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The Religion of the Future
Excerpted from Religion in the New Age
by Swami Kriyananda
If religion today no longer commands the high esteem it once did, the reason is not hard to find. Throughout the world, religion has identified itself with attitudes that are being abandoned, as mankind embraces a new, less form-bound and form-conscious age of energy.
Religion, traditionally, has defined itself by its beliefs, not by the dynamic inner experience of peace, of closeness to God that the great Scriptures have held out in loving promise to mankind. Religion has focused its attention on the outer forms of worship to the detriment of the inner spirit which those forms were designed to express.
Religion, in its highest aspect, is God’s gift to mankind. It is especially important for mankind to be guided by God during times of great change. With such a mission it was that the great spiritual teachers came during other crucial times in human history. Their birth was opportune, but it was also ordained. Buddha, Krishna, and Shankaracharya in the East, Jesus Christ in the West these men were no accident of history.
The first point for religion, too, to recognize is that we live in an age of energy. Religion must accept that energy is no passing fad, but is a simple matter of fact. Driving the nail in deeper still, we must accept that energy is the reality; matter, the illusion. Energy is the wave, or vibration, of which matter is only a manifestation. Energy, in other words, is not the product of matter, but its cause.
What does all this mean for religion? Religion’s power of influence lies not in its outward forms; its ceremonies, its dogmas, its institutions. It lies in the inherent spirit of which those forms are but manifestations. Truth gave us religion. It was never that religion created Truth.
The human spirit would die if it lost every high aspiration. It would condemn itself to apathy and decay. Since the human spirit cannot live without religion, mankind will have to find some means of living with it. And that entails not rejecting, but exploring and reconciling, the differences between old dogmatic assumptions and new scientific discoveries.
The deepest truths of religion are all of them quite simple. They have been obscured by the outer structures of religion, which have become so complex in religion’s struggle against a multiplicity of challenges as to create confusion and divisiveness, not clarity. Of all the institutions of mankind, religion ought to be the most unitive. Yet people fight, persecute one another, and go to war over their religious differences all these in the name of God who, so all of them claim, is a God of Love.
It is time again to explore man’s inner relationship with his Creator. Jesus Christ said, ”Behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” The true goal of pilgrimage, so the Indian Scriptures declare, is within. What matters in religion, then, is not the outer place of worship, nor the outer rituals, nor even the particular system of beliefs, but a person’s own direct, actual, inner experience of God and Truth.
The emphasis during Dwapara Yuga will shift from the quantitative approach to the qualitative. This shift toward simplicity, toward emphasizing the needs of the inner man over the demands of church and state, and, finally, toward qualitative over quantitative solutions, will create a growing demand that religion meet science with methods of its own for testing and experiencing truth.
What is needed are methods for calming and concentrating the mind. Meditation is comparable in this sense to the science laboratory. It helps one to achieve that degree of mental clarity which is necessary for this type of research. Truth cannot be perceived so long as the mind is restless, and so long as its attention is directed outward to the senses.
Inasmuch as yoga deals not only with mental and physical techniques of self-development, but with direct control of the inner energy (pranayama, or energy control), it will come to be recognized as an actual science of religion. Yoga meditation practices will be used as a means of testing the claims of religion by putting people in touch with their superconscious, and by enabling them to guide their lives by soul-intuition.
The religion of the new age will be directed inwardly more than outwardly. The purpose of this inner research will not be to strengthen the ego, but to trace individual self-awareness back to its source in Infinite Consciousness. Inasmuch as the ego’s attention is normally directed outward to the body, and to the world around it, its self-definition is derived from these superficial identities. The ego’s grip on human consciousness can be lessened only by contact with a higher consciousness. If we hope ever to achieve clear understanding of who and what we are, we must go within and explore a deeper link with the world around us.
The religion of the future will be a religion of Self-realization. It will consist in the realization that the infinite love and joy of God form our own deepest reality, and that God is our true Self. For just as matter is energy, so energy is but a manifestation of thought, thought but a manifestation of consciousness, and consciousness, in its ultimate refinement, but the Divine out of which all things, all beings, and our own selves were created.
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