Here’s where I stopped in the last post (that you should read if you haven’t already):
”The function of religions today is to mute individual differences and formalize subjective, spiritual experiences within the confinements of their respective dogmas, making sure that the metaphysical is an allegory or merely a psychological insight.”
This sort of top-down approach to religion and spirituality is native to the way humans self-organize. The issue occurs when faith cannot track down the object of faith - the divine - and instead assumes a corporate structure that mimics how we experience order; a substitute for true order.
Horizontal vs Vertical Religions
When Plato and the Socratics proposed the schism between human and nature, they created a vacuum that invited Eastern philosophies to impose their exegesis of the order of things. Where we sought solutions in practical ways, using religion, nature, as a practical tool, they proposed a divine that was foreign, alien to humans, to be experienced via the submission, and not the cohabitation of the spirit.
Prima facia, they’re overlapping hermeneutics but they created a delineation of gnosis and episteme and how we interact with the world. We assumed that the physical was separated from the non-physical.
I'm sure there are some academics who have already written books on the subject but I haven't encountered any yet. So, I'm coining a concept, using this simple explanation:
A Vertical Religion places divinity on an abstract plane. Divine intervention comes from above, saving you in the afterlife, and solving problems in esoteric, non-corporeal ways.
A Horizontal Religion places divinity in the same reality. You come in contact with it every day. Intervention happens in mundane ways, through physical means, during this life.
The vertical religion is the corporate structure that imposes a top-down hierarchy. But it fractures faith since mortals assume superiority over other mortals the same way a CEO or a president does. Religion was reformed through a bureaucratic process that eliminated the bulk and the complexity, leaving us with the pure Technology of religion that can be easily hijacked.
You can activate this Tech to aim at more “appropriate”, yet mundane and political targets. Namely to control and make a profit.
Centralized Morality
When the divine is missing, the entity of religion becomes a corporate entity, with governing power over the decisions of the individual and the structure of society - that pushes for homogenization of thinking - resulting in an effective application of a systemic strategy that favors conformity. You can observe this in the hyper-moralistic tendencies of our generation and the way we demand an absolute opinion of everything.
The Technology of Religion is re-appropriated, since we aren't burdened by the judgement of the divine and we can freely use, as I already said, for our unholy purposes.
And it happens that one of the most effective ways to organize and control groups of people is to whip the swathes of opinions, reframing them within a Centralized Morality so they reflect back to the individual, slowly reprogramming them to think in a particular way that will earn them - unaccounted - social credit.
More than that, society assumes individual morality is a priori, denoting that your membership to the club bestows metaphysical goodness in you which isn't earned by virtue of doing good. When you happen to divert from this narrow paradigm, you're not sophronized but punished through guilt. It is infernal in the sense that this punishment is damning your soul, not your actions. Morality in this context is dogmatic, absolute, slowly pushing towards a universal law that can be used as a tool to level cultures.
This is a process that began many hundreds of years ago, priming the world for globalization. Centralized Morality found fertile grounds in the massive proselytization the major religions engaged in — which happen to be non-native to the Western population.
Non Fungible Religion
Every time I attempt to finish a piece, I struggle to find an appropriate solution that offers a satisfying conclusion. Truth is, I’m not describing a problem so I need not provide answers.
Instead, what I’m going to do today is speculation.
Back in the late 19th century, when the meaningful part of religion was already eclipsing and the red gold and red white veil of secular theocracy were about to cover the world, the Theosophist movement emerged.
Helena Blavatsky, with her Doctrine, did what everyone else did; took the Tech and created something new, a prisca theologia, a Universal Common Religion, with flavor from all cultures.
The core of all modern spirituality is the principles of Theosophism. A malleable, shapeshifting spiritual technology.
At the same time, psychology renders all functions of the psyche symbolic, resulting in the subjectivation of the soul to an anatomical soma that the surgeon-coocoo fake doctor can slice open and operate.
We’ve reached a point where this ideology is affecting mainstream culture in real ways. And exoteric religions have to take a backseat because they offer nothing, while these esoteric practices are offering everything.
But we’re realizing that… it’s mostly BS. And there was a reason we had formal, religious structures guiding us during our spiritual journey. Whether it was the local priest or an adept.
As we’re moving to post-post-modernism, I speculate that we’ll attempt to return to more formalized, initiatory practices. But without the corporate structure of the major religions.
A return to the traditional, empirical spirituality that serves life, not the afterlife.
This post was [Written by Human], and not a robot. Make sure to share or else...