The Convergence of Religion

by Arjuna Ardagh

The huge wave of radical awakening, both outside and within organized religion, has tended to polarize people either into an increasingly rigid fundamentalism or into the vast open waters of translucent mysticism, where we no longer know with our thoughts and beliefs but we truly know, with our whole being. Paul John Roach is the senior minister of the Unity Church of Fort Worth, Texas. Since September 11 he has seen people respond to more uncertain times in one of two ways:

Some adopt a rigid system that answers all possible questions and so you don't have to think beyond its systems. The other response is much more seemingly fragile but much more expansive, because it doesn't lay down a rigid framework. It allows you to move within the mystery of it. And that seems to be flowering right now. I think people are more and more interested in embracing that because they've been through everything else. It is a willingness to embrace mystery, a willingness to embrace not knowing, allowing that intuitive awareness to speak.

This willingness to sit in mystery has become hugely accelerated since September 11. Pamela Wilson is a spiritual teacher who travels extensively in the United States , Europe , and Asia ; just looking at the teaching schedule on her website can give you jet lag. She describes a dissolving of boundaries between what she calls “messengers of the truth”:

So many people have dropped their identification with their role in recent times. All the messengers and traditions are relaxing and melting their identification and separation. I see a dissolving into oneness of tradition, the teacher-student polarity melting back into one medicine. This is, for me, a very blessed time to be a messenger. There isn't a hierarchy and there isn't a rigidity of “my way is the only way.” Different paths are all melting into each other, and that is really living the truth. Nature seems to be the ultimate satsang giver.

Alan Jones refers to dogma as “conceptual lust,” the “agonizing desire to have a conceptual control of reality, one way or another.” Religion becomes tremendously more intelligent when it is freed from such control and can connect again to the core vision we all share.

Sitting next to one of the largest Christian cathedrals in America, Jones stated with a twinkle that he is much less interested in what people believe and much more interested in how those beliefs function: “My first test with anyone to orthodoxy is, ‘If you were in charge, would I be safe? If you were in charge, would there be room for me?' If the answer's yes, then we can argue about anything. I love an intellectual argument.”

He tells me he has as many Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim friends as he does Christian and finds common ground with all of them:

I know so many wonderful people in other traditions who for me seem so authentic, and I would say that they bear Christ for me. I don't mean to baptize them and be imperialistic. One of the best little talks I've heard on “I am the way, the truth, and the light” was from a Hindu. “Yes,” he said, “Jesus is saying, ‘I am the way,' but what is the I? Who is this Jesus? The life of self surrender, the life of compassion is the way, the truth, and the light.”

Jones says he loves the teaching stories of Jesus, and in that sense he remains a Christian. For example, the virgin birth, he says, is not only about Mary's sexual status: “It is saying, look at this woman with a baby. Look at any woman with a baby, at her breast or her cheek, and ask yourself, ‘In the light of that image, how should I be in the world? How should I behave? How should I treat people?' ”

Awakening from rigid dogma allows us to embrace a theology that is evolutionary, that is always discovering more about the possibilities of living as love. “God is infinite. Go from glory to glory, in endless revelation,” says Jones. Fundamentalist anything pins the truth down to works in a black book (never mind that they are the translation from the Latin, which was translated from the Greek, which was translated from the Aramaic, from the spoken word of someone who never met the original prophet), and makes that book a higher authority than what we see, feel, and trust in this very moment. Buddhists compare the present moment to the Dhammapadda, making that the higher authority. Muslims do the same with the Koran. Evolutionary spirituality sees every teacher who has lived as a significant landmark on an endless journey of consciousness, experimenting with its own possibilities at incarnation, discovering how manifest consciousness can reflect the splendor of its unmanifest face.

When we shake free of dogma, we find all kinds of evidence of the natural goodness of humankind, of the Goddess energy of creation. Translucents who have given up the rigid beliefs of religion, while staying true to their own experience, have a far more positive view of humanity than those who cling to ideas of original sin.

The most translucent expressions of every religious teaching converge on the same essential message. Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, and Krishna all said essentially the same thing, which is to come back to who you really are and rest there. Translucents find common ground in all these teachings, so they find it easy to talk to one another. An explosion of conferences, magazines, and websites in the last decades has brought together religious leaders from all different parts of the world and traditions in dialogue. At events like the Prophets Conference and the Parliament of World Religions, the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, Thomas Merton, and the Indian teacher Ammachi all found common ground. Father Alan Jones shares his thoughts:

The divisions in religion are not between traditions now but within them. I'm not interested in “Is this Christian?” I'm interested in “Is it true?” I have more in common with Rabbi Pierce than I would with a TV evangelist, who I feel is living on a different planet. Even to say “following Christ” doesn't have much coherence, because there are so many Christianities, there are so many Judaisms. That's where the splintering is; part of it is good and some of it is frustrating. It's a very exciting time.

Every religious tradition today is experiencing the internal distillation into translucence and fundamentalism. The more translucent elements resonate with the original spirit of Jesus or Buddha or Moses and with personal awakening. They find it easy to be in conversation with other traditions, and become different flavors of the same universal religiousness. The more fundamentalist interpretations, of the same religious traditions, cling to literal readings of written scripture, dogma, and more codes. Neale Donald Walsch put it this way:

Religions are now talking to each other. We have heard it, and we have seen it. With great sincerity they are finding areas of commonality. The Catholic Church reached out after September 11 to all the different faiths to congregate at the Vatican to determine in what ways we might unite under the common flag of humanity, for the common belief in a single loving God. Those are profound sociological experiences and events that would have never have occurred even five years ago.

 

Excerpted from The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You are Waking Up and Changing the World by Arjuna Ardagh, © 2005. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. For more information, visit www.translucents.org. To order the book, visit www.newworldlibrary.com

This reprint appeared in the December 2006/January 2007 issue of Innerchange.