Religion or spirituality?

I came across this image about 1.5 years ago. I'm sure the original poster meant it as a negative slant on organized religion - insinuating how limited in knowledge religion can be. I understood, as it seems more and more people aren't attending any kind of house to worship, deterred by a plethora of reasons and/or seeking new ways to spiritually grow.

For myself, I saw/see something very meaningful when I look at this image. One can not create any kind of belief system, or in this case a religion, without the vast awareness from Spiritual inspiration, depicted in the vast ocean here. Each religion contains itself (the bowl) and gathers the like minded to form a unit in the vast, unknowable ocean of Spiritual knowledge. I want to point out here, the little bowl that contains "religion" is immersed in the vast ocean of Spirituality, is it not?. I also noticed the bowl doesn't have a lid on it, so the waters within the bowl are that of Spirituality. You see where I'm going with this? These two are not divided in any way other than how they are labeled.

On the other hand, how is the Spirit to know and witness itself in the vast ocean of what it is, without any kind of container to contemplate itself? Remove the bowl from this image and what do you have? ... that's right, just a vast open space of what? There would be nothing there to let the Spirit know it is even Spirit! It 'must' have a container, a platform, a stage if you will, to be able to break itself down and dig into the complexities of itself. Spirituality can not be identified as such, unless it has a religion to play and explore - or in our case MANY religions. That's the glory of it all! This ocean of Spirituality is not confined to one bowl, oh no no no. Add 100 more bowls, 1000 more bowls and there is room for them all. Each bowl, without a lid, drawing from the same waters as it's neighbor beside it.

I think this image is just powerfully wonderful!

Just as with anything we experience, some are more pleasurable than others. Some religions make more sense to us than others. If we could stop for a minute and pretend that WE ARE the vast ocean of Spirituality and we start dropping bowls into our waters so that we may know ourselves better, I would bet we wouldn't care to see some things about ourselves, but they are there all the same, feeding and living off the same water that we are.

It is written EVERYWHERE in different sacred scripture, describing the power/s of the "waters". Oh yes, and it's a very deep subject indeed, filled with mysticism, prophecy, analogy and mythology. It's spoken of very cryptically in some circles.

I've held onto this image, because whenever I look at it, I'm reminded of my own inner ocean of Spirit. I start looking at the containers I have put in my waters and how they make me feel, what I judge, what I focus on. The cool thing is, whenever I come across a facet of myself that I don't care for, I simply tip the bowl over and remove the bowl from my water. Tada! I believe that's called "healing", yes?