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.
The original purpose of religion was to bring sacredness to life. It was therefore unnecessary when human beings lived moment-to-moment in the presence of the sacred. There was no separation between spirituality and life, no distinction between the sacred and the mundane, no division of the Godly and the worldly. When we lost the ongoing and immediate sense of sacredness, then we needed religion to bring us back to it. "Religion", after all, means "that which renews our connection".
No matter that modern religions have been distorted into a force for separation and not connection. If we look carefully within any one of them, we will find traces of the Original Religion, the religion born from that immediate, experiential identity with the divine. Born from the divine, it also has the potential to bring us back to the divine.
I am afraid that when I use phrases like "bring us back to the divine" I am strengthening a separation that is actually an illusion. The Original Religion is not a program for attaining to a divinity separate from ourselves or the world of matter we inhabit. It arises from the felt experience that no such separation exists. To even use words like "divine" or "sacred" establishes them as separate categories of existence and widens the division.
We have a name for the Original Religion. We call it animism, and it is still practiced today by isolated groups of indigenous people. Someone once defined animism to me as the belief that all things have a spirit: including animals and plants, rocks and streams, the wind and the sky. Actually animism is much more than this. It is not that all things have a spirit; it is that all things ARE spirit. Spirit is not a distinct element that can be separated out from the being itself. The entire universe is sacred, and everything in it, irreducibly. Everything that exists, even two apparently identical drops of water, is unique, special, and sacred.
The animist thus lives in a constant state of reverence. Each action takes on a sacred significance. Each word is a prayer. Each event is divinely arranged, a communication from the All to a temporarily separate piece of it, the self.
Modern religion harks back to this way of being through teachings like, "God is everywhere", "God is in all things," or "Everything happens for a divine purpose." The experience of God's constant presence is essentially the experience of the Original Religion. It is a presence so close and so intimate that the self is submerged in it. The Presence suffuses all life, each moment of it, and it shines forth from every being we encounter. We have the sense of living in a wholly divine world, a holy world. And because the same Presence shines forth from all, our customary sense of division falls away, and we have the feeling that you and I are really the same being looking at itself through different eyes.
Any religion can take us here, even an atheistic religion such as Buddhism. After all, if God is in everything and everyone, and not external to everything and everyone, what does it really mean to say God exists or does not exist? Buddhism speaks of interconnectedness or interdependency, and we typically understand that to mean a kind of relationship among separate subjects. The true teaching goes much deeper. It says that our very existence is woven out of relationships, that we ARE our relationships and nothing else. Inter-existence would be a better word for it. And so karma is not an externally imposed punishment for doing ill to a separate "other" being; it is simply the direct consequence of all that we do, because the other is not in fact other. Again, every action is significant, every word deserves mindfulness. God sees everything. There are not some words and actions that don't matter and others that do. No. Everything matters. Everything is sacred. Nothing is left alone in the cold dead world of the mundane.
Does that mean that our sacred objects, our times of meditation and prayer, our rituals and observances have no purpose? No. Their purpose is to remind us of the truth. The purpose of a holy object is not to say, "This object is holy and others are not." The purpose of a holy object is to remind us of the holiness of all objects. The purpose of a ritual is to remind us of the sacredness of all action. The purpose of a prayer is to remind us of the sacredness of all speech. And, when we see our holy men as divine, it is to remind us of our own divinity and the divinity of all.
Too often the teachings of our great spiritual leaders have been perverted, so that holiness has become something outside ourselves. When that happens, we naturally trust external authorities in most matters, and lose the confidence and ability to be the creators of our own lives. Today, more and more people are returning to the truth: that we are divine beings living among other divine beings in a world that is itself, in its parts and in its entirety, wholly divine.