Religion, religiosity, and spirituality

Religiosity is the innate human yearning for meaning in the present. Religion is the institution(s) we create to preserve and often impose meanings we invented in the past. Spirituality is the innate human capacity to shatter religion as a first step to freeing religiosity to make new meanings.  Religiosity is healthy when it is driven by compassionate curiosity: the desire to know freed from the desire to control. Religiosity is unhealthy when it substitutes fixed images for fluid imagining; when it stops asking questions and settles for momentary answers. Religion is healthy when it preserves our answers for the moment without prohibiting the asking of new questions in the next moment. Religion is unhealthy when it fixates on an answer and outlaws all further questioning. Spirituality is healthy when it invites us into terrifying ecstasy that shatters the known and leaves us naked in the midst of the Unknown. Spirituality is unhealthy when it substitutes happiness for ecstasy, and shallow proverbs for the deep probing that is religiosity.