Someone asked me about my religion the other day. Heard once that this is one of the topics you should always avoid when talking to people you don’t know – worse, I guess, to take a stance in public and put it on your blog… hmmm….

I am a big fan of religion. In Latin, religio means anything from “Religion” (in the sense it’s typically used), to superstition, all the way to – neutrally – belief system (BS). It is related to re-ligare and re-ligens.

Now what are those words about?

Religare – Connecting with the world around us

As soon as we say “I”, we separate ourselves (sin being related to sinte, meaning separation in old German – as a side-note for those who like the concept of “original sin”). Erich Fromm in “The Art of Loving” talks about how the worst human fear is that we are completely alone. Funny enough, as soon as we say “I”, we separate ourselves from everything else, which is now “Other”, and end up completely alone. Usual ways to respond to this fear according to Fromm are conformism, orgasmic union and intoxication. All of which are dependent on external aspects to be fulfilled. He suggests that only by actively loving, by reaching out and connecting can we sustain the experience of being connected to the world around us.
In the sense of re-ligare, re-connecting (also compare yoke and yoga = union), any act that connects us to the world around us becomes a religious act. Any act that allows us to transcend fear of other by realizing our underlying oneness, experiencing ourselves in other through empathy and proper reflection, and integrating that other into our idea of self, is an act of love. In this sense love and religion become synonymous.

Religens – Paying careful attention

Religens does not translate into the English language, the antonym does: negligence –
“failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would exercise under the same circumstances” – according to a definition I found online.
Religens denotes the idea of paying careful attention to the archetypal experience around us. What does that mean?
Everything around us is informed by patterns. Our patterns. Sometimes they are referred to as karma. I like propensities, personally. Think about your relationships or jobs. You keep encountering the same situations, the same stories with different names and faces, not until you have solved these challenges, but until you have outgrown them. With every breakup in which you truly transform, your relationships change, your patterns change, and you suddenly meet different kinds of partners – with new challenges. Similarly with jobs, money, any other aspect in your life. Underlying each of these situations are patterns you can identify and “clean out” through awareness, forgiveness, and love.
But you have to pay attention. That is what religens is about. Listen to the world around you. Everything in your universe talks to you. You have your own myths your own archetypes, be they victim, child, saboteur, prostitute, or artist, hero, healer, teacher, knight, princess, helper, wizard (think about characters in stories that you relate to and you will know what I mean – Carolyn Myss wrote about this in “Sacred Contracts” – highly recommend it). With these you constantly create stories. Religens is taking responsibility for your stories, and realizing that you are the storyteller of your own mythology. You create your meaning. Nothing around you has inherent meaning, but for the meaning you give it. Religens is about constantly being in conversation with your reflection. As inside so outside.

Aye, there’s the rub

In our societies, driven by fear and conformism as a means to belong, we fight over whose imaginary gods are the right ones as we try so hard to find a common mythology – an impossible task. While we have common patterns in our archetypes, each one of us builds our own mythology around them. Take any two members of any religion and interview them about it and you will quickly find that each have their own opinion as to what it actually means and will bend their interpretations to fit their own personal belief system (BS).
So, why try? Why not accept that we can share stories with each other that help us see our archetypal reflections without having to feel that there has to be one right one. Delight in our differences. Only that which we don’t know yet is really information.
Maybe people misunderstood Plato’s concept of the “ideal”, the something that is behind all the appearances to mean that there is one “Truth” out there. While some things might ring true, first and foremost we each hold our own “truths”. Each of us has our own BS. Hence, the idea of organized religion is in a way an oxymoron. It is the attempt to come to one common story that denies progress and evolution and must by default have a teleological component.
By each of us taking responsibility for our own religion, we take responsibility for evolution, for forwarding growth that does not accept a predetermined end. Be the star that knows no day and night.

Taking responsibility

All this said, when I think about my “religion“, I find myself left with these components:

• Everything in this universe is my responsibility and creation
• My religion is my interpretation of my universe and my responsibility
• I assemble my mythology and create stories to produce meaning
• I rely on myself to produce faith = trust and joy in my existence
• Through loving that which I fear and experience as other, I connect to universe and evolve my identity
• Constant evolution is the aim, science the method, stories the dust I leave behind
• Attention, attention, attention

Tell me about your religion…