Before Religion

The Descent of Religion

Tree Incarnation by Mark Henson

Long before dogmatic religions became a stale and bastardized relic of their initial inspiration, anyone could enter these "religious realms" without the messy, corrupting, restricting, disempowering etc. etc. business of priest mediators. People crossed into very specific vibrational fields via monotonous drumming, pain endurance, rhythmic dancing, and psychoactive plant ingestion.

Clearly the landscapes and entities experienced in these non-ordinary states of consciousness had some value. For a more articulate and just plain better expose on this, pick up Graham Hancock's book Supernatural. In brief, these realms were seen as being imbued with sentient information that could be brought back to heal individuals and communities.

The spectrum of possible experiences is wide, ranging from the deeply religious to the strangely bizarre. Michael Hoffman sees the ego-death experience that some had as leading to the emergence of God. In these experiences, self-control dissolves and a unitive immersion occurs whereby a "higher-power" seems to control the on-goings. At this point, the only apt reaction is a slow astonished repeating of “oh.....my.....god.....” 

Shortly after those eternal tones dissolve into the folds of measured time, attempts to re-experience and re-present it arise. The travel accounts begin. Compositions of spoken words and scrawled symbols seek to create a meaningful description of what the experience was all about.

These descriptions are elaborated upon, re-worked, and used in rituals that aim to replicate the experience and direct it in a unique manner. As this process expands, Mystery Schools arise to further systematize the rituals and instruct novices in the art of non-ordinary states of consciousness. The teachers were appointed based upon a spiritual attainment meritocracy, basically they had learned how to navigate the non-ordinary state experiences and could teach others. 

This spiritual meritocracy system eventually devolves into a system of appointed priest-authorities. They're not necessarily the most adept at navigating these states of consciousness, but they have memorized a large part of the sounds and scrawlings that re-present the initial experience. Being estranged from the experiences themselves, the authorities construct exoteric doctrines from second-hand accounts of earlier, more adept spiritual navigators. These doctrines are highly moralistic and produce a contractive-fear state that molds people into simple, predictable creatures --- a necessary first step in any worthwhile brainwashing campaign. 

The symbols used to understand the initial "...oh...my...god..." eternities become the controlled domain of priest authorities who manipulate this world of abstraction and those who live inside it. It's time for a return.