• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Charles Eisenstein

  • About
  • Essays
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
    • Charles Eisenstein Random
    • New and Ancient Story Podcast
  • Courses
    • Climate — Inside and Out
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course One
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Two
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Three
    • Dietary Transformation from the Inside Out
    • Living in the Gift
    • Masculinity: A New Story
    • Metaphysics & Mystery
    • Space Between Stories
    • Unlearning: For Change Agents
  • Books
    • The Coronation
    • Climate — A New Story
    • The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
    • The Ascent of Humanity
    • Sacred Economics
    • The Yoga of Eating
  • Events
  • Donate

The Original Religion

July 10, 2008 by Charles Eisenstein 4 Comments

July 2008


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. Imagine a time (whether prehistorical or transhistorical) when human beings lived moment-to-moment in the presence of the sacred. Religion was unnecessary. 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 borne 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. We usually define animism as the belief that all things have a spirit: including animals and plants, rocks and streams, the wind and the sky. Actually, this belief is a step away from the original animism, which is perhaps better termed “panentheism,” a belief in the indwelling divinity of all things. Panentheism says 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, and everything in it, is irreducibly sacred. Everything that exists, even two apparently identical drops of water, is unique, special, and sacred.

The panentheist 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.

The detachment from this way of being began with the earliest rudiments of human separation from nature: symbolic culture and domestication. When we try to encompass the infinity of the world within a finitude of labels, we distance ourselves from its immediacy and uniqueness. As the author of the Biblical Genesis understood, to name is to objectify and therefore to own. Domestication of plants and animals, similarly, risks converting them from coequal beings sacred in their own right into chattel, subordinate to human purposes.

This process was well underway in the Mesolithic if not before, but human beings still lived in harmony with nature because they had beliefs, stories, and rituals to reconnect them to the truth of the irreducible sacredness of all beings. Shamans were the original priests, the caretakers of this sacred knowledge, which they recognized is indispensable for human beings’ survival. In those days, we understood the necessity of religion – renewing or remembering our connectedness. It is necessary because it is true, and no being can live very long or very well outside of truth.

Traces of the original religion survive within the esoteric traditions of modern religions, embodied in 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. The mystics tell us that 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.

This is actually very easy to experience, at least for a split second. Look someone in the eye, and pay attention for an instant of recognition and union. It is so intensely intimate that we usually cannot stand it, so we shift our eyes away or shift our mind away, and forget that moment before we realize it has happened.

I think the original motivating intent of religion is to seize and expand such moments until they widen to encompass all of life. Even the attenuated rituals of modern life have something of this power to evoke the presence of the sacred, which we can then recognize was there all along, immanent and waiting.

Any religion can connect us to that presence, 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 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.

In Western religion we can apply the same understanding to the Golden Rule. Perhaps when Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” he wasn’t prescribing a moral rule. He was simply stating what was, from his perspective, an obvious truth: As you do unto others, so you are in fact doing unto yourself. This is obvious from the felt perspective of nonseparation.

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. Everything matters. Everything is sacred. Nothing is left behind 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 or women 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.

Whether conscious or not, it is this realization that ultimately motivates the environmental movement, the peace movement, the justice movement, and so many other areas of activism. None of these make sense in a world of force and reason, where more for you is less for me. Why should I care about the fate of other beings? As long as I can insulate myself from the blowback, why not just maximize my own security? Arguments for justice or the environment that attempt to appeal to rational self-interest (“think of all the medicines we could derive from rainforest plants”) are never compelling. They do not compel others to change, as forty years of failed environmentalism demonstrates. Nor do they compel meaningful changes from within. We cannot scare ourselves into virtue.

That is why the panentheistic revival in all its forms is key to the transformation of the planet. Underneath all the New Age expropriation of the trappings of indigenous spirituality and shamanism lies a yearning to return to the living realization of the indwelling divinity of all things. It is a way of seeing the world profoundly at odds with modern materialism’s reduction of the universe into a pile of stuff: generic masses subject to arbitrary, purposeless forces. And it will engender profoundly different results. Can you imagine a science, a technology, an economy, a culture founded on reverence? That is the promise of the once and future Original Religion.

 


Previous: Pain: A Call for Attention
Next: Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

Filed Under: Ecology & Earth Healing, Self & Psyche Tagged With: Essay, nature, panentheism, sacred, story

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Bert Lobe says

    May 10, 2014 at 2:17 am

    Given the universal (Hegel) what is the role of the particular? I have a hunch that peace is born when the many and various and beautiful “particularities” of faith begin to engage with seriousness, graciousness and an abundance of generosity. I doubt that the materialist Amartya Sen and others are right when they suggest that it is our behavior alone which counts for anything. To be sure “good” choices are vital, choices in the interest of the whole, but what is it that animates these choices? Surely it is something in the various particularities? Or is good alone innate? A story with a great truth tends to make a difference…take the Gita, the sermon on the mount, the Koran for example.

    Reply
  2. Jordan says

    March 1, 2018 at 9:46 pm

    Thank you, Charles. Such awesome clarity, simplicity and insight.

    Reply
  3. AskJohn.com says

    April 11, 2018 at 3:12 pm

    Thanks I started bowtieism.com on 11/12/13 to make a clear start. Man has created many illusions and fantasies over the past 18,000 years.

