What is the Purpose of Religion?

Religions have a purpose. It gives life meaning. Every religion, every spiritual path, has a rule book. These doctrines or systems create a state of mind that makes the believer’s body, mind, emotions and spirit conducive to receive teachings. Every religion first cultivates the inner landscape then the outer world.

Religions and spiritual traditions give us a moral compass to live by.

In times long past there were mystery schools in temples, monasteries and scriptoriums that offered education to those who craved a deeper spiritual path. As far back as Mesopotamia, the temple was the centre of the community and the base for commercial and spiritual life. Men and women entered into commercial and spiritual practice within the confines of the temple complex. We no longer have these centres for learning. Our culture no longer has mystery schools or temples that act as the educators.

All religions have rituals, practices and teachings to assist a seeker to engage personally with spiritual truths such as prayer, singing, communion, mantras, yoga and meditation.

Originally, these rituals, practices and teachings helped to develop new spiritual beliefs and values such as loving kindness and compassion. They also sought to develop an ability to communicate with spirit to receive personal revelations.

But this changed when intermediaries were given more and more power to intercede between the gods and goddesses and the common people. This served to separate people from the divine, leading to less personal connection. Religion became a form of control that kept the masses disconnected from their own divine spark.

This is especially the case for the Abrahamic religions…

God the Father

Two thirds of the world’s population grows up in a society based on Abrahamic religion. By this I mean the religions that credit their founder as Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are the People Of The Book (Ahl al-Kitāb) who are religions that received divine revelation with holy scriptures: the Quran, Torah and the Old Testament (which is a translation of the Torah).

The main symptom or result of growing up in a society based on Abrahamic religion is that power, validation and value is found from outside of the self. This is the root problem of patriarchal religions. The root problem of toxic patriarchy is an externalisation of our source of power. Abrahamic religion believes that there is only a father and he resides in the sky. There is no concept of a mother, a divine feminine god. There is a complete imbalance. This means two thirds of the world who believe in an Abrahamic religion which is an off-planet god that has no equal mother.

And we wonder why there is so much violence and distorted toxic masculine attributes happening in the world. That’s the source and the reason for patriarchal Western society. 

You don’t even have to grow up in Abrahamic religion to be affected by patriarchal culture. There is still the externalisation of power. How this plays out in the Christian religion is that Jesus must come and save you. Allah or the Hebrew God must have mercy.

This is god outside of the self. In the religion the father God creates the Earth. God thinks his earthly creation is so simple and disgusting, including us, and he can’t look at us so he just leaves us. He is an off-planet creator god, meaning the creation itself – a piece of stone or a leaf – is not god. God is away from this place. This is the basic root principle in Abrahamic religion. The father has gone away.

Even in Christianity where there was an attempt at restoration through the principle of Jesus, the Church distorted his teaching until the people needed to be saved by Jesus! With the concept of Original Sin we were led to believe we were all born innately full of sin and we needed someone, a saviour, outside of ourselves to redeem us.

The point of power, the source of power, was not inside us. The god is not inside us. but outside of us and we must beseech this god to pull us out of suffering because we are too sinful. This is how it plays out in religion. 

God the Mother

If you have been paying attention to what I have been writing about for the past five years, you will understand what I am getting at. God the mother, or the divine feminine is the missing piece of the puzzle. The Great Mother is as old as 500,000 years. She was the sole aspect of god for hundreds of thousands of years. Even after the gods began to supersede the goddess (only about 5,000 years ago), the goddess continued to be revered.

It is easy to presume that the goddess died out long ago. But the oldest goddess worship across the Mediterranean continued well into the Christian era and continues to this day in indigenous cultures and in the Hindu religion.

In indigenous cultures and Hinduism there is still a mother principle embedded in their mythologies. This a concept of god consciousness with an earth mother and a sky father. They are equal and the way to access the ineffable is through the Earth herself. Through our bodies, through the very nature of our bodies, through our intuition, through all the feminine principles.

Sadly, Abrahamic religion has cut us off from the mother. Women are particularly impacted, with the history of our world white-washed to remove all trace of the divine feminine and the goddess religions.

As a result, women feel disconnected from our power and purpose. We need to remember that the essence of woman is power, to reclaim our power within. We are the holders of life, the birth carriers. We bring life through our being so the very essence of woman is power, whether we choose to have children in this lifetime or not. We are the life givers.

When we feel disconnected from our power and our purpose, the way to return is to begin to feel into our body that we are, to cultivate a connection with our body as a sacred temple. We connect wth the intelligence centres of our body: our mind, heart, gut and the womb space. We deepen our connection through our breath and we come home through our incredible body.

Through embodiment we access deep connection and a sense of belonging that we have been searching for outside of ourselves. By cultivating, exploring and celebrating this, we widen our connection to the force of life within us, accessing our own source of power.

So, by reclaiming our deep connection to our body we expand out into an understanding that we are a part of a great web of reality.

The Gnostic Path

The knowledge that has been lost with the suppression of the goddess religions is the ability to access inner knowing and wisdom. The feminine spiritual path is Gnostic. Gnosis is Greek for knowledge in the sense of insight, wisdom and illumination or enlightenment. Gnosis is received through direct transmission instead of from an external source.

Gnosis is a personal experience that is best transmitted through art, allegory, and mythology. This knowledge is accessed through the heart. This is not the actual physical heart but our heart chakra that unites us with all that is. The heart chakra is an intricate matrix that unites us with our higher self and connects us with all that is. It is the pure consciousness of unity and love.

In the ‘Gnostic Gospels’ Elaine Pagels wrote: “Gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (‘He knows mathematics’) and knowing through observation or experience (‘He knows me’). As the Gnostics use the term, we could translate it as ‘insight’, for Gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level is to know God; this is the secret of Gnosis.”

This is feminine wisdom, intuitive understanding of the divine. Gnosis cannot be read in a book and intellectualised as a concept. It is a transcendent experience that transforms us from the inside. We realise we are a child of God, entering through the heart in order to access the Kingdom of God. Our heart sends and receives, giving us an unlimited source of love. This source of love has the power to cleanse, purify and transform us all the way down to cellular level. Through the heart we are invited into the sacred union with all that is.

Philo (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE) referred to kardia as secret knowledge (gnosis) and wisdom (sophia) of God. It is not only knowledge of the divine but also of ourselves, the world, nature and the ineffable. The Hebrews describe Gnosis with the Da’at. This Hebrew word for knowledge was used in the Kabbalah to describe a mystical state attained when ascending the Tree of Life to then reach the divine light. The ancient Egyptians described the Gnostic experience in many texts of their proverbs such as “The body is the house of God,” and “Man, know thyself … and thou shalt know the gods.”

Gnosis comes from within each one of us through the secret knowledge of all things hidden. But this knowledge is not something that you will just find outside of yourself. Gnosis in its purest form is the intuitive spiritual knowledge that comes with knowing thyself and the spirit. Plato describes this process when he says “all learning is remembering.” He calls this a recollection and restoration of the views a person once had, and original knowledge that was once lost. I would describe this Gnostic experience as intuition.

Gnosticism is this path of inner reflection and personal purification that helps us discover the hidden knowledge encoded into our very DNA; with the ultimate goal of our gnosis to lead us down the path of enlightenment. Once we truly begin to know thyself, the world and our mission, we then begin to connect our souls with our Gnosis kardias, knowledge of the heart that connects our soul with our heart, body and mind.

The end result is human harmony. This is the divine feminine and divine masculine united in sacred union. The unification of the soul with the physical, mental and emotional body through the intelligence centre of the heart.