World Religion: Re-ligare as a Context for Our Diversity

This short bullet-point introduction is taken from a spontaneous live talk given on the weekly broadcast of One Mountain, Many Paths, which Dr. Marc Gafni co-founded together with his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. These are unedited and unplugged excerpts of Dr. Gafni’s talk created by his students. Thus, the style of this story is the spoken word and not a formal essay. We recommend you to watch the featured clip of Dr. Gafni’s teaching on this topic below.

We were in Easter last week. We’re honoring the great Christian tradition, as we honor each and every religion.

• The Christian tradition is both filled with tragedy and beauty. At the very core of Christianity, in its inner tradition, its animating impulse, there are sparks of the sacred, which are unimaginably beautiful and uniquely necessary as part of a World Religion.
• Just like in the inner core, in the broken vessels of Islam, there are sparks of the sacred. Deep within Judaism, there are sparks of the sacred. Deep within the Buddhist traditions, with all of their being hijacked for war all through Buddhist history, there are sparks of the sacred.
• Every great religion has its holy and broken hallelujah.
• We are gathering from the broken vessels of the great religion, the sparks of the sacred, and returning them to source.
• As we are standing at the brink of the abyss, confronted by catastrophic and existential risk, we say: Let there be light.
• It’s our job as the new human and the new humanity, as Homo amor, the fulfilment of Homo sapiens to reclaim a new vision of re-ligare.

The Light of the New Story

• We are here together to articulate a New Story of value. The light of the New Story comes from the integration of the best, most validated, gorgeous insights of pre-modernity (the traditional period), modernity, and postmodernity.
• We come together here in One Mountain to liberate the sparks of the sacred from the broken vessels of the great traditions, in order to begin to articulate not just the New World Spirituality, but a New World Religion, that is a context for our diversity.

A New World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity

• In these post-modern times, many of us may call ourselves “Spiritual but not religious.” This is a huge way of identifying ourselves for so many of us. And it had its place for a time. It was a way to separate ourselves from the broken vessels of the great traditions and from the tragedies of the great traditions.
• But separating ourselves from the religions, doesn’t have enough power. Identifying ourselves as “spiritual, but not religious” is too tepid, it’s too flaccid, it’s too impotent.
• We need a word that’s more potent. We need to literally reconnect to source, and to reconnect is to Religare [Latin for reconnect].
• We are talking here about Religare-ing: about reconnecting the torn ligaments at this moment of a collapse of value. We’re not just articulating a world spirituality, but actually a world religion.
• There’s actually ground and necessity and capacity today to manifest a world religion.
• A world religion does not mean a monological religion which is speaking at you, which tells you every truth. It does not mean the end of diversity, rather a world religion is a context for our diversity.
• A world religion means: a shared universal grammar of intrinsic value. Out of which we can generate — for the first time — in world history — global intimacy.
• Global intimacy which in turn generates global coherence, which in turn generates the possibility of global coordination: Intimacy — Coherence — Co-ordination.
• In a moment in which all of our challenges that threaten our very existence are global, we can’t have only local dialects or grammars of value. We will not survive the challenge of this day, the dystopian challenge of existential and catastrophic risk, without a universal grammar of value.

Toward A Shared Global Story

• At this moment where we’re all colliding into each other, there’s no more local. We’re living in the unbearable intimacy of this one planet. For a country to survive, it needed the organizing fabric of a religion. But we’re no longer divided accurately along national, geographic, or country lines as it were. We’re not divided across localized sociocentric or ethnocentric lines. We’re one globe! We need to articulate a world religion that becomes a context for our diversity.
• A world religion in which each religion remains and flourishes and deepens. In which each religion calls itself out on its tragic dimensions and evolves to the next level in the evolution of love.
• Each religion remains a unique and gorgeous instrumentation of music. An intimate configuration of interior gorgeous value, glory, love, truth, and beauty, in the Unique Self Symphony of Spirit. But the score of the music, which is the context for our diversity, is a world religion.
• So as each religion dies on its cross, the resurrection has to be not just that individual religion. The resurrection has to be literally the emergence of a world religion, which is a context for our diversity; the score of the Unique Self Symphony.

Join us this Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths to evolve religion at a higher level of consciousness.

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