    Reply
  4. kevan hubbard says

    October 18, 2020 at 1:58 pm

    Very interesting and I can’t decide between panththeism and panentheism…. which being the best path.i was watching a very interesting video whereby it was proposed that the universe is infinite in both time and space but smaller universes get inflated within the greater universe,I suppose that the sub universes are universes and the greater One, using a capital as Plotinus would have done,is the Multiverse?of course in this you have panentheism occuring within the greater pantheistic Multiverse?

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

All Essays

Peace-building

Time to Push

The Rehearsal is Over

Some Stuff I’m Reading

Beyond Industrial Medicine

A Temple of this Earth

The Sacrificial King

Words to a Young Man

How It Is Going to Be

What I’m doing here

Charles Eisenstein, Antisemite

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

Fascism and the Antifestival

The Death of the Festival

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To Reason with a Madman

From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope

World on Fire

We Can Do Better Than This

The Banquet of Whiteness

The Cure of the Earth

Numb

The Conspiracy Myth

The Coronation

Extinction and the Revolution of Love

The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?

Building a Peace Narrative

Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom

Making the Universe Great Again

Every Act a Ceremony

The Polarization Trap

Living in the Gift

A Little Heartbreak

Initiation into a Living Planet

Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling

Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral

The Age of We Need Each Other

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

Brushes with the Mainstream

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

Transcription: Fertile Ground of Bewilderment Podcast

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

This Is How War Begins

The Lid is Off

Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

Scaling Down

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

Psychedelics and Systems Change

Mutiny of the Soul Revisited

Why I Don’t Do Internet Marketing

Zika and the Mentality of Control

In a Rhino, Everything

Grief and Carbon Reductionism

The Revolution is Love

Kind is the New Cool

What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves

From Nonviolence to Service

An Experiment in Gift Economics

Misogyny and the Healing of the Masculine

Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?

The Need for Venture Science

The EcoSexual Awakening

“Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.”

Harder to Hide

Reflections on Damanhur

On Immigration

The Humbler Realms, Part 2

The Humbler Realms

A Shift in Values Everywhere

Letter to my Younger Self

Aluna: A Message to Little Brother

Raising My Children in Trust

Qualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Soul

The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

The Oceans are Not Worth $24 trillion

The Baby in the Playpen

What Are We Greedy For?

We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder, Revisited

Activism in the New Story

What is Action?

Wasting Time

The Space Between Stories

Breakdown, Chaos, and Emergence

At This Moment, I Feel Held

A Roundabout Endorsement

Imagine a 3-D World

Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014

Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift

A Neat Inversion

The Waters of Heterodoxy

Employment in Gift Culture

Localization Beyond Economics

Discipline on the Bus

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

A Miracle in Scientific American

More Talk?

Why Another Conference?

A Truncated Interview on Racism

A Beautiful World of Abundance

How to Bore the Children

Post-Capitalism

The Malware

The End of War

The Birds are Sad

A Slice of Humble Pie

Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Invisible Paths

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)

Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

Money: A New Beginning (Part 2)

Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

Pain: A Call for Attention

The Miracle of Self-Creation, Part 2

The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

The New Epidemics

From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Humanity Grows Up

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

Privacy Policy | Contact

Charles Eisenstein

All content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to copy and share.

Celo: 0x755582C923dB215d9eF7C4Ad3E03D29B2569ABb6

Litecoin: ltc1qqtvtkl3h7mchy7m5jwpvqvt5uzka0yj3nffavu

Bitcoin: bc1q2a2czwhf4sgyx9f9ttf3c4ndt03eyh3uymjgzl

Dogecoin: DT9ECVrg9mPFADhN375WL9ULzcUZo8YEpN

Polkadot: 15s6NSM75Kw6eMLoxm2u8qqbgQFYMnoYhvV1w1SaF9hwVpM4

Polygon: 0xEBF0120A88Ec0058578e2D37C9fFdDc28f3673A6

Zcash: t1PUmhaoYTHJAk1yxmgpfEp27Uk4GHKqRig

Donate & Support

As much as possible I offer my work as a gift. I put it online without a pay wall of any kind. Online course contributions are self-determined at the time you register for each. I also keep the site clean of advertising.

This means I rely on voluntary financial support for my livelihood. You may make a recurring gift or one-time donation using the form below, in whatever amount feels good to you. If your finances are tight at all, please do not give money. Visit our contact page instead for other ways to support this work.

Recurring Donations

Note from the team: Your recurring donation is a resource that allows us to keep Charles doing the work we all want him doing: thinking, speaking, writing, rather than worrying about the business details. Charles and all of us greatly appreciate them!

One-Time Donation

Your gift helps us maintain the site, offer tech support, and run programs and events by donation, with no ads, sales pitches, or pay walls. Just as important, it communicates to us that this work is gratefully received. Thank you!

Cryptocurrency Donation

Hi, here we are in the alternate universe of cryptocurrency. Click the link below for a list of public keys. If your preferred coin isn't listed, write to us through the contact form.

View Keys



What kind of donation are you making?(Required)


Recurring Donation

We are currently accepting monthly recurring donations through PayPal; we use PayPal because it allows you to cancel or modify your recurring donation at any time without needing to contact us.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.

One-Time Donation

We are currently accepting one-time donations with any major credit card or through PayPal.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.
Donation Method(Required)

Name(Required)
Email(Required)