Panentheistic Essays
The Original Religion
Within all religions today there is a common core, an inner spiritual transmission going back to the dawn of human consciousness, to a time when religion was not necessary. MORE...
The Marriage of the Inner and the Outer
"While nearly everyone intuitively associates “spirituality” with a positive path of life transformation, the word conceals a trap that can end up creating the opposite of transformation – stagnation. “Spiritual” implies a division of the world into two categories that can strand us in partiality. MORE...
All Hallow's Eve
Once upon our time, our distant ancestors were animists who believed in the innate divinity of all things. Spirit was a property of matter, and all things possessed it: not just plants and animals but also rocks, clouds, lakes, wind, places, and every natural thing and process. I said all things possessed spirit, but that isn't quite what the original animists believed. Spirit was not something separate from matter, to be possessed or not. Matter was inherently spiritual. MORE...
Where is God?
Once at a talk I gave to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT), someone asked me, “I’m confused. Do you or don’t you believe in something called the soul, the spirit, or God?” I had been talking about the historical abstraction of spirit from matter, and my questioner wanted to know on which side of the fence I stood. Am I an atheist like him, my beliefs firmly grounded in logic, reason, and reality? Or have I bought into a fairy-tale about some non-material realm? MORE...
Living in the Gift
Many of the rituals that pervaded Stone Age culture were conceived in the form of gifts: gifts to the land, to the water, the fish, the trees. Native American herbalists will take a bit of tobacco or corn meal when they gather herbs as an offering, a ceremonially-offered gift to the plants and land from which they have received. Indeed, gift-giving even among humans in invariably accompanied by ritual, which persists to the present in the form of Christmas Day. We instinctively recognize gift-giving as a sacred occasion, from which ritual grows irrepressibly. MORE...