For me, religion is living in a way that is founded on a connection from the innermost part of my being that is knowingly of and inseparable from the Universe and all in it. And from that connection, to be religious means living in all aspects of life in the quality that corresponds to what is within, my innermost, and from there everything greater I am knowingly inseparable from, bringing it to the fore and making life increasingly about that.
As a young child I had no word for that state of being, which was to be simply a being in religion – the Universe just was and I knowingly was part of it. Growing up, while I never lost that connection and still had no word for it, that for which I now use the word ‘religion’ as above, the world taught me the word ‘religion’ and gave it a meaning that was something completely different.
As the world taught me what its version of religion was, that world also seemed determined and designed to disconnect me from that actual inner state of innate religion I was born with. And while it often succeeded, I would at the end of every day come back to my innermost and its connection with the All, which was always there, just waiting for me to come back to, feel and know myself part of.
And so it was that for most of my life, until age 53, I had known two versions of religion; the one the world taught me and which I called religion, and the other I had always known, for which I had no word but that remained innate and very deeply within me, always there, always accessible, always calling, always responsive.
Shortly before I turned 53, I met the woman who is now my wife and through her encountered a group of people living an outward expression of religion in the world, The Way of The Livingness, that corresponded completely to my inner wordless religion. From that point, as the truth within me was met by an outward expression in the world that matched it, the word ‘religion’ finally became a word I understood and used for both the inner and outer realms of my life, as the two then were integrating and integrated.
Increasingly to this day, some 4 years later, I am religious about living my life, daily and nightly, in a quality that is founded on that connection from my innermost, so that the outward, that is what and how I live, corresponds with, is informed by, moved and lived from, and obedient to what is deepest within.
As I now know religion to be, there is also a knowing of what, to me, isn’t religion; that being whatever outwardly doesn’t correspond to the truth I know from my innermost. From that depth, however, in another way I see also that we all are religious, every person’s religion being whatever they make life about, be it a version of religion the world has taught them it is – which may or may not correspond to what they might discover it to be from the depths within if they were to go there – or something else entirely again that has nothing to do with any notion of what the world says religion is.
From this perspective, whatever we make life about, put to the fore, give our energy to, uphold above other options and possibilities, as we all do, I see that ‘whatever’ is an act of being religious. And so, from that understanding of what it is to be religious, even when the other options and possibilities we don’t make life about include the pursuit of a return to our innermost and living from that, to not do so is nonetheless an act of religion.
