Worldview Community Blog

Imagine you were one of those folks utterly dedicated to their quest to fully awaken to the dimension of Spirit. You spend years searching the world (both out there and within yourself) for clues as to how to achieve that. You meditate, you contemplate, you chant, you visualise the light, you work through your shadow, you practice various forms of yoga, you sit under every Bodhi tree you can find. Eventually, you awaken! Your ego-identity is transcended and you become the uncorrupted embodiment of Spirit, manifest in human form. You have had a spiritual experience.

Pretty soon, people begin to notice your radiance. They are inspired by your wisdom and moved by your presence. They ask you how you did it, and you do your best to tell them. You use parables and stories, metaphors and koans. Your followers listen carefully, write down your words as “gospel”, and begin talking about you with some reverence. They tell their friends about you, and are careful to ensure that your instructions are followed to the letter. Now we have a religion.

Religion then is institutionalised spirituality. It is an effort to pass down through time the wisdom of the awakened ones.

Religion in itself then is not a bad thing, only bad religion is a bad thing. Bad religion is what happens when people confuse the institution with the spiritual message. The original message that seeks to guide followers towards a direct spiritual experience gets corrupted to serve the institution itself, which is linked to the vested interests of those who run it. Some degree of corruption is virtually inevitable in all religions, and some seem clearly more vulnerable than others. Just the same, at the heart of every religion, there sits a spiritual baby in the dirty bathwater of human foolishness.

The great benefit of established religions is that they carry a tried and proven lineage of spiritual transformation. Every tradition has a long line of awakened souls (saints, lamas, etc) to vouch for the authenticity of their methods. The phenomenon of “transmission” (where practitioners are positively influenced merely by being in the presence of an enlightened one) is real and valuable. As well, over time, substantial bodies of work emerge to support a given spiritual tradition, offering further value to devotees.

The downside is that you can drown in dogma and one’s spiritual aspirations can potentially be hijacked by unscrupulous teachers. Next thing you know you are being groomed by a sexual predator or urged to strap on a bomb belt as part of your liberation. In western Judeo-Christian countries, our passions are activated when we read of the Inquisition, or the power-hungry antics of past Popes, or the ongoing sexual abuse scandal presently rattling the church to its foundations. Modern minds are inclined to want to completely dismantle the church, curse the Koran and judge the Jews because of past and present sins. That would be a mistake.

While post-modern minds usually reject the dogma of any spiritual tradition, the fact is that the vast majority of the people on this planet need dogma to help them live a good and decent life. For those people, the traditional religions offer practical guidance of immeasurable value, enabling the vast majority of people everywhere to maintain sufficient moral decency to sustain their given society. Most Muslims are peaceful people. Most Christians are tolerant and forgiving. Most Jews love their God. If we dismantle the religions, we deny those good-hearted folk the guidance they need on their path to the higher realms of consciousness.

Ken Wilber calls the traditions the “great conveyor belt” of spiritual transformation. At different stages of our development, we find value in different kinds of spiritual instruction. Sometimes we need to learn the “one true way”. Later we may study multiple traditions and cherry pick value from each. Still later we might abandon external sources and go find a Bodhi tree. So, a willingness to accept the need for different strokes for different folks may ultimately serve the highest good.