Religion is a funny strange thing. I was raised with one, a fairly random occurrence. I inherited a faith from my family as most people do. And as a child does I went through the motions of ritual and behavior with those around me falling into my proper cultural stall. The expansion of view that came with growing up left me perplexed by my family’s lack of knowledge about the faith that they were following. They had adopted beliefs as I did mine, from their parents. A simple continuation of a line of faithless people that went to a house of prayer, said the appropriate greetings as they entered the social gathering and muttered a bunch of religious verbiage for which they knew or cared not the meaning. At the time I often found myself in my own world playing with a coin that I had which when flipped to one of the two sides indicated to me that my imaginary friend was present. I also wrote letters to my dead grand parents. I mailed them by placing them into envelopes addressed to numbered clouds inside the underbelly of my mattress and spent the remainder of such nights dreaming of their replies. I learned the language of my religion and had one of those coming of age religious celebrations which filled my bank account with gift money for a brief period of time before I cleared it out to pay for a car that I stole and left wrapped around a tree. Now some twenty five years later its easy to see the ridiculousness of these events.

This thing called religion that I was given to practice was void of sacredness, something that I found quite easily through the flip of a coin, by writing to dead people and through various other experiences in which children naturally discover the divine such as staring at the clouds. Like many kids raised with religion I was expected to behave as a civilized person because of my religion. But what civility was there in the performance of meaningless ritual that created cultural separation between people? Through my now adult eyes its easy to see that religion has largely squashed out the sacred from its practices. The faithful repeat the inherited gestures with no need for meaning or origin. Many religious leaders could more easily find Noah’s Ark than drum up a shred of the experience of transcendence. Remarkably, the sacred is so easily accessed that we might likely enter into it when we’re not paying close attention. It hides out in our daydreams, our childhood memories, in quiet spaces or momentary fascinations with the natural world, a storm, the moon, a worm making its way across a dirt heap in central park, music, art or simply another being. All one needs to do is recognize it as such and embellish it with attention. Its our innate tendency to connect to our divine dimension. Allow yourself to shift in consciousness back and forth between the divine and the mundane, the infinite and the finite, the archetype and the exemplar. Transcendental patterns and the shape of material reality may be revealed.

With the mundane world in a heap of a mess, largely caused by religion, I now find myself desperate for a connection to the sacred, not through religion and for no gain. I seek it only to catch a glimpse of ‘reality’ or as Sufi sage Ibn Arabi once referred to as “that which transpires through that which appears.” Is the truth behind the hoax the thing that sages of past call god? Looking through a handful of religious and philosophical texts that scatter about my home it frightens me and I begin to feel that I’m on the wrong end of a bad joke as I realize that this may be so. Perhaps the simplest things are the most evasive. I search the world around me looking, noticing, drinking in what has always been there. Practicing being present reveals an implicate order - the fundamental reality behind the physical world. I’m standing before a giant encyclopedia. Explanations are in every movement, sound, smell, taste and idea. I wouldn’t dare use the G word, I left that with my lineage, corrupted by stale religion and a grand master who runs the show like an orchestra conductor. Instead I settle into a comfortable bliss and enjoy my new found friend, myself residing right here where I have always been whirling in the great all there is.