The Subway Religion

Today I had a deep insight into the ultimate nature of subways and experienced an
epiphany: Subway as God.
As I was standing among a huge crowd of people, all waiting anxiously for the subway, I felt
this painful waiting emotional feeling abruptly increasing as a heavy, unbearable burden,
which in an instant made me suffer like some sort of psychological, extremely painful
cancerI began to tremble and almost passed out. I couldnt take it anymore, so with all
that was left of my conscious mind I just dropped off this whole waiting emotional stuff and
immediately my stream of thinking subsided. And I went still.
Although some small part of my mind was still clinging to the idea of catching the train I let
it go as I let go of my impatience and anxiety and became aware of my breath slowing
down. All of a sudden, my mind stopped and the silence came in to cover up my senses.
Cool and gentle like a calm breeze on a warm day, I felt an infinite bliss deepening in the
center of my heart, a strange, ethereal music of silence inaudible to others, replacing the
humming of the crowd and the screeches of the wheels and rails.
Still, I could see and hear them all. And I could see also myself, or at least my body still
standing there on the emptying platform like a living statue while the people were rushing
and bumping into each other and into the subway. I was aware of all this happening with
only a tiny part of my attention, as they all seemed distant, like being watched on a screen
from a space craft travelling far away, in the outer space. From there, from the uttermost
solitude that silenced my thought with its awe and carried me away, somewhere on a lonely
mountain top, all clad in ice and snow, from that state of consciousness:
I could see the train coming.
I saw the people rushing and getting in.
And I saw it leaving without me.
I was just standing there, completely motionless, totally at peace.
And that was all.

After a while, when this moment of self-awareness also left me, I fell back to my senses and
thought to myself, while waiting, again impatiently, for the next train:
What if nobody will know? What if I die right here and right now, for no reason whatsoever
and the world will be short of a new religious experience?
So I came back home in the evening as fast as I could and thought things over again and
decided to share this new born religion with you.
Well, its not quite a religion as the subway wasnt God for real, though; however, it was a
religious experience. And guess what: It was really triggered-off by the arrival of the subway.
For those among you who got it well, as described above, in plain words, thats it! Youve got
the whole thing!
But for those of you who are still asking what its all about, well, I am going to give you a
religion. I have to, otherwise you wouldnt believe me! In order to share this spiritual
experience with you, so that you can believe this message, I must admit that the subway
was God, for who else could have brought about such a sublime experience of the infinite
and of the eternity in this space-time dimension? So, for the sake of sharing somehow this
living and holy truth, I must admit a conventional, a social truth: Subway as God.
Should one future reader ask Whats this religion really about? I will only try to recount the
experience just as it was, as you can read at the beginning of this post. This is enough. And
this endows religion with a good name. If you still cant get it then, either my words are
inappropriate or you arent ready. There is no other way. That will be all. Ill try to do my best
on other occasions.
But questions have a soul of their own.
In a distant future, with more and more questions arising What about this? What about
that? some smart reader will give to my future sub-readers (already referred to as
followers for quite a while) , thousands of years from now, huge amounts of additional
explanations, that is: mind-stuff. Highly elaborated and sophisticated myths on how I prayed
to Subway to come, how the redeemer Subway revealed to me as God and delivered me
from my sins and how thereafter I instituted this and that complex initiation rite, that is:
more theological explanations and metaphysical subtleties and the like. This could be a good
technique meant to make people more confused and manipulable, but eventually forcing

some of them to seek their redemption by themselves and on their own way, after having
enough of such and such dogmatic tradition and ritualistic ossification.
Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and Krishna, whilst honestly striving to teach the right ways to
the humankind, were doomed to misunderstanding for the very beginning and ended up
being misinterpreted hundreds or thousands of years later. Nowadays religious people and
religious institutions understand quite the opposite of the teachings of their founders. The
first thing to be left aside when a living truth becomes a social institution is the core of the
religion, the indescribable religious experience of the founder, as it was revealed in the first
place. Secondary events and principles become essential.
Hence, for instance, in a future religion of Subway, my religious experience will be long
forgotten and the followers will be split into two main cults: the cult of the Standing and the
cult of the Sitting. As you know, the people who travel by subway inevitably fall into two
categories: those who could take a seat and those who are not quick enough and must
stand. So, those theologians who, a thousand years from now, wont be able to live again my
spiritual experience and its truth, will think they have the right (allegedly commanded by
me) - to divide the world into two categories: the Standing and the Sitting, each of them with
their own belief system, depending on how the different legends will go on my alleged
position in the subway: sitting or standing. They will try to twist my words and turn them into
worship material but also into an ideology which should be a good servant to one category
or another. The devotees will not know that the positioning of the travelers, in the subway
or anywhere else, is not important at all and the more one will try to find anything in my
writings related to the proper position of the body required in order to get the deliverance
from sins, the more will falsify them and tear their truth apart. And by the way, I feel that
there is no such thing as sin for in my ecstatic rapture, in the innermost place of my soul, I
found out no commandment, no wrongdoing, no mistake whatsoever just sublime bliss.
But since ones environment is also ones religious experiences background, the
environment itself instead of inner experiences tends to become a long lasting structure of
consciousness, under the form of religious ideas and beliefs systems. As time goes by the
ideas and beliefs petrify, just like old, dry bones, giving birth to a spiritual tradition.
Such a religious tradition as founded involuntarily by me in this morning will end up
someday being called Subwaitianity or Subwaitianism, because its main feature will be its
well recognizable collective devotion of those agitated people to the arrival of the subway: a
messianic, unprecedented cult of the Waiting, anxiously, the Non-Letting Go of things and

