I didn't explain esoteric religion right—left the most important thing out

What I said in the last entry (about the previous entry) was right, but I left off the most important difference.

The exoteric (external) version of a religion is about listening to the religious stories (the myths) and living morally while pondering the lessons.

By contrast, the esoteric is about undergoing powerful religious experiences yourself in order to achieve transcendence.

The reason the standard exoteric organizations hate and seek to wipe out the esoteric ones is because they think it's sacrilegious, that the individuals are trying to become god or to usurp the role of a prophet or messiah, and they believe people should instead be meek sheep only listening to preachers and pastors giving sermons. Practitioners of the esoteric religious experience believe the organized church is about control more than true religious experience, more properly political than religious.

The esoteric uses powerful enthoegenic (god-engendering) substances ('shrooms) in order to experience transformation, whereas the exoteric church uses only symbolic red wine and crackers, which can't produce a powerful enough transformative experience.

I also believe it's vitally important to develop the proper religious attitude (a philosophical/spiritual attitude) and work for some time toward what used to be known as spiritual purity before ingesting these substances. In other words use prayer, fasting, and proper living (meditation and the virtues rather than the vices) for some time. This was the point of the months-long preparation before experiencing the Eleusinian Mysteries themselves. Initiates learned the stories of Demeter and Persephone, which are in one sense about how the procession of seasons came to be, but in another they're about spiritual death and resurrection, and one of the major points is (when combined with the entheogenic experience) it changes your attitude toward death and the afterlife permanently—it rids you of the fear of death, and that allows other fears, based on that key one, to fall away as well.