This is not my understanding of being human.

I ask for gentle consideration!