the attachment to and fear of the future moment illustrated by their thoughts running
incessantly through their minds: Will He arrive more quickly?, Will He not depart that
fast? etc. Like everything that is only a means to an end, subway will eventually be
worshipped like a god by people who only have the time to worship the haste itself and the
waiting. The only two prayers will be: Please God arrive more quickly! and Please God
dont go too fast! The only one commandment will be: Thou shalt not stop. This is indeed
the appropriate commandment for people who cannot and will not stop.

Moreover, some sophisticated theologies will ascribe to me even the concept of a Holy
Trinity, which in a future Subway Religion will be called Subwaytivity, consisting of the Holy
Arrival, The Holy Stopival and the Holy Departure of Subway. Its true that in our
contemporary English such words like Stopival dont make any sense. But since the
continuous motion and agitation is the basic law that governs all our behaviors as they
condition all our thought patterns, the actual stop or cessation is already a metaphor, and
these words are already obsolete because the subways halt is also seen through the veil of
this mental conditioning only as another form of movement, hence the more appropriate
word stopival, which Im pretty sure will find its place in the future edition of The Oxford
English Dictionary, along with Subwaitianity, Subwaitianism , Subwaytivity and the like
As a conclusion: the inquisitive reader, present and future will find it difficult to understand
this article. The reader will be a little bit confused and even intrigued and I bet he/she will
say something like this:
Damned nonsense! If this guy had really experienced such an extraordinary spiritual
rapture, why on earth would he have had to ruin it with all this nonsense in the second part?
And how come having such an experience while waiting for the goddamn subway? Is it
possible to find out a spiritual way by just waiting for a sub-way?
Well, my point is that behind any mask of suffering is hidden the real face of God. The
subway station might appear like a temple, a sacred ground, not because of an intrinsic
quality of itself but because it symbolizes the inner creative space of your consciousness,
the dark belly of the beast in which the lamp

of self-awareness is kindled. The subway

can be mistaken for God, because it is a vehicle and it is also a mask and a form entailing
suffering. Its an illusory mask but also a vehicle that takes you behind the mask, where the
real face of God can be seen. And I had to ruin the second part of the article in order to point
out the difference between the mask of God and the real face of God.

As a matter of fact, everything I said and everything that can be ever said are only masks.
Words cannot reveal the truth; they can only point towards it.
The actual truth can only be seen from within.

The masks only function is to lead you to that stage where it is not useful anymore. The
moment when you learn to let things go, the mask has fulfilled its purpose and drops away
because you are ready to see your real self underneath. But the mask has prepared you
for this; this was its real purpose.
From that point on, there are moments of grace when you can see the face of God. But God
is only my metaphor, another pointer towards your own true self, which is now revealed, as
the humans soul in this pure form is only a reflection of that godliness that informs all
things, all energies and all beings and yet remains untouched by them.
And now it is revealed:
when you let the subway go
without you and suddenly
you are able to let the past die.
With its truths, gifts, beliefs,
sorrows, achievements, failures and prestige,
with its happiness and nostalgia.
And you can let the future come
embracing all its hopes and fears,
but letting them also pass away.

And so you stop searching and searching

for the meaning of life
and the stirring life in your chest
rejoice at such a relief.
As you let go the image about yourself:
the nice or bad person you used to be,

you will find out how much easy

and how wonderful life can be
by just remaining yourself,
freed from the self-esteem,
freed from the self-immolation
With a clear and joyful eye you become able to see
the splendors and beauties and horrors
coming and going, from that still point
within you,
which is ever free.