People easily fall in to despair. So they have created religion as a means for people to find value in their lives.
A religion should not inform one about the clear information of a god. It should lead to an appreciation and perception. Armstrong mentions, "a poem, a play, or, indeed a great painting has the power to change our perception in ways that we may not be able to explain logically but then seem incontestably true. This new insight must go deeper than feelings that are, by their very nature, ephemeral" (25). This means that plays, poems, or even paintings can change people's perception and they may not be able to explain why this occurs, which means that these things influenced people to change. What is around someone has a great influence on how they will take action in certain situations. Armstrong mentions "A good creation myth did not describe an event in the distant past but told people something essential about the present. It reminded them that things often had to get worse before they got better, that creativity demanded self-sacrifice and heroic struggle, and that everybody had to work hard to preserve the energies of the cosmos and establish society on a sound foundation" (31). This means that these symbolic terms of these paintings created myths and influenced how people would eventually act in the future because they based some of their beliefs off of them. This process can be accessed through the next step of the core principle of the religious practice, the process of "emptying.".
When the greed and selfishness are removed, This process is called the "emptying." .
The ideas described in the story, Nirvana for example, cannot be accessed without permitting all the senses to absorb one's surroundings and to be open to willing to change. The experience obtained by a full use of the senses allows a person's mind get the image of an experience, therefore lets the person to attempt to comprehend the meaning and the value of one's own sense of self.
