I love to study world religions because I love my species. I love to listen to ancient sages struggling to make sense of their world without adequate information. I have no wish to reduce my vision to their groping efforts, but I see my own world more fully when I look through their eyes, even for a moment.
It seems to me the ancients were feeling a tie that bound them to other species. They sometimes felt themselves to be a manifestation of some deeper source. Some cultures imagined the “tie that binds” to be a god or to be gods and goddesses. Even if one leaves what is being called religion today, our species is in deep need for revelations of interconnectedness.
Religion is always but the husk of a deeper intuition of wonderment and interconnection. We can easily become lost in religion’s husks and lose the experience that underlies the religious sentiment. Thich Nhat Hanh, the brilliant Buddhist priest, warned, “Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.”
Religion is a tragic mistake when we take our beliefs to be truth and our practices to be ethical by definition. But I believe the ancients were haunted by an experience that can be very real. There IS a tie that binds us to each other. The species ARE our extended family. We ARE the offspring of cosmic sources. In a very real sense we are one.
We in the States have been taught to believe freedom as a kind of detachment. Because we have suckled at the cold empty breast of Ayn Rand, many of us believe ourselves to be independent and detached. If COVID should teach us anything it would be the interdependency of all life. A sick child far away IS our business. That means a child working in a sweat shop to make our American products more cheaply will come back to affect us. There may or may not be a heaven to reward the good and a hell to punish the evil. Karma may or may not be real. Still, in a very real sense because we are interconnected, what goes around eventually comes around.
The historic forms of religion can be bewitching and oppressive. No one is poorer for throwing away the empty husks of religion, but we CAN be poorer if we never have an experience of our intimate interwoveness with nature and with humankind. Our lives CAN be smaller if we do not realize we are children of the stars.
Environmentalist Wendell Berry expresses what some mystics were possibly trying to say in a way that is only enriched by his scientific understanding: “I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and its environment. The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